Pride in ‘The Lion King’
Disney’s Secretly Queer Animation
Pride month is over, and it was striking to me how many companies’ pride flags disappeared the moment we hit July; I will say one thing, they were efficient!
So, I thought I would bring a bit of a pride into July (or you could read this as an idea I was meant to write in June and didn’t get around to it, your choice).
Let’s talk about Disney’s The Lion King, which centres around a literal “pride” of lions, with only two males and the rest being females — statistically at least one of those lionesses would have been into other lionesses rather than Mufasa or Scar. Yes, this is obvious, but there are other points, so bear with me!
Timon and Pumbaa
A trope in many films is the comedy, queer character in the sidekick role. Think of characters like LeFou in Beauty and the Beast (who, in the live action version, is canonically attracted to men) and Wiggins from Pocahontas.
In The Lion King, we have Timon and Pumbaa. Both of them are outcasts from their families and society as a whole, living in a paradise in which they do not have to think about the past or societal judgement.
The pair raise Simba following the death of Mufasa and are his quasi-parents. In this sense, Simba is adopted by a queer…
