Hamlet Vs Lion King

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As concepts and plot devices from the play Hamlet were adapted into Disney’s 1994 film, Shakespeare and the two directors of The Lion King, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, used the conventions of their text types to engage their audiences in numerous ways. For a pair of texts created to entertain audiences with a four-hundred-year difference, both young and old, a variety of filmic techniques related to their text type were employed to capture such viewers. These techniques applied to their respective texts include imagery and animation, songs and soliloquies, and engaging characters. Through these techniques and concepts, the two texts proved successful in capturing their alternate aged audience.
As Hamlet was a written script of Shakespeare …show more content…
As Disney’s iconic film takes key concepts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both texts share elements and characters between each other – most notably being Scar with Claudius and Simba with Hamlet. Whilst in Hamlet, Claudius has already taken the throne before the play begins, in The Lion King, Scar is presented as Mufasa’s conniving and fearsome sibling who envy’s his brother’s place on the throne before he takes it. The directors emphasize these aspects of Scar through giving him envious green eyes, a sinister face with sharp teeth and the deliberate inclusion of showing off his claws in his screen time unlike other lions. While these details are complimented by Scar’s wicked ways and deceptive tone of voice, Claudius is portrayed as a “smiling damned villain” who acts with innocence through his guilt of being a metaphorical “serpent”. In Allers’ and Minkoff’s text, Simba is first portrayed as a naïve and arrogant cub eager to be king who, through a course of events, grows to become a carefree yet youthful friend of Timon and Pumbaa’s to finally a wise and deserving heir of Mufasa’s throne. This contrasts with Hamlet’s identity of whom begins in a spiral of depression knowing his father is dead and replaced by his mother with his beastly uncle. His character develops alternatively from Simba as he seemingly goes …show more content…
It is through the use of these appropriate conventions that these text types engaged their audiences and created a strong pair of comparable texts while doing
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