Peaking at #2 this week is the soundtrack for the animated movie The Lion King.
I'm pretty sure I did not see this movie in the theaters when it came out. I was a 14 year old and animated children's movies were too uncool for me (not that I was a very cool 14 year old, to be honest). As it happens, just recently I took my two children (tell that to my 14 year old self) to the re-release of The Lion King in theaters, which I think was the first time I ever watched the movie from beginning to end. I already had a pretty good idea of the arc of the story, both because of the films popularity, and also because it's based on Hamlet. Similarly, I have never watched Titanic, but because of its popularity I am pretty sure I know all the various plot points (also, the boat sinks).
The Lion King is a good movie that at only 88 minutes is shockingly short when compared to modern movies (the live-action The Little Mermaid is 135 minutes long!). The star-studded cast of this movie basically guaranteed the public's interest, and the execution of the plot, characters, and music propelled it to one of the biggest box office hits ever.
Watching the 30 year old film in the theaters it struck me how computerized animation has changed animated movies. The Lion King was hand-drawn, meaning that each cell had a limited amount of complexity. It's not practical to have to redraw complicated scenes hundreds or thousands of times, each at slightly different angles. When I look at modern movies, animators can design and place complicated 3D objects in the digital world just once, and the computer handles rendering that object for all frames. Obviously, this allows for much richer and detailed animated worlds, but there's something to be said for the restrictions that hand animation puts on movie makers — they need to find ways to make a visually meaningful frame some other way.
As a soundtrack, this album is fine. There are some catchy songs and they're fun to listen to outside of watching a movie. Soundtracks are always a bit jumbled because part of a movie soundtrack is to compliment what's on the screen, and that's obviously missing on a soundtrack. The Elton John versions at the end of the album are decent, he's good at what he does.
My final word is that the movie is worth seeing, and the soundtrack exists if you want it, but it's not essential.