I've got retelling pretty settled. Steve brought up an interesting point about whether a movie can ever be a retelling of something in a different medium. Basically, for the sake of my argument here, it definitely can be.
So, I'm going to do a super quick comparison of "Hamlet" and "The Lion King" just like I did for my other three examples. Then I'll go into more detail.
Disney's "The Lion King" (via IMDb) "Tricked into thinking he killed his father, a guilt ridden lion cub flees into exile and abandons his identity as the future King."
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (via Wikipedia) " The play, set in the Kingdom of Denmark recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius for murdering the old King Hamlet (Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father) and then succeeding to the throne and marrying Gertrude (the King Hamlet's widow and mother of Prince Hamlet)."
NB: "The Lion King" will be abbreviated "TLK" and "Hamlet" will be abbreviated "H".
Ok, right off I'm thinking not really similar at all.Some obvious differences:
1) TLK says the "prince" figure thinks he killed his father, the "king" character. Not something that ever happens in H.
2) Setting is different, but that's not really a big deal.
3) TLK only spends a small portion of it's plot on the "revenge" portion of the story; really, that's ALL of H.
4) The "prince" character in H doesn't really spend any time fleeing, except maybe the part where his "uncle" sends him away and then the "prince" comes right back. But you could see that as a parallel, maybe?
5) Not much is made of the "queen's" marriage to the "uncle" in TLK. It's kind of central to H's plot and the "prince's" predicament in H.
Next up: not sure. Some ideas about anything that strikes you as a similarity? As a difference?
This I think is very true. Besides the uncle killing the father-king, there aren't a lot of similarities between the two narratives. I would disagree though in that the final scene of LK is ultimately about Simba getting revenge, and there's a Disneyfied suggestion that Scar has been sleeping with Simba's mother. (I swear!) I do think the scene where Simba goes to the jungle is meant to be analogous to the England sequence, though it's nearly unrecognizable.
ReplyDeleteAlso you are not mentioning the scene where Mufasa appears to Simba in the lake to tell him to return to Pride Rock, I.e., take revenge. That's key.
A.C.: Can you clue me in on the suggestion Scar is mating with Sarabi? The fact Scar is "leader of the pack" not "leader of the pride" was pretty clear to me that the lionesses had not accepted his leadership. As I've learned from that definitive source, the nature video, lionesses will not accept a new male until he has killed the cubs of his predecessor. Simba gets away so Sarabi isn't acquiescent.
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