Last week I was spending time working on projects for school and such so I decided to put on some background tv while I did so. This meant watching a whole bunch of rerun Star Trek episodes and then for something different I watched The Lion King in its full glorious surround sound. Now I like animated movies as much as the next guy but as you can imagine if I wanted to actually pay attention to a movie I probably would have chosen something else to see.

In any case, I did watch The Lion King and since it is one of my favorite Disney movies I enjoyed it as much as any college age guy can enjoy a Disney animated musical. It got me thinking about a few things though that I had never really noticed in this movie before.

It starts out in a perfectly balanced world as it would seem. The circle of life and all that. The lions are the ruling party and there is a hierarchical division among the rest of the society. The poor useless bums of the world were the hyenas. Then there's Scar, a disgruntled lion who wants power but is not in the position to attain it. He creates a plan in which he leads the lower class in a revolt to take over the Prideland and is successful in toppling the current regime. It took some coercion and some murder but in the end he would have his power.

It is this power exchange that got me thinking. How was it that Scar was able to convince the hyenas to join in his diabolical plan? He promised that they would never go hungry again. He was offering the lower class, the commoners a chance to be in equal standing with the wealthy and the upper class. He was leading a revolution and in some basic respects it is not unlike the Marxist Revolution in Russia.

After several years with this new power in control it became apparent that the new way of life would not sustain the entire population the way Scar originally claims. The herds have moved on and there is no food left. What started as the perfect plan to create a communist utopia for these hyenas has turned into even more excessive poverty and only by Simba coming back and saving the day is normalcy able to return to the land.

Now I'm not going to say that this was an intended theme in the movie, because I really don't think it was. I just think that somehow when trying to tell their story they managed to also tell the story of the basic problems of why this sort of communist dictatorship is essentially a failed attempt at utopia and will ultimately spiral the society into a grim and terrible dystopia.