- Jonathan Taylor Thomas voiced young Simba, while Jason Weaver provided the cub's singing voice and Evan Saucedo also provided the cub's singing voice in "The Morning Report", a newly animated song which was added to the 2003 DVD Special Edition of The Lion King.
- Zoe Leader as Sarafina, Nala's mother, who is briefly shown talking to Simba's mother, Sarabi.
Production
Development
The origin of the concept for The Lion King is widely disputed. According to Charlie Fink (then-Walt Disney Feature Animation's vice president for creative affairs), he approached Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Peter Schneider with a "Bambi in Africa" idea with lions. Katzenberg balked at the idea at first, but nevertheless encouraged Fink and his writers to develop a mythos to explain how lions serviced other animals by eating them. Another anecdote states that the idea was conceived during a conversation between Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Schneider on a flight to Europe during a promotional tour. During the conversation, the topic of a story set in Africa came up, and Katzenberg immediately jumped at the idea. Throughout 1989, several Disney staff writers, including Jenny Tripp, Tim Disney, Valerie West and Miguel Tejada-Flores, had written treatments for the project. Tripp's treatment, dated on March 2, 1989, introduced the name "Simba" for the main character, who gets separated from his pride and is adopted by Kwashi, a baboon, and Mabu, a mongoose. He is later raised in a community of baboons. Simba battles an evil jackal named Ndogo, and reunites with his pride. Later that same year, Fink recruited his friend J. T. Allen, a writer, to develop new story treatments. Fink and Allen had earlier made several trips to a Los Angeles zoo to observe the animal behavior that was to be featured in the script. Allen completed his script, which was titled The Lion King, on January 19, 1990. However, Fink, Katzenberg, and Roy E. Disney felt Allen's script could benefit from a more experienced screenwriter, and turned to Ronald Bass, who had recently won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Rain Man (1988). At the time, Bass was too preoccupied to rewrite the script himself, but agreed to supervise the revisions. The new script, credited to both Allen and Bass, was retitled King of the Beasts and completed on May 23, 1990.
Sometime later, Linda Woolverton, who was also writing Beauty and the Beast (1991), spent a year writing several drafts of the script, which was titled King of the Beasts and then King of the Jungle. The original version of the film was vastly different from the final product. The plot centered on a battle between lions and baboons, with Scar being the leader of the baboons, Rafiki being a cheetah, and Timon and Pumbaa being Simba's childhood friends. being later joined by Roger Allers, who was the lead story man on Beauty and the Beast (1991). Hahn found the script unfocused and lacking a clear theme, and after establishing the main theme as "leaving childhood and facing up to the realities of the world", asked for a final retool. Allers, Minkoff, Chapman, and Hahn then rewrote the story across two weeks of meetings with directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, who had finished directing Beauty and the Beast (1991). One of the definite ideas that stemmed from the meetings was to have Mufasa return as a ghost. Allers also changed the character Rafiki from a more serious court advisor into a wacky shaman. The title was also changed from King of the Jungle to The Lion King, as the setting was not the jungle but the savannah.
Allers and Minkoff pitched the revised story to Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, to which Eisner felt the story "could be more Shakespearean"; he suggested modeling the story on King Lear. Maureen Donley, an associate producer, countered, stating that the story resembled Hamlet. Continuing on the idea, Allers recalled Katzenberg asking them to "put in as much Hamlet as you can". However, they felt it was too forced, and looked to other heroic archetypes such as the stories of Joseph and Moses from the Bible.
By this point, Woolverton had left the production to work on the Broadway adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Hahn stated the film was delayed to a summer 1994 release, "with much consternation, because people said you can't release animation in the summertime."
Casting
The voice actors were chosen for how they fit and could add to the characters; for instance, James Earl Jones was cast because the directors found his voice "powerful" and similar to a lion's roar.
Nathan Lane auditioned for Zazu, and Ernie Sabella for one of the hyenas. Upon meeting at the recording studio, Lane and Sabellawho were starring together in a Broadway production of Guys and Dolls at the timewere asked to record together as hyenas. The directors loved the chemistry between Lane and Sabella when they auditioned for roles as hyenas/Zazu, so they decided to cast them as Timon and Pumbaa instead. For the hyenas, the original intention was to reunite Cheech & Chong, but while Cheech Marin agreed to voice Banzai, Tommy Chong was unavailable. His role was changed into a female hyena, Shenzi, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, who insisted on being in the film. Rowan Atkinson was initially uninterested in the studio's offer to voice Zazu, later explaining that "voice work is something I generally had never done and never liked [...] I'm a visual artist, if I'm anything, and it seemed to be a pointless thing to do". His friend and fellow Mr. Bean writer/actor Robin Driscoll convinced him to accept the role, and Atkinson retrospectively expressed that The Lion King became "a really, very special film".
Matthew Broderick was cast as adult Simba early during production. Broderick only recorded with another actor once over the three years he worked on the film, and only learned that Moira Kelly voiced Nala at the film's premiere. English actors Tim Curry, Malcolm McDowell, Alan Rickman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen were considered for the role of Scar, which eventually went to fellow Englishman Jeremy Irons. Irons initially turned down the part, as he felt uncomfortable going to a comedic role after his dramatic portrayal of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). His performance in that film inspired the writers to incorporate more of his acting as von Bülow in the scriptadding one of that character's lines, "You have no idea"and prompted animator Andreas Deja to watch Reversal of Fortune and Damage (1992) in order to incorporate Irons' facial traits and tics.