Scar lion king gay

Scar is probably the most queer coded Disney villain out of all the villains from the renaissance. His animator, Andreas Deja, is also an openly gay man, which I’d imagine had influence. Actor Jeremy Irons needs no classy, smooth-voiced actor has appeared in more than films and TV series, among them 'Dead Ringers,' 'Watch. In The Lion King (), self-exiled lion cub Simba falls in with meerkat Timon and warthog Pumbaa, who raise him to adulthood.

Timon is voiced by Nathan Lane, who is openly gay, and Pumbaa by Ernie Sabella. His credits include Supervising Animator for three iconic villains that later generations have described as queer coded: Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, Jafar in Aladdin, and Scar in The Lion. There is much to be said about the fact that Scar’s presentation can be reduced to a cowardly, gay man leading a comedic trio comprised of a Black woman, a Latino man and a mentally disabled “liability.” But I wouldn’t want remakes of The Lion King to simply brush the matter of queer Scar under the carpet.

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There are many sins that can be laid at the feet of the live-action remakes that Disney seems intent on forcing upon us every year, but arguably the worst, in my mind at least, is the systematic de-queering of so many of the classic villains. Gone are all of the things that made these characters so eternally delightfull: the color and movement are subdued; the songs are rendered into vignettes as bland as the movies that surround them; the savage glee they take in their torment of the protagonists sanded away.

Each live-action remake has gone further to neuter and mitigate the queerness of its villains, turning them into the same banal slop as the rest of the films in which they find themselves. Take, for example, Scar from The Lion King. In preparation for this piece I decided to rewatch the live-action film, in the hopes that I might be able to uncover some residue of the queer malice that made the original character such an inspiration if I can dare to use that word for me as a young queer kid constantly existing on the outskirts of heterosexual society.

Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there was none of that to be found in this new rendition. We all know by now that this film lacks almost any semblance of the beauty and the majesty that characterized its animated predecessor. Now, it has to be said that Chiwetel Ejiofor does a very fine vocal performance as Scar.

Irons may not have been a stellar vocalist, but he was hella campy in his rendition of the song, making the most out of its cutesy rhymes and celebration of ambition and evil. Straightness and normative gender roles are as subject to ridicule and mockery as anything else. Scar—and Ursula, and Jafar, and Gaston, and all of the others—are compelling and fascinating not because they might sleep with others of the same sex but, instead, because their very existence calls into question the heterosexist and deeply patriarchal logic that so often undergirds the Disney animated features canon.

Even his murder of Mufasa is a much more muted affair than in the version, and the new Scar seems to be going through the motions of usurpation rather than, say, actually savoring his triumph. This entire subplot is drawn from the The Lion King, in which Scar is particularly insistent that the widowed queen join him, despite her giving absolutely no indication that she wishes to do so.

In the end, I found myself both deeply frustrated and very disappointed with how badly these new iterations of Scar failed to live up to even the barest of expectations. The queer Disney villain appears to be a thing of the past but, so long as those old films exist, they will too, a fascinating and alluring reminder of the pleasures of queer evil.

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