![]() ![]() While the father should be the protector of the children against the vicissitudes of the real world, the mother should provide and nurture the children (Bettelheim, 1977). Bettelheim argued that in the typical nuclear family setting, every member has a well-defined role and functions. To this regard, I should start by pointing out the importance that Bettelheim gives to the universality and centrality of the Oedipus complex in childhood development.Īlthough Bettelheim proposes the application of Freud’s concepts to fairy tales (Bettelheim, 1977), in order to do so, it is required a common social structure based on a common definition of roles. Therefore, an obvious way to start is to analyse Simba, The Lion King’s hero and main character. ![]() ĭue to space constraints, this article will focus exclusively on the events and characters that I consider paramount for this analysis. The ideas and concepts presented by Michel Foucault will also be very useful for this article, as he was primarily concerned with the concept of discourse, the relationship between power and knowledge and how they are exploited as a form of social control exercised by institutions of societies (Hall, 1997). ![]() However, it is also a film that has become a generational landmark, so it seems inevitable to observe it under the light of Metz’s ideas. ![]() The Lion King is mainly a children’s tale and therefore it has the main characteristics of a fairy-tale. Both Bettelheim and Metz used Freud’s concepts to do so, although Metz preferred Lacan’s revision of Freud’s theories. In the later stages of his career, Christian Metz also attempted to interpret films through the lens of psychoanalysis. For Bettelheim, the fairy tale’s structure is adapted to the thinking process of children, that is, the content of fairy tales is related to children’s developmental stages and crises, and thus, a proper fairy-tale analysis should include a psychoanalytical reading. Furthermore, the concepts and ideas proposed by Metz, Foucault and Bettelheim can be interconnected providing a solid theoretical framework that can be used as a foundation for this interpretation.īruno Bettelheim argued for the importance of fairy tales in child development and established a correspondence between the fairy-tale world and the experience and thinking of children. The reason why I gather some of the products of three brilliant minds like Bruno Bettelheim, Christian Metz and Michel Foucault in this article is because they all provide concepts that might be useful for a semiotic interpretation of the 1994 American animated epic musical movie released by Walt Disney Pictures and produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, The Lion King. Keywords: semiotics, psychoanalysis, fairy-tales, discourse, power, cinema, politics, myths. Moreover, I will focus my interpretation on the narrative, that is, on the plot of the animated movie, leaving out of my analysis more technical considerations about the production of the piece. In order to so, I will be using Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation of fairy-tales, Foucault’s considerations on discourse and power, and the peculiar approach of Christian Metz to film analysis to support my empirical analysis. This analysis will be carried out on the basis of different theoretical approaches provided by Semiotics, which will simultaneously make apparent the contributions of this discipline in the pursuance for meaning. Email: The present article aims at introducing a semiotic analysis of Disney’s feature-length animated movie The Lion King. ![]()
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