#20 - Anticipating A New Week, The Lion King, Animated Movies - 13/07/2025
Having this weekend to relax, actually, has been satisfying. Last week, circumstances came up that of course were out of my control that turned my first weekend break kinda hellish. I wasnt happy with that. Fortunately, things have been better this time around and i've sort of just been lazing around and resting. I think i've earned it, personally; the last two days of my first proper working week were kinda stressful, but not inherently bad. So, having that time to rest is nice and I've been spending my time actually resting. Gotta say, I also appreciate how breezy and cool the weather is, given how burning hot the temperature has been lately. I've been out in 28 degree weather and it's HELL without sunscreen. Stupidly I was late to that particular party, and my arms and neck have been sunburnt as such. However, on the other hand, I look like I have actual life in me now compared to the pale zombie I appeared to be beforehand. Either way, rest was in order, and thus, I have rested.
I've been anticipating this next week, this new week upcoming, mainly because I want to ensure i'm still doing good and still going at it, still trying my best. I will admit, I am somewhat petrified of failure and the inability to actually do good with what I do, but I also am kind of overparanoid to a lot of extents; I tend to have this tendency to assume how bad I am at something before I can ever really give myself the benefit of the doubt or any actual confidence in myself, and that's something I'm trying to combat as of late given the new confidence that flows through me. So im just doing my best to remember that one, im new to this and two, im actually good at what I do as well. So thus, ill be kind to myself. Other than the points ive raised, im just excited! Im excited to get into the flow of things, to do some good, to do right by people and work my ass off if it means that i'm making the world a better place even by a little margin in the end. If I had told myself ten years in the past that i'd actually be using my time to do something good, to make the world a little better, he'd not have believed me. But life is not a linear thing, it's completely unpredictable, and I love it.
Related to work, but I actually sat down today to just watch movies! Been a while since I did that on my own; specifically, The Lion King and The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride. I was reminded of them based off of some of the conversations I'd had with coworkers throughout the week, and the songs from them both sort of just became an itch in my brain that manifested eventually into deciding to revisit these. These for me are childhood movies, I remember loving both of them a lot as a kid and they stuck with me a ton. A part of me wonders if that's due to the furry aspect, given that they're movies that clearly inspired a lot of furries, but I dont know if I can call them that and to be honest I don't particularly feel that they helped me identify with that sort of thing in the end. What I can call them, especially the first one, is masterful storytelling with such a peppered pace to the plot that it feels both quick and compelling. Everything down to the music and just how lush the entire film is feels right to me. It all the more makes me realise just how strange it is that Disney has seemingly lost their soul, that what they produce now is essentially just a few animated sideprojects and then live action remakes of their old properties for some strange reason. I dont really get how their quality dipped this badly.
The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride? Im...more mixed on it. I really liked this one as a kid, actually, I think i legit preferred it to the first movie when I was younger because I vibed a ton with Kiara and Kovu, but I sort of felt it to be really indifferent and a bit of a nothingburger on this rewatch. It doesnt help that it's direct to video too, which means it downgrades a lot of the time to develop characters with slapstick antics that, given how dark the plot actually is here, feels strange. There's these themes of generational hatred and trying to grow from the past that are legitimately really interesting to hear and infer, but they're really buried by the limitations of direct to video. For example, there's this constant inferrence and idea of destiny and fate, how Kovu being adopted by Scar before the latter's death is an indicator of who Kovu will be; it's this genuinely interesting discussion of nature versus nurture, if someone can grow from their bad origins and surpass their origins by being better people, these themes of division and how the past shouldnt dictate the future. Zira is genuinely compelling because she's so stuck in the past (despite no clear reason as to why she'd want that given how Scar turned the pridelands into a dying region, something which I also find bothers me), that she can't see that this endless cycle of conflict interferes with the fact that in the end, her pride and Simba's are one and the same. And then Simba genuinely learns a lesson about moving on from the past. I find the latter point weakly done in the actual film because he doesnt really learn, he just kind of...accepts. Like, there's Zira, who wants to avenge Scar, and then there's Simba, who wants to dissasociate with anything Scar related despite those things being their own independent lives. There's a cycle of hate that needs to end and the film doesnt emphasise it enough. Instead, there's a strange Romeo and Juliet sort of thing going on with Kiara (who's honestly boring) and Kovu (who should have had way more development than just Scar-but-not-actually-Scar) that takes up the second half of the film despite them having about three total meetings in the entire film. There's evidence to suggest the film was hastily trimmed, given that Zira's death was different originally, so I wonder if crucial elements were trimmed too. Im aware of how they really altered things concerning if Kovu was Scar's son, and...yeah, I need not emphasise how much that was a good idea. Though it's silly to get to that point to begin with. Either way, overall, I like The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, but far less than the original movie. The Lion King however, is excellent.
Its stuff like this that makes me evaluate my relationship to movies, animated ones, nowadays. I spent so much of my childhood just watching these movies that they became innate to me, but nowadays I kinda just dont really watch that many. It's not because of a distaste for the medium, its moreso that I find it hard to really sit down and watch things. Today was different, because I had an itch to scratch. But Im hoping to sort of change that, and really watch more films sometime. I dont find myself getting involved in discourse concerning films at all nowadays, just kind of observant to things. I think that hatewatching films is a dangerous thing, especially to make a career out of, since it means you thrive off of negativity. And negativity can be a very toxic thing to ingest constantly.
Its nice to have grown up and wisened.