The Lion King.

There are those who worry that The Lion King--with its on-screen murder of royal Mufasa and the guilt-trip laid on his little son, Simba--is too intense for children. Have the worriers ever taken a look at the books their kids are reading? They might consider Roald Dahl's The Witches and a scene in its opening pages: the little hero lies trapped in the back seat of a crashed car and listens to an awful silence because both his parents lie dead in the front. Or they might check out The Amazing Bone by William Steig, in which the little heroine pig weeps for mercy while listening to her fox-abductor sharpen his knife in the next room. "I regret having to do this to you," sighs the fox as he drags her to the kitchen table to be slaughtered, "it's nothing personal." Or perhaps they ought to peruse the Grimm tale called "The Juniper Tree." At the end of this particular review, I'll give them something to worry about. But first, how good is the new Disney?

Middling, I'd say. The story is swiftly told and does have a certain mythic resonance. It's a rationalized Hamlet: Junior delays in avenging Pop because his murderous uncle, Scar, has made our leonine hero feel responsible for his father's death. But Disney's scriptwriters have crammed in jokes presumably deemed fit for kids only because they're too stale for adults: "What's a motto?" "I dunno, wassamatta you?" There's a surfeit of witless clowning in this movie and a shortage of genuine humor. As for the "serious" dialogue, it shows the pernicious influence of TV soaps: "Listen, you think you can just show up and tell me how to run my life?" is a line that puts us in "Baywatch" rather than in the African savannah.

The songs, by Tim Rice and Elton John, are miles below the level established by the last three Disney features. The melodies and lyrics contain little of the fun of The Little Mermaid, little of the romance of Beauty and the Beast, and absolutely none of the wit of Aladdin. When Timon the meercat sings the first few bars of that old doo-wop version of an African folk song, "in the jungle, the lion sleeps tonight," you can sense the audience perking up. At last, a real song instead of that dreadful "ear candy" that Rice and John serve up! But the background score, by the reliable Hans Zimmer, has more than a whiff of the mbube style made popular in this country by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and it lends an all-too-fleeting power to the opening and closing scenes. The best song composer for Lion would have been Paul Simon working once again with Ladysmith.

Some of Disney's best animation ever appears in this movie. The illusion of depth created goes way beyond that of all other cartoon features I've seen and conveys a sense of African spaciousness and majesty. At times, the drawing delivers a sort of art appreciation course for tots: the swirling lines at the bottom of a sun-baked canyon suggest Van Gogh; the design created by a herd of zebras evokes pop art. As usual with Disney, the comic and villainous characters are drafted with verve and wit, while the juvenile and romantic leads are cutesy-poo.

The best characterization in the movie is that of the villain, Scar, a decadent scoundrel, limp of paw and devilish in his designs. Voicing Scar, Jeremy Irons repeats his performance of Claus von Bulow from Reversal of Fortune. (The scriptwriters have even cribbed Irons's best line, "You have no idea." High camp doesn't get any higher than this.

Now, let's give all those fretting parents out there something intense to worry about. What should really bother them has nothing to do with death scenes and guilt traumas. Mufasa's corpse looks spotless after Scar gets him trampled by a herd of wildebeests. No blood, no mangling. As for Simba's psychological turmoil, no kid in the audience over five will doubt that the hero will be able to get his head straight in time for the final showdown with Scar. Simba is health personified compared with Spiderman or Tim Burton's version of Batman.

But consider this. At the heart of The Lion King is a social vision that is feudal. Here, the Good Life depends upon an absolutely fixed social order in which nobody can climb up or fall down without the world collapsing into anarchy. Terrence Rafferty, in his very funny dismissal of The Lion King in the New Yorker, completely missed the point when he jeered that Scar's seizure of the throne can make no difference to the animals that lions eat. Of course, Scar's elevation to King Predator is no revolution. Rather, it's Scar's promotion of his underlings, the hyenas, that throws the animal kingdom into confusion and famine because the food chain gets snarled up. These hyenas are villainous for being social upstarts, and Scar is doubly villainous for having betrayed not only his brother but an unalterable social order. Goodness, in this movie, is an attribute of birth, not experience. Evil, too, is inborn and utterly irredeemable. (It's no use telling kids that these are animals, not humans. They perceive cartoon animals as people. "Nature is all; nurture can only tinker. That is the fundamental vision of The Lion King and of all fairy tales. Keep in mind the hatred of the hard-working, upwardly mobile puritans for the fairy tales that aristocratic court ladies loved to listen to and peasant grandmothers loved to tell and scholar-poets loved to collect. Will our latter-day puritans let this latest licentiousness go unpunished while wasting time in complaining about the very mild violence in this movie?

Legions of the politically correct, to arms! Lynch Disney's CEO Michael Eisner!

Having got all that off my chest, I now await the video of The Lion King. My five-year-old will love the meercat.