Animation Director Roger Allers recently joined the Walt Disney Family Museum’s Happily Ever After Hours virtual event for a live Q&A about his career. He was co-director of The Lion King and also lent his writing and artistic talents to Tron, Oliver & Company, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Lilo & Stitch. He also directed the short film The Little Matchgirl and his project, “Kingdom of the Sun,” inspired what became The Emperor’s New Groove. Here are 10 things we learned from Roger Allers.
1. He wanted to work for Walt Disney when he was a child.
Roger Allers loved Disney animated films when he was a kid, which made him want to become an animator. “At that time there weren’t videos, so you only saw the movie once, maybe twice if you were lucky when it came out. So a lot of it was revisiting it in books and the story records.” He shared a funny anecdote about getting a glitter color set as a kid that was called “Pixie Dust” and thinking it would make him fly. He was devastated when he found out that Walt Disney had passed away and the way in which he found out seems cruel. “I learned about it in the backseat of a car on the way home and the two in the front seat were laughing about it. It was traumatizing.”
2. His path to Disney Animation was full of twists and turns.
Roger’s journey to Disney Animation took him all over the world, including jobs in Canada and Japan. “While working in Tokyo, a couple of my friends had gone on to work at Disney. We had worked together to develop Tron and when it was taken to Disney, some went along to work on the animated parts.” Roger had just returned from Japan having worked on an earlier version of the film Little Nemo: Adventure in Slumberland when a friend he had worked with gave him a call. “Through a very sad circumstance, a story artist had just died at Disney. His name was Pete Young, he was working on Oliver & Company.” Roger’s portfolio was still in transit from Tokyo when he had a meeting with Don Hahn and George Scribner, who gave him a chance to draw a few things on the spot and hired him immediately. “It was a little unconventional, but so exciting to all of a sudden be there… The whole thing had just come out of the lot in Burbank and we were in a warehouse on Flower Street and it was not a very big building.” Due to the intimate working spaces, Roger Allers got to wander around the warehouse to see all of the departments at work early in his Disney career.
3. How he became a director.
As head of story on Beauty and the Beast, Roger Allers worked closely with the directors. “That was very involved with creating the story, working with lots of artists, and working very closely with Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. It gave me a broader understanding of the whole thing and during that time people would say to me ‘You should direct.’ It always seemed to me like once you direct, you’ve given up your personal life.” He was hesitant at first, but when Peter Schneider offered him a directing job on “King of the Jungle,” he couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
4. The differences between “King of the Jungle” and The Lion King.
“In the first draft, little Simba and Nala were friends with little Pumbaa and Timon and another friend and they all ran around together,” Roger Allers shared about the film on its journey to becoming The Lion King. “In that version, when Simba was cast out by his uncle, by the hyenas… there was no love story to draw him back. There was no contact with the spirit of his father. That was all new. I would say that was probably the biggest idea, having Simba reconnect with his father… There were larger spiritual underpinnings to the whole story, the circle of life and all of that.” Roger Allers was on the project first and when Rob Minkoff joined him, they were given just a few weeks to reboot the story.
5. The Lion King voice cast were involved when the film was still called “King of the Jungle.”
“Many of the actors were cast on the first version of The Lion King,” Roger Allers shared. The character of Simba was originally modeled after Ferris Bueler, which is why Matthew Broderick was hired. “Of course, then his role really changed. We got Robert Guillaume to do Rafiki.” Simba’s spiritual guide was originally a more sophisticated part that fit the actor. “After we rewrote it, it changed Rafiki into being kind of a crazy old coot… and also a little screwy. So we came back to Robert and said ‘We’ve made a few changes’ and to his credit, it took a recording session, but he found his voice.” The biggest exception was the casting of Timon and Pumbaa, but Roger remembered Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella, who both previously auditioned to play hyenas. When the characters were changed, they were the first actors Roger thought of.
6. He had to beg friends to come to Disney to work on The Lion King because nobody wanted to work on it.
“One of the challenges was that not a lot of people wanted to work on it. There wasn’t a lot of buzz about it. At the time, Jeffrey Katzenburg was really excited about Pocahontas and not so excited about The Lion King.” With Disney Animation split between the two films, Roger didn’t have enough animators to make the film and had to call some friends he’d worked with previously at other studios. “It was such a great mixture of people that when we all came together, it came very quickly.”
7. The importance of the Africa research trip.
“It was huge, the trip to Kenya was huge,” Roger explained. “We were only there for two-and-a-half weeks, but the beauty of the landscape and all of us were just very touched by being there. To see the animals roaming free, we had all been brought up with zoos. To see herds of animals roaming, to see lioness stalking their prey, to see a cheetah with two cubs… We learned Swahili from the guides that were showing us around, that’s where we learned the phrase ‘Hakuna Matata.’ We took some of the photos and turned them into some of the sequences, that’s where the rainstorm came from.”
8. The collaboration with Tim Rice and Elton John was an unusual working method for Roger.
“There was nothing usual about The Lion King, everything was kind of backwards,” Roger shared, including working with the film’s songwriters. Having worked closely with Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, Roger was used to a more hands-on approach from the musical team. Tim Rice was hired first, who then brought Elton John onto the project. “With Elton, except for a couple of visits, he pretty much stayed in London and sent music out. Tim was very present and they would go back and forth. That was different that way. Howard and Alan were more of a duo.” The first song Roger received was before the story was fully fleshed out, a love song that didn’t have a place in the film yet. “‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ was written very early on. I remember we all went ‘Oh, alright,’ and it was because as we learned later when we monkeyed with the song, the whole reason [Elton John] wanted to do the movie was to write a Disney love song.” Roger Allers later learned how important the song was when Elton John convinced them to do it his way. “He was very articulate about it. Besides telling us why he wanted to do the movie was to write a love song, he also said Simba and Nala are the next king and queen and going to produce the next heir, so you need a love song to show that they are in love to get them to that place.”
9. What he learned from “Kingdom of the Sun,” which became The Emperor’s New Groove.
“It’s a test of what do you love, what do you really love, what do you want to do,” Roger shared about his next project after The Lion King, “Kingdom of the Sun” inspired by the Inca Empire. He shared that prior to coming to Disney, he had worked on three animated features that were never finished. “You can put a lot of energy into things and not have them come of anything… I love this, I can’t picture doing anything else. My word to other people is hang in there. If you really love it, hang in there. After working four-years on that project… I had to take stock. Take a breath for a little while and dry my tears, but I was so determined to do something creative because that’s what powers me.” Roger shared his heartbreak over the day he was told the project would be reworked by a different team and he wouldn’t be a part of it. “After all that work, they said ‘No, we don’t want to do that…’ So anyway, they kept some of the characters and some of the songs and then did this whole different thing.” While The Emperor’s New Groove became a success on home video, it was initially a box office bomb for Disney Animation.
10. His last Disney project was the short film The Little Matchgirl.
Still licking his wounds from being dismissed from “Kingdom of the Sun,” Roger Allers next project would be his last for Disney. “Don Hahn came to me and said ‘Would you like to do an animated short about The Little Matchgirl?’ It had always been a very moving story to me. It’s one I read to my kids and never got through with a dry eye. And the idea to do it all with music with no dialogue was really interesting.” Originally intended for the third Fantasia film, the first piece of music Roger worked with was disliked by Roy E. Disney. “Honestly, I would do anything for Roy because I loved him, he was our hero. Don Hahn found the piece by Borodin, it was called ‘Nocturne,’ it was a beautiful piece and we got the Emmerson String Quartet. We had almost no budget to make these shorts on.” To make the short, Roger had to borrow animators who were between assignments, typically just for short periods of time. “It was very economical, but it had to be very creative.”
Fans can see the full schedule of Walt Disney Family Museum virtual events, including the Happily Ever After Hours speaker series, at waltdisney.org/calendar.