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Coming from Africa, I found the movie's "African" pretenions hilarious --
Mickey Mouse in Kente cloth. Notwithstanding all the avenues of criticism
re a disneyfied look at African cultures, social organization, its
deployment of stereotypes etc, I find it an interesting reflection of
Disney's attempts to break into a market niche supposedly defined by the
renewal of "Afrocentric" identity politics among African Americans (which,
in transposing the idealised memory of a collective past onto modern
Africa, often makes itself vulnerable to this disneyfication -- the Africa
of the imagination posited, for example, in an Arrested Development video,
often has more in common with a Eurocentric tourist vision of Africa than
it would like to admit...)
 
Another angle on your analysis of the Lion King -- hope this is useful
 
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