The animation division of Walt Disney was in the doldrums throughout much of the 1980s. Among the figures who revitalised it was the director Roger Allers, who has died aged 76.<\/p>\n
With Rob Minkoff, Allers co-directed The Lion King<\/a> (1994), which took $979m worldwide and spawned a smash-hit stage musical, two sequels, a 2019 remake and a 2024 prequel. After the first film became a phenomenon, Allers \u201cachieved almost mythic status on the Disney lot\u201d, according to the entertainment writer Jim Hill.<\/p>\n The Lion King project began life as a sombre, song-free epic called King of the Jungle before morphing into a Shakespearean comedy-drama peppered with power ballads and infectious singalongs composed by Elton John and Tim Rice. Transposing Hamlet to the African savannah, the film concerns Simba, a lion cub whose evil uncle, Scar, arranges the death of his noble father, the ruler Mufasa, in a brazen power-grab. Furry counterparts to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in the form of the meerkat Timon and his warthog chum Pumbaa. The movie\u2019s producer, Don Hahn, described it as \u201cMoses-Hamlet-King Arthur Meets Elton John in Africa\u201d.<\/p>\n During production, the movie seemed destined for disaster. It had shed one director, and its script problems were so extensive that the studio\u2019s best animators were reportedly reluctant to work on it.<\/p>\n Allers had already demonstrated his great facility with story on Oliver & Company (1988), a reimagining of Oliver Twist populated by cats and dogs. That film, which did well at the US box office, provided a foretaste of the impending \u201cDisney Renaissance\u201d; the full flowering came a year later with The Little Mermaid. Having worked on two further hits, Beauty and the Beast<\/a> (1991) and Aladdin (1992), Allers was brought on board The Lion King to steady the ship.<\/p>\n Hahn credited Allers and Minkoff with helping to deepen the relationship between Mufasa and Simba, and to realise touching moments such as the scene in which the cub places his tiny paw into the giant prints left in the earth by his late father. Allers, whose own father had recently died, confessed to a strong emotional attachment to the material. \u201cIt was definitely in there, informing the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n With Irene Mecchi, one of the film\u2019s screenwriters, he went on to co-write the libretto for the stage version. They received a Tony nomination in 1998 for best book of a musical. Since 1997, The Lion King has been playing continuously on stages around the world.<\/p>\n Allers at the Toronto international film festival in 2014. Photograph: Jonathan Leibson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The labour pains on Allers\u2019s next film for Disney were even more severe. Kingdom in the Sun (originally titled Kingdom of the Sun) took the basic plot of Mark Twain\u2019s The Prince and the Pauper \u2013 two lookalikes, one royalty and the other a peasant, swap places \u2013 and moved it to the Inca empire, accompanied by new songs from\u00a0Sting.<\/p>\n The Sweatbox, a 2002 behind-the-scenes documentary co-directed by Sting\u2019s wife Trudie Styler but later suppressed by Disney, charts the film\u2019s chaotic journey and includes fascinating material: Allers on the initial research trip to Peru; early production meetings at which he appears confident and ebullient; scenes of Allers with Sting in the recording studio, where the director contributes backing vocals to a singalong about llamas; and the two men clashing over the structure of a song. \u201cFilm-makers want everything short and punchy,\u201d the musician complains, \u201cbut songs need time to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n An early screening of a pre-visualised rough cut (a version of the film before it has been fully animated) ends with Allers\u2019s bosses complaining that the muddled film is \u201cneither fish nor fowl\u201d and sending him and his team back to the drawing board. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like being rolled over with a steamroller,\u201d Allers says. \u201cAnd then you get up, paper-thin, and try to blow yourself back up.\u201d<\/p>\n When Kingdom in the Sun is refashioned in a more broadly comic direction, Allers admits he is\u00a0\u201cgrieving\u201d the film he intended to\u00a0make. \u201cOh Roger, come on, it\u2019s just a cartoon,\u201d Hahn tells him. To which Allers replies: \u201cThen I guess Picasso could say: \u2018It\u2019s just a painting,\u2019 and Beethoven could say: \u2018It\u2019s just a symphony.\u2019\u201d Eventually he left the production. Directed solely by Mark Dindal, it was released in 2000 as the madcap comedy The Emperor\u2019s New Groove<\/a>.<\/p>\n Allers was born in Rye in upstate New York, to Shirley (nee Williams) and George, and raised in Prescott, Arizona. He was spellbound at the age of five by Disney\u2019s 1953 film Peter Pan, and dreamed of becoming an animator at the studio.<\/p>\n After studying fine arts at Arizona State University, he spent two years living and travelling in Greece, where he met Leslee Hackenson, whom he married in 1977. On his return to the US he moved to Boston, taking an animation class at\u00a0Harvard.<\/p>\n Hired by the director Steven Lisberger at Lisberger Studios, Allers worked as an animator and story writer on Animalympics (1980), a goofy, sweet-natured sports comedy with a voice cast including Billy Crystal and Gilda Radner. He also helped develop Lisberger\u2019s innovative Tron, which mixed live-action with early instances of computer animation. The film was acquired by Disney and released in 1982.<\/p>\n Allers was briefly employed by the Toronto studio Nelvana on the adult science-fiction animation Rock & Rule (1983), then spent more than two years in Tokyo on the troubled production of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989).<\/p>\n Returning to the US, he joined Disney in 1985 to work on Oliver & Company. He was an additional story artist on Lilo & Stitch<\/a> (2002) and received a writing credit on the second Lion King sequel, The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata (2004), also known as The Lion King 1\u00bd. Though it went straight to video, it is arguably the best in the series. With its focus on what the peripheral characters Timon and Pumbaa were doing before and during the action of The Lion King, this third instalment is to the original film what Tom Stoppard<\/a>\u2019s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet.<\/p>\n Ariel and Flounder in The Little Mermaid, 1989. Photograph: Walt Disney\/Allstar<\/p>\n After leaving Disney, Allers directed the animated short The Little Matchgirl (2006), an Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s story reimagined in pre-revolutionary Russia. In the same year, he co-directed Open Season, an animated comedy about the friendship between a grizzly bear and a mule deer.<\/p>\n On Kahlil Gibran\u2019s The Prophet (2014), he oversaw the work of nine other directors, each illustrating one of Gibran\u2019s poems. He also shaped a coherent story \u201con which to hang the poems, to give it a strong narrative \u2026 to help the audience in their journey through Gibran\u2019s philosophy. I jumped at the chance because the book had been very meaningful to me in my youth.\u201d<\/p>\n After his marriage to Hackenson ended in divorce in 2020, Allers married the musician Genaro Pereira. At the time of Allers\u2019s death, the two were collaborating on a musical, The Grasshopper, about the 17th-century poet and fabulist Jean de la Fontaine. A public reading took place in California in 2023.<\/p>\n Asked in 2016 to define his style, Allers said it amounted to \u201cstorytelling with an aim to create something of sincere and moving emotion with a certain joie de vivre\u201d. If it was rendered in traditional animation rather than the computer variety then so much the better. \u201cI love the personal signature that comes from the hand of the artist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He is survived by Pereira, and by Leah and Aidan, the children from his marriage to Hackenson.<\/p>\n Roger Charles Allers, film director and animator, born 29 June 1949; died 17 January 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The animation division of Walt Disney was in the doldrums throughout much of the 1980s. 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