The amazing miracle about this film is not just the world of patience spent during three years to catch all these animals and their ways of life on film, not just the brilliant camera technique in approaching the animals to their intimacy, not just the broad universal scope of the presentation of African wild life, but above all to make the music illustrate it all with incredible precision of observation, timing and faithfulness, as if the animals did what they did conducted by the music. Paul Smith was applied in several Walt Disney films and always with more eloquent results than he was given any credit for. Walt Disney displayed a knack for this already in "Bambi", in which the music carefully follows the entire narrative with overwhelming faithfulness and precision, and the same miracle is presented here, like also in other documentaries of his like "The Living Desert". This is a quality in Walt Disney that is generally overlooked, his immense musicality and skill of applying it to his films, to make them wonders of experience both visually, mentally and musically.
Review of The African Lion
