The Lion King

An opening that hands the first four wordless minutes to a single song. It renders in music the rite in which the whole savanna greets the birth of a new prince.

• The first sound is not an instrument but Lebo M's cry in Zulu. A human voice bursting out unaccompanied opens the African dawn before the picture does.
• Underneath runs a leading-and-answering pattern (call and response), in which one voice throws out a line and many answer it. It is the traditional give-and-take of African choral singing.
• The music flows in a steady build (crescendo) as choir and drums stack up layer upon layer, until a single last drumbeat cuts the screen to black and the title appears. The end of the song and the doorway into the film lock together exactly.
• Zimmer and Lebo M won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocals for this piece, and the song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. A pop version sung by Elton John also closes the album.

A song about young Simba's swagger, treating the throne like a game. It forms a pair with Scar's song, which comes later.

• The bouncing rhythm and bright major key (a scale that sounds bright) carry the child's excitement just as it is. It is a child playing king, imagining all the privileges and none of the responsibility.
• Dialogue in which Simba and Nala shake off Zazu the majordomo breaks in between the sung lines. Speech and song trading places is the idiom of musical comedy.
• The passage where the screen turns into primary-colored patterns and the animals stack up into a tower is drawn not as reality but as something inside the child's imagination.
• Rowan Atkinson, as Zazu, cuts in with mock gravity, putting a comic brake on the giddy song.

The villain's song, in which Scar reveals to the hyenas his plan to usurp the throne. A march in the dark casts its shadow over the story.

• Jeremy Irons sneers through it, speaking more than singing. Delivered somewhere between speech and song, this style lays bare Scar's cynical nature.
• The minor key (a scale that sounds dark) and the thudding, clipped march rhythm combine to make even the ridiculous hyenas look like an army.
• Watching the hyenas march in formation, many critics were reminded of the mass rallies of 1930s propaganda films. Picture and music together cast the shadow of dictatorship.
• The offbeat retorts of Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, and Jim Cummings as the hyenas mix a strange comedy into the menacing song.

A score that begins with the wildebeest stampede and carries on into the stillness and mourning left behind. It is the passage Zimmer recalled as a requiem for his father.

• Low strings and brass drive forward by relentlessly repeating a short figure. This is ostinato (a repeated figure), a technique that builds momentum by repeating a short rhythmic cell.
• The choir rises like a shout, and African voices and the Western orchestra collide as a single mass. This is where the score's basic materials are used most violently.
• When the stampede ends, the large ensemble is withdrawn in an instant and only small sounds remain. As the music recedes, the audience comes face to face with the silence on the screen.
• The mourning melody that begins at the end of the stillness sounds like a darkened twist on the kingdom melody heard earlier. It is the moment when the same melody tilts from major toward minor and its meaning is turned upside down.

Timon and Pumbaa's song urging the wounded Simba to live without worry. Meanwhile, several years slip by.

• The title is a Swahili phrase meaning don't worry. The passage midway through, in which Pumbaa confesses his past, is built like a short monologue play.
• The banter between Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella, with its ad-lib (improvised line) rhythm, creates the song's comedy.
• In the latter half, young Simba's voice gives way to adult Simba's. Years pass within a single song, a time ellipsis made of music.
• This song, too, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It is a jaunty song, but because it buries a painful past, it can also be heard as a song of avoidance.

A ballad tracing the feelings of Simba and Nala, reunited as adults. Their friends' grumbling frames it at both ends.

• It opens and closes with a playful passage in which Timon and Pumbaa fret about losing their friend. It is a frame structure, setting a sincere love song inside a frame of laughter.
• The two lions' hearts are not the same. Nala carries longing, Simba a secret he cannot confess, so even within one song their emotions cross at odds.
• It won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and Elton John won the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for it.
• Elton John's version plays over the end credits. It is worth hearing alongside the choral arrangement in the film.

A 6-minute score spanning Simba's return to the final scene. It links the film's beginning and end through music.

• The kingdom's melody heard in chapter 2 returns powerfully in the brass. This is the leitmotif technique, which repeats a short melody tied to a particular character or object, so that the idea of reclaiming a lost place is carried in a single melody.
• Zulu chorus and drums lay down a marching ground that drives the return forward. Lebo M collaborated on the choral arrangements.
• In the ruined kingdom it sinks into dark, low-register harmonies, then, as the rain begins, chorus and orchestra open up together in full.
• At the end of the track, the cry and chorus of the first song return. The bookend structure, binding beginning and end with the same material, is completed in sound.