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.
With Rob Minkoff, Allers co-directed The Lion King (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 “achieved almost mythic status on the Disney lot”, according to the entertainment writer Jim Hill.
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’s producer, Don Hahn, described it as “Moses-Hamlet-King Arthur Meets Elton John in Africa”.
During production, the movie seemed destined for disaster. It had shed one director, and its script problems were so extensive that the studio’s best animators were reportedly reluctant to work on it.
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 “Disney Renaissance”; the full flowering came a year later with The Little Mermaid. Having worked on two further hits, Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), Allers was brought on board The Lion King to steady the ship.
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. “It was definitely in there, informing the whole thing.”
With Irene Mecchi, one of the film’s 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.
The labour pains on Allers’s 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’s The Prince and the Pauper – two lookalikes, one royalty and the other a peasant, swap places – and moved it to the Inca empire, accompanied by new songs from Sting.
The Sweatbox, a 2002 behind-the-scenes documentary co-directed by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler but later suppressed by Disney, charts the film’s 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. “Film-makers want everything short and punchy,” the musician complains, “but songs need time to breathe.”
An early screening of a pre-visualised rough cut (a version of the film before it has been fully animated) ends with Allers’s bosses complaining that the muddled film is “neither fish nor fowl” and sending him and his team back to the drawing board. “It’s kind of like being rolled over with a steamroller,” Allers says. “And then you get up, paper-thin, and try to blow yourself back up.”
When Kingdom in the Sun is refashioned in a more broadly comic direction, Allers admits he is “grieving” the film he intended to make. “Oh Roger, come on, it’s just a cartoon,” Hahn tells him. To which Allers replies: “Then I guess Picasso could say: ‘It’s just a painting,’ and Beethoven could say: ‘It’s just a symphony.’” Eventually he left the production. Directed solely by Mark Dindal, it was released in 2000 as the madcap comedy The Emperor’s New Groove.
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’s 1953 film Peter Pan, and dreamed of becoming an animator at the studio.
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 Harvard.
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’s innovative Tron, which mixed live-action with early instances of computer animation. The film was acquired by Disney and released in 1982.
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).
Returning to the US, he joined Disney in 1985 to work on Oliver & Company. He was an additional story artist on Lilo & Stitch (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 1½. 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’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet.
After leaving Disney, Allers directed the animated short The Little Matchgirl (2006), an Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 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.
On Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (2014), he oversaw the work of nine other directors, each illustrating one of Gibran’s poems. He also shaped a coherent story “on which to hang the poems, to give it a strong narrative … to help the audience in their journey through Gibran’s philosophy. I jumped at the chance because the book had been very meaningful to me in my youth.”
After his marriage to Hackenson ended in divorce in 2020, Allers married the musician Genaro Pereira. At the time of Allers’s 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.
Asked in 2016 to define his style, Allers said it amounted to “storytelling with an aim to create something of sincere and moving emotion with a certain joie de vivre”. If it was rendered in traditional animation rather than the computer variety then so much the better. “I love the personal signature that comes from the hand of the artist,” he said.
He is survived by Pereira, and by Leah and Aidan, the children from his marriage to Hackenson.
• Roger Charles Allers, film director and animator, born 29 June 1949; died 17 January 2026
