After initially reading Gooding-Williams' argument, I could only think about how poorly argued his argument was. His interpretation of Lion King was completely valid. I could definitely see the elephant graveyard as representative of the inner cities or otherwise marginalized groups of society. However, in the "Disney in Africa" section, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Gooding-Williams chose to write a tribute to Hegel instead of finding anything to argue. The connection from the film to Hegel's Eurocentric viewpoint was extremely weak. In my opinion, he failed in proving his point that the Disney version of Africa is a "historyless" place. Perhaps if he had spent less time summarizing the entirety of Hegel's philosophy and just included a link like so, he might have had more time to actually add to his argument. In essence, this section was too much "they say" and not even close to enough "I say."
Personally, I would have taken the entire section entitled "Disney in Africa" out of the piece as it added absolutely nothing to Gooding-Williams' argument on the inner cities metaphor. Unfortunately, the "Disney in the Inner City" section was also extremely poorly argued. As pointed out in the Morton piece, Gooding-Williams' entire argument rests solely on the fact that two out of the three hyenas in the film were Latino and African American, a detail that was almost certainly coincidental in the actual casting, yet is being exploited here as the main evidence for an argument. Gooding-Williams also does not spend a lot of time explaining the significance behind the hyenas even though it is key to his contention. He also falls in the fact that he categorizes the hyenas as "black and Latino denizens" exclusively instead of a more generalized interpretation of marginalized groups.
The Morton piece was better in my opinion. It did not criticize the argumentation of the Gooding-Williams piece as much as I had liked. Furthermore, it provided a new interpretation more so than editing the one in question and also spent a little too much time summarizing the film. However, Morton's more political interpretation of the film was completely valid. He is correct in that there is not "black and white" in this film. Instead, it is a showcase of various political systems that highlight corruption and other issues within each defined class. Simba is most definitely influenced by both Scar and Mufasa, and his monarchy is very different from either of his predecessors'. There is chaos within each class of society, and this is what Lion King communicates instead of a strict dichotomy between rich and poor.
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