"When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality"
About this Quote
Taymor is quietly rebuking the instinct that dominates so much prestige entertainment: the urge to prove you can replicate reality, down to the last pore, feather, or CGI blade of grass. Her point is almost heretical in an era that treats technical fidelity as artistic seriousness. Theater, she argues, wins by refusing the contest altogether. Its power comes from admitting its own artifice and turning that limitation into an engine for imagination.
The intent is practical and polemical at once. While developing The Lion King for the stage, Taymor wasn’t just translating a hit Disney film; she was protecting theater’s native strengths from being steamrolled by cinematic expectations. Abstraction becomes a strategy: masks, puppetry, visible mechanics, and stylized movement don’t “approximate” animals, they create a new language for them. The audience is asked to collaborate, to complete the image in their heads, which produces a more intimate kind of spectacle than literalism can.
The subtext is also about authority. Taymor positions the director not as a manager of realism but as a curator of symbols. “Not to do literal reality” is a defense of metaphor as a tool for emotional truth: a gazelle made of wood and fabric can feel more alive than a perfect simulation because it’s carrying meaning, not just information.
Context matters: The Lion King arrived in the late-90s, when Broadway was wrestling with corporate IP and the fear that stagecraft would be reduced to brand-extension. Taymor’s abstraction is how the adaptation justifies itself - not as a copy, but as a reinvention.
The intent is practical and polemical at once. While developing The Lion King for the stage, Taymor wasn’t just translating a hit Disney film; she was protecting theater’s native strengths from being steamrolled by cinematic expectations. Abstraction becomes a strategy: masks, puppetry, visible mechanics, and stylized movement don’t “approximate” animals, they create a new language for them. The audience is asked to collaborate, to complete the image in their heads, which produces a more intimate kind of spectacle than literalism can.
The subtext is also about authority. Taymor positions the director not as a manager of realism but as a curator of symbols. “Not to do literal reality” is a defense of metaphor as a tool for emotional truth: a gazelle made of wood and fabric can feel more alive than a perfect simulation because it’s carrying meaning, not just information.
Context matters: The Lion King arrived in the late-90s, when Broadway was wrestling with corporate IP and the fear that stagecraft would be reduced to brand-extension. Taymor’s abstraction is how the adaptation justifies itself - not as a copy, but as a reinvention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Julie Taymor — comment about The Lion King; cited on Wikiquote (Julie Taymor) as: "When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality." |
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