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How 'Lion' explores identity, belonging and cultural heritage

20 Jan 2017 BY Kirsten Geekie in Film Features

An unimaginable true story brought to life,  Lion   is an affecting yet life-affirming human drama about a young Indian boy who finds himself thousands of miles from home. Separated from his family for more than 25 years, the boy eventually attempts to find his way back home to his birth mother.

Lion (2016)

105 reviews

Drama based on the true story of a young Indian boy who gets lost from his family and, many years later as an adult, retraces his steps to find them.

Age group 11+ years

Duration 118 mins

As a young boy, Saroo and his family lived in a rural village in northern India. Reduced to stealing coal to exchange for food with locals, his older brother Guddu would often head to a neighbouring town to find work. One evening, five year-old Saroo followed Guddu and waited for him to finish at the train station. While waiting, he wandered into an empty train and fell asleep, only to awaken with the train in motion, hurtling him far away from home. Terminating more than 1,500 miles away in Kolkata - a strange, frantic city, whose language he didn't speak - Saroo is lost in a seemingly hopeless situation. Narrowly avoiding being kidnapped, and with no paper trail or family name, he ended up in a local orphanage, from where he was eventually adopted by a couple in Australia, starting a new life on another continent.

The first feature film from Australian director Garth Davis, Lion is a film of two halves. Opening with the little boy's alarming journey into the dangerous melee of Kolkata, the first act immerses you in Saroo's experience. Alone and bewildered, the camera stays close to him, following him up and down the train as he screams for help. Deposited in Kolkata, the camera then draws out, revealing his small, vulnerable body set agains the huge crowds and unfamiliar landscapes of the big city. Overlooked and unable to ask for help (Saroo speaks Hindi, while the language in Kolkata is Bengali) he is destined to become one of the many street urchins that inhabit the city's alleyways and archways. Reminiscent of  Slumdog Millionaire 's frenzied, heady depiction of the slums of Mumbai, Lion  puts you right there with Saroo, navigating the dark, murky underbelly of the city. 

Incredibly, Saroo survives the streets, and is sent to live with an adoptive family in Australia. Travelling to his new home in Tasmania, the film allows you a sigh of relief as the camera gently lingers on scenes of Saroo safe in the hands of his new adopted parents, mutely coming to terms with his new life. As he settles in, Saroo is joined by Mantosh, another Indian boy, who becomes Saroo's adopted brother. However, Mantosh struggles to assimilate to his new surroundings as comfortably as Saroo.

Where the first half of the film follows Saroo as a young boy, tossed around by the hands of fate, the second half transitions to 25 years later, with Saroo a university student in Australia. As an adult, Saroo is embracing the next phase of his life, with memories of his time in India lying dormant. Until, that is, at a party, when the smell of freshly made Jalebi - an Indian sweet - triggers old memories. This leads to a discussion of family and identity that comes to govern Saroo's journey throughout the rest of the film. Inspired by the development of Google Earth, Saroo becomes obsessed with retracing his steps back to the family he left behind. Only his long-buried memories can tell him if he is on the right path amongst the countless possibilities in the sprawling geographical radius.

For British actor Dev Patel, who plays adult Saroo, this is a film about love and the remarkable bond between mother and son transcending continents. Through tender memories, we see young Saroo working with his birth mother Kamla in the hills behind their village. The more Saroo scours Google Earth for clues to the whereabouts of his village, the more vivid the memories become, and the more his love for his mother is reignited. Meanwhile, we're shown the quiet dedication that his adopted parents have provided and the deep bond he has formed with his adopted mother, even if Saroo cant bring himself to tell them of his investigations for fear of hurting them and seeming ungrateful.

The film throws light on the sensitive issues around adoption and the motivations of parents who adopt children from different countries and cultures to their own. All the while, Saroo's relationship with Mantosh becomes increasingly strained - not helped by not knowing what became of Guddu. Acutely aware that Saroo's life would be very different if he hadn't been adopted, his memories wont let you forget that it was simply an unthinkable event that cruelly drew them apart.

Torn between two families in two different countries, landscape becomes a defining motif in Saroo's struggle to understand who he really is. Gliding aerial shots of the Australian countryside are compared to the rugged plains of India that Saroo's train travelled across. Director Garth Davis and Dev Patel both spent months travelling through India in order to help them emotionally connect with the story. Saroo's childhood memories revolve around the earthy hills he worked on with his mother, while as an adult he runs into the rugged wilderness of Tasmania for space to think, revealing the innate association he has with both worlds.

This conflict of identity is brought to the fore by a deeply affecting performance from Dev Patel. Through eight months of research, he perfected the Australian accent, travelled India, and even met with the real life Saroo. Similarly, 8-year-old Sunny Pawar is transfixing as young Saroo, despite having never acted before. As a more established actor, Nicole Kidman strikes a poignant chord as his agonised adoptive mother, torn between her love and his needs.

A real story told with raw and absorbing truth Lion is an important story with a huge heart that provokes fundamental questions around identity, belonging and cultural heritage.

Explore the themes of Lion further with our Into Film Recommends podcast below, or  log in to SoundCloud to download the podcast and listen on the go . 

The  Into Film Recommends Podcast Series is also available on iTunes .

Kirsten Geekie , Film Curation Manager

MA (Hons) in English Literature & Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow with a background in Film Festivals having worked for Edinburgh International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc Fest and BFI London Film Festival.

This Article is part of: Film Features

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English Tutor Lessons

English tuition year 12.

Essay Introductions on the Film ‘Lion’ Directed by Garth Davis

For year 11 students studying aos1, unit 1 reading and creating texts, the film lion directed by garth davis, please find two essay prompts with their introductions that include the main contention and message of director colour coded., prompt #1   “every night i imagine that i’m walking those streets home and i know every single step of the way and i whisper in her ear i’m here”.  lion portrays the bonds of family.  discuss..

Introduction / Main Contention / Message of Director

Lion the movie directed by Garth Davis is about love, the bonds of family and the remarkable bond between mother and son that transcends continents.   As a young five year old we see Saroo working with his birth mother Kamla in the hills behind their village of Ganesh Talai, Khandwa, India.  There is a clear sense of belonging to family and knowing Saroo is accepted and loved shown in the scene where his mother feeds her children with the milk in packets Guddu got in the market.  In 1987 Saroo is adopted by Sue and John Brierly who prove a quiet dedication to the bonds of family in the life they provide for Saroo in Tasmania.  Then the film transports us 25 years later as the adult Saroo scours Google Earth for clues to the whereabouts of his village in India.  The more vivid the memories become for Saroo he feels the more his love for his birth mother is reignited.  The pivotal moment is in 2012 in the village of Ganesh Talai when Saroo’s birth mother sees his face after 25 years of separation.  The memory of her face had been embedded in Saroo’s mind for such a long time in the many flashbacks he experienced throughout the film.  No matter how long Kamla had been apart from her son she knew who he was and their tears spoke for themselves as the bonds of unconditional love is celebrated.  Director Garth Davis said that for him the film reminds us that if you can love unconditionally and give a child a home and hope, like Sue gave Saroo, then you can overcome anything through love.

Prompt #2  Explore how the landscape plays a significant part in the film Lion .

The film Lion directed by Garth Davis hosts a range of beautifully shot landscape sequences by cinematographer Greig Frasier both in India and Tasmania.  The rugged and stunning landscapes play a significant part in the film as they are used to convey Saroo’s current state of mind.  The landscape shots were based on stories told by the real Saroo Brierley to the cinematographer with the effect that it allows the viewer to empathise with and create a connection with Saroo.   When Saroo says “I have to find my way back home” these words are like a pledge to accomplish something seemingly impossible to achieve across continents of landscapes.  Geography is at the heart of the film and we see at the very beginning of the film overhead shots take place as the credits appear which carry great meaning to the real life of Saroo.  The landscapes are meant to simulate astral-travelling that Saroo used to do as a child when he would allow his mind to travel across Australian landscapes to Indian landscapes to find his home.  Throughout the sequencing of the sweeping landscapes of both India and Australia the film tells the viewer Saroo’s story in sections so that we compare the two. Consequently, it is impossible not to reflect on the juxtaposition between the comfortable, suburban, middle-class upbringing Saroo enjoyed in Hobart, and the tough, dirty, poor lifestyle he inadvertently escaped back in India.  More importantly, by mimicking astral-travelling within the magnificent landscapes, Director Davis wanted his audience to appreciate the sense of Saroo as a tiny speck against a massive world and the enormous effort needed to find his way home to the village of Ganesh Talai.

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If you’re waffling between seeing “La La Land” or “Moonlight” this weekend, do yourself a favor and check out “ Lion ” instead. 

“Lion” is an epic, emotional whirlwind of a movie: a hopeful, devastating, and ultimately immensely human film about one man’s quest to uncover his identity. 

In the film, a young Indian boy, Saroo, is separated from his family at age 5, sent hurtling by himself on an empty passenger train that takes him 1,000 miles from his home. He ends up in Kolkata, where people speak Bengali and not his native Hindi, and where he is quickly forced to navigate harsh streets and escape myriad dangers. 

Saroo is eventually adopted by a well-off Australian couple in Tasmania, and his life changes completely. Then, as a young man, he returns to his murky, repressed past, determined to find his birth mother using an unlikely tool — Google Earth. 

Read more: Here Are the Oscar Nominations We’re Most Excited About in 2017

The film considers a host of themes, both big and small: adoption and belonging, poverty and privilege, local and global. 

For Luke Davies, the film’s screenwriter and author of three novels, the power of “Lion” lies in its “inseparable mixture of joy and sorrow.” 

The film oscillates between immense loss and overwhelming hope. It is unafraid to confront the abject poverty that is all too common across the Indian continent, but also showcases the beauty and vitality of the people who live there. 

Davies himself is an Australian transplant to the US. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film “Candy,” based off his book of the same name. 

He’s been surprised by the amount of buzz the film — which has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay — has generated.  

The movie, he told Global Citizen, has become “part of a general conversation that’s happening at the moment,” surrounding issues of immigration and globalization. 

“This is a film that celebrates ‘the other,’” he said. 

Read more: Slow Violence and the Displacement of India's Indigenous

Saroo, an Indian immigrant living with Australian parents, is a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. 

As a young Indian boy coming to Australia, he must learn a new language and culture. And as a young Australian man who doesn’t speak Hindi and only has fleeting memories of his childhood in Ganesh Talai, a tiny rural settlement in India’s Madhya Pradesh state, he has to come to terms with his fate.

Like many, he’s caught between two worlds, unsure of which to embrace fully. 

In writing the screenplay for “Lion,” Davies himself visited India and was shocked by the paradoxes he saw. 

“More than anywhere I’ve ever been in the world, India is remarkable for its mixture of chaos, ugliness, a distressingly easy relationship with casual death, and great beauty,” he said. 

“India contains all of these paradoxes, and we wanted our film to feel as far away as possible from a manufactured, hallmark movie-of-the-week as you could get because, as I’ve said, we believed in the pure power of the story itself,” Davies said.

Traveling with the real Saroo Brierley, he met both Brierley’s birth mother, Kamala, and his adoptive mother, Sue. 

“The spiritual heart of this film is the experience of the two mothers,” he said, echoing the film’s director Garth Davis. “Meeting [Kamala] changed my entire inner sense of where the film had to get to in the end because of the electric intensity of being in that room with her as she sat there — her and Saroo clinging to each other, stroking each other for two hours.”

The film, of course, is derived from the true story of Saroo Brierley, as recounted in his book “ A Long Way Home ,” and as such is hedged in an uncomfortable reality about homelessness in India. 

Beyond its emotional pull, the film also brings awareness (and a face) to a harrowing statistic — that 80,000 Indian children are lost each year, ending up in orphanages and on the streets across the country. 

Read more: This Program Has an Ingenious Way to Keep Girls in School: Let Them Play

Through the film’s website , you can donate to three organizations — Magic Bus , Childline , and Railway Children that are working to provide resources and housing for these children. 

The film’s marriage of storytelling and social consciousness is part of what has drawn audiences from across the country, and around the world. 

“Lion,” Davies said, is unique in that it is “a film that bypasses your intellect and breaks your heart open.”

In a world that seems at time to be broken apart by divisiveness, the film is, as Davies put it, a “healing balm in a time of such anxiety,” which is exactly why we need this film more than ever.  

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The True Heart Breaking And Heart-Warming Story Of ‘Lion’ Movie

Feb. 2, 2017

Lion | Movie Analysis

Film review of lion : a search for identity and a yearning to belong.

Lion  (2017) traverses the life of a 5-year-old Saroo Brierley as he experiences separation from his family, survives the streets of a city he doesn’t even speak the language of, gets adopted by a loving Australian family, and finally embarks on a journey to find his birth home and family. This movie revolves around themes of identity, parenthood, adoption, and cultural heritage.

Watch the trailer of Lion here:

LION  | Summary and Analysis

The movie spans 25 years of a boy named Saroo Brierley who lives in extreme poverty while helping his mother carry rocks while helping his brother steal coal pieces from moving trains. Saroo idolizes his brother, who is like a cool superhero in the wonderous eyes of a small child. His brother, Guddu, jumps on and off trains, gets coal pieces and produces miracle foods, such as milk and jalebis. One day, Saroo in his ecstasy of joining his brother in one of his ventures, falls asleep at a train station and on finding his brother absent, he steps onto a train but that train happens to be decommissioned and Saroo is trapped in the moving train, bound for an unknown destination. Saroo’s dawning realization that he is alone and trapped is accompanied by desperate shouts for his brother who is not to come. “Guddu!!” These visceral screams are cut off by a shot of the outside, the turmoil of a lost child is contrasted with the serene landscape and a moving train. The camerawork by the talented Greig Fraser smartly pans the camera to show the vastness of the world and the smallness of a lost child.

Saroo arrives in Kolkata, the bustling city filled with unknown people who speak an indecipherable language (Saroo speaks Hindi, whereas people speak Bengali in Kolkata). Saroo’s perspective is explored throughout his survival on the streets of Kolkata that do not care for a homeless and poor child. Human traffickers and child predators roam the same streets and almost capture Saroo at every turn of the road. Yet, the brave child Saroo is, he escapes the predatory hands of these beings. A year later, he is adopted by a loving Australian couple, Sue and John, who take him in and shower him with all the love in the world. A brush with jalebis brings to the surface lost memories and Saroo embarks on a journey to retrace his steps to his birthplace.

Dev Patel plays the older Saroo in search of his home through a harrowing journey spanning multiple hours on Google Maps and a complex maze of memories. The cinematography looks into the wandering eyes of Saroo and the roads and images he follows home. The camera pans from the blurry images on the screen to the vivid and sometimes hazy memories that Saroo retains from his childhood. The pacing of the movie takes the audience along with Saroo as he navigates the vastness of the world to find an identity. The audience doesn’t realize the destination that they’re hurtling towards, only a building tension and desperation that haunts Saroo and transforms him into a person that is looking for a place to belong. Adult Saroo’s haunting eyes and his need for a home are paralleled with the child Saroo’s survival through the streets of Kolkata. The audience is sharply and constantly reminded of the tough landscape that Saroo had to survive.

Dev Patel brilliantly plays the mature and more sensitive role of Adult Saroo. However, this would be groundless without the child actor, Sunny Pawar, whose big eyes contain the world and hope regardless of any obstacle that may come his way. Young Saroo sees everything and understands all that is happening. His sensitivity and empathy toward other people alert his survival instincts when to act and when to run away. The steadfast and sturdy nature of this young boy is both devastating and heartening to witness. This direction lets the movie unfold without the extreme melodrama of a child being tortured by his surroundings. Garth Davis weaves a rich tapestry of the determination of a young man in finding his home and finding a place in this wide, wide world to call home. 

In the search for his birth mother and the existence of an adoptive mother, Saroo is now torn with the guilt of turning his back on his adoptive parents who gave him a future and raised him with so much love and adoration. The movie expertly grapples with the theme of adoption and ethnicity, along with the estrangement Sue, played beautifully by Nicole Kidman, feels with her son, Saroo. The delicate balance between adoption and parenthood unfolds over the course of the story. Saroo talks with his mother about how he feels having to adopt two kids deprived her of raising her own kids, the “blank slates” they would have been, instead, she was burdened with two strange kids with even stranger pasts. Sue’s confession about why she adopted Saroo and Mantosh would leave a shaking imprint on the viewer’s heart with the sheer spirituality of it. The act of adoption transcends the mere need for children and enters the realm of understanding and a human need to break away from abusive parenthood. The mere words, “we chose to have you,” shakes the entire foundation of the adoption industry. The act of adoption accompanied not by a need to adopt one because of a lack of choice, but by choice, by free will, provides new insight into the world of parenthood. 

After the reconciliation with his parents, Saroo sets out for India, for the home he unknowingly left behind. The audience holds their breath at this point, as this is the moment the movie was building towards. Saroo is sceptical about whether he will be able to meet his family again or not. By some motherly instinct, Saroo’s mother stayed in that area for all these years. The reunion is as much a tear-jerker as it can be. This is short-lived as he is told that the brother he was dreaming about meeting no longer exists in the world. However, the simple act of embracing his mother and telling her that he is alive and well is a cathartic process that Saroo needed in his life. Saroo, now finally at peace with his inner child, calls his mother, Sue, on the phone to tell her that all is well. The knowledge that her son was safe all these years is enough for Shekila and that brings closure to an entire age of turmoil. The movie ends with real footage from the real Saroo Brierley as it is shown to the audience that he brought both of his mothers together in a subversive act of reclaiming his past and future.

The title is apt to the story and journey of Saroo. In a maze of survival and finding a home, Saroo doesn’t even know his name properly but emulates it perfectly. Sheru, it turns out, is the name of this child with lion-like perseverance and bravery. The story comes full circle and ends on a note of pure joy and healing.

The only undercurrent that the director failed to explore properly is the character of Lucy, Saroo’s unconditionally supportive girlfriend, played by the actor Rooney Mara. The actor’s potential doesn’t get explored much as she is relegated to the role of a girlfriend who listens and understands her boyfriend perfectly. Saroo might not have been able to traverse this rocky terrain by himself, but it doesn’t get translated properly enough into gratitude towards Lucy.

Lion won the Oscars and awards along with the hearts of the audience with its striking portrayal of what it means to belong, and the central theme of identity, parenthood, adoption, and cultural heritage.

– Shreya Singla

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A RAW AND POWERFUL JOURNEY OF IDENTITY

Lion Is Inspirational Storytelling Done Right

Garth Davis’s debut film adapts the true-life story of Saroo Brierley, who reconnected with his Indian birth family through Google Earth.

The bizarre, true story of Saroo Brierley’s life—an odyssey from India to Australia and back—feels totemic, like something an ancient poet might sing of. As a boy, Brierley was torn from his family through a series of unfortunate coincidences and taken into a new and loving home, only to, decades later, chart his way back to a place he’d basically forgotten. But Brierley’s story is also a distinctly modern epic: a hero’s journey where Google Earth is a magical pathfinder, a tale of family that seriously explores how adoption can muddle notions of racial identity.

In adapting Brierley’s life for the new film Lion , the director Garth Davis wisely avoids adding dramatic embellishments to a narrative whose premise already sounds like awards-season material. But Brierley’s separation from his birth family, and his journey home, is almost too extraordinary to be fiction. Davis manages to keep hold of that authenticity throughout the movie, grounding its most absurd twists and turns with texture and detail, and never succumbing to the gauzy sentimentality that can pervade “human interest” yarns. Lion isn’t an especially innovative movie , but as a piece of inspirational storytelling, it’s a standout.

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The film’s first (and best) act, which follows Brierley’s journey from India to Australia as a 5-year-old boy, is equal parts mesmerizing and terrifying. On an excursion with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) from his small town to a nearby rail station, Saroo (the adorable Sunny Pawar) gets separated from him and climbs onto a train car by mistake. The train, and Saroo, is then taken almost a thousand miles across the country to Kolkata, where he doesn’t speak the local language and begins to walk the streets with other lost children. When he tells authorities the name of his hometown, he receives baffled shrugs. Eventually, he’s taken to an orphanage and flown to Tasmania, Australia, where a well-meaning couple (played by David Wenham and Nicole Kidman) raises him in relative comfort.

Davis, who collaborated with Jane Campion on the wonderful BBC miniseries Top of the Lake , doesn’t frame Saroo as a statistic (India has more than 30 million orphans , a vast majority of them girls). The film repeatedly cuts back to Saroo’s memories of his mother and brother, including vague, dreamlike bird’s-eye photography of his hometown. Davis wants the viewer to understand the profundity of the images lodged in Saroo’s brain, even as he gets older and the recollections grow fuzzier. The unusual, accidental circumstances of his “abandonment” help keep his hope alive. As Saroo later tells his friends, he’s a lost boy, rather than a rejected one.

As a grown-up, Saroo (played now by Dev Patel) is handsome, if brooding, and his Indian roots have been all but erased by an adolescence with the Brierleys. He has a brother, also adopted from India, who never adjusted as well to his new home and wears that trauma openly. Saroo is much more good-natured, but the cracks in his self-image start to show; when he meets a group of Indian students in college, he can’t relate to them culturally, though when they serve him jalebi , a sweet snack he remembers from his childhood, he freezes in painful recognition.

It’s not easy to dramatize the loss of cultural identity, but Davis and Patel succeed (with the help of Luke Davies’ script) by rendering Saroo’s internal conflict with subtlety. In the slower mid-section of the film, Saroo doesn’t take his frustrations out on the people around him, nor does he actively vocalize his confusion. Overall, he’s happy with his life while knowing that there’s a giant piece of the puzzle missing.  Saroo’s girlfriend (Lucy, played by Rooney Mara, who does her best with an underwritten role) eventually encourages him to seek out his birth family, and he uses Google Earth to try and track down the town he’s from, though the name he remembers appears on no map.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Lion builds to an emotional conclusion; Brierley’s story, which he recounted in his autobiography A Long Way Home , received the Oscar-fodder treatment for a reason. It’s toward the end where Davis leans hardest on the “inspirational drama” tropes, but they’re well-earned by solid performances and the director’s attention to nuance. The film’s finale might feel a tad familiar, but Lion is ultimately an excellent example of its type—a resonant true story told, not with manipulative cliches, but with refreshing confidence.

A Long Way From Home in The Film Lion

In the film Lion, it is an unimaginable true story brought to life, and is an affecting yet nevertheless life-affirming human drama about a young Indian boy who finds himself thousands of miles from home. Separated from his family for more than twenty five years, the boy eventually attempts to find his way back home to his birth mother. This essay will talk about the hardships Saroo went through as a child and a young adult which prevented him from moving on from the past, issues such as mental health, young adulthood, and cultural conflict.

The film sheds light on the issues around adoption and the motivations of parents who adopt children from different countries and cultures to their own. Saroo’s relationship with his brother becomes increasingly strained because of not knowing what became of Guddu. Aware that Saroo’s life would be very different if he hadn’t been adopted, his memories won’t let you forget that it was simply an unthinkable event that cruelly drew them apart. Torn between two families in two different countries, landscape becomes a defining motif in Saroo’s struggle to understand who he really is. Beautiful buildings and lovely landscape shots of the Australian countryside are compared to the rugged and broken plains of India that Saroo travelled across. As he had moved from two completely different countries, india had a very traditional culture whereas australia does not emphasis traditional culture as much which created a huge disconnect between saroo determining his true cultural identity. An example is when Saroo was art friendly gathering, he saw a bowl of jalebis which triggered a past memory of him in india. The memory was him and his brother Guddu at the shop and Saroo at that time had caught the attention of a jalebi and asked his brother to buy one. When he would come across cultural food, it would bring him back memories of the times he was in india with his family. Things like these had made him feel very confused and detached as both the cultures of each country were on two very different ends of the spectrum .

Saroo had experienced early adulthood at the age of 5, experiencing such scenarios changes the way a child functions. His whole childhood was stripped away as he was given adult responsibilities which were going out and helping his mother and older brother with work. By picking up rocks every single day, that was the only source of income without it there would be no home or food on the table when there already is rarely any food and no functioning house. In the movie its shown how saroo has been given a very large amount of responsibilities to him considering his age. One being is his self care, it’s shown in the movie how he goes out with his brother to get food and the risk of getting lost or even kidnapped is very high. An example is after saroo gets lost and is trying countless times to find a place to sleep, he comes across a group of children sleeping on cardboards where and has the opportunity to get a friend and a cardboard from them to sleep on. Later that night a handful of children were abducted by older men, as saroo got up he ran as fast as he could hoping he could get away from them.

This shows how saroo was out in the night without no parental supervision and could have had came across even worse situations, and he has nobody’s help but his own. Another example from the film is, a young lady finds him on the street and takes him home. Not knowing what this stranger is capable of, saroo put his trust into her because she gave him a nice warm bath, food and other needed essentials. Not knowing what she had planned for him, a random individual shows up and saroo is told by the young woman that he’s going to help him find his home back. But as saroo caught on that he had a bad eye for him, he manages to escape from the woman running away again. As shown in these examples, saroo was given very huge responsibilities he cannot keep up with at his age.

According to various reports, about 450 million people are affected by mental, neurological and behavioural problems in their lives and among these 873,000 people die of suicide every year with mental illnesses common to all countries and people with mental disorders usually suffer from social isolation, poor quality of life. As shown in the movie saroo has all of these experiences. His living status is very poor, he has no bed to sleep on, no food, and no way of having a good hygiene. As we progress in the movie we gain knowledge that saroo was adopted by a couple that lived in australia. As saroo got older he was in a good school, had a roof over his head and was progressing in life. A friendly get- together changed his mind about his past, countlessly saroo started to have thoughts about his past and how his mother and brother had probably gone sick looking for him and not knowing where he was or if he was alive. Saroo started to have flashbacks on what had happened in his past, how he would go to the store with his brother or how he would help his mother pick rocks, these memories prevented him from moving on.

This caused him having the experience of stigma. He started to blame himself for what had happened even though he was not capable of anything at the time he had parted from his family. He started to also isolate himself from his family and his lover as he separated himself from his love because of the stress he started to experience, which was because of his family back in india. He felt as if he was way too privileged and got the chance of having a better life, while his family was still in india struggling to have a meal. He started to keep secrets about what he was doing from his foster home parents, which was that he was trying to locate his home back in india and try to reconnect with his family. As these examples are straight from the movie it is shown that saroo experienced a great amount of mental hardship as he had became an adult because of his past.

Lion is a real story told with a fascinating truth and is an important story with a huge heart that provokes basic questions around identity, happiness and cultural heritage. As the movie progresses into the end, we gain knowledge about the hardships and see everything in a very different perspective about what not only Saroo went through but millions of children go through everyday without having the chance to create a better life for themselves. Saroo eventually finds his real birth mother and later on connects not only himself but his foster family with her as well, which made a huge impact on his life as well as his mothers.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the lion king.

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It may be a long time before viewers can appreciate the 2019 remake of "The Lion King" as a freestanding work, instead of judging it against the original. The 1994 version was "Hamlet" plus "Bambi" on the African veldt: a childhood-shaping, Oscar-winning blockbuster, the second-highest grossing feature film of its calendar year, one of the last great hand-drawn Disney animated features (Pixar's original " Toy Story " came out 18 months later), and a tear-producing machine. This remake was controversial long before it opened, mainly because it seemed to take the Walt Disney company's new branding strategy—remaking beloved animated films as CGI-dependent "live action" spectaculars—to its most drastic conclusion. It serves up the same story with different actors, different arrangements of beloved songs and soundtrack cues, a couple of original tunes, a few fresh scenes and sequences, and, of course, photorealistic animals. The latter are the movie's main selling point, so believable that one of my kids remarked afterward that sitting through the film was like watching a nature documentary on mute while the soundtrack to original "The Lion King" played in the background.

But here's the thing: the movie is helmed by a Disney veteran, actor-director Jon Favreau , who's great at this kind of thing. And this might be his best-directed film, if you judge purely in terms of how the scenes and sequences have been framed, lit, and cut together. The cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel , who shot some of the greatest live-action animal adventures in movie history, including " The Black Stallion ," and this production straightforwardly owns the notion of "realness," modeling its animals on actual creatures, defining character more through body type and ingenious details of movement than through facial expressions, which might've looked kinda creepy here, honestly. (The animals are a little bit creepy at times, though not as creepy as in Andy Serkis' "Mowgli," where you sometimes felt as if you were watching top secret footage of gene-spliced animal-humans.) 

Favreau broke into filmmaking with such hip indie comedies as " Swingers " and " Made ," then improbably transformed himself into a junior version of Steven Spielberg or James Cameron , overseeing the biggest of big-budget properties, including the first two " Iron Man " films and Disney's recent hyper-real remake of " The Jungle Book ." This may be his most daunting challenge yet, or at least his most provocative if you cherish the source material. The very idea of presuming to remake Disney's most financially successful late-period animated film with the latest in computer-generated imagery, while continually reminding people of the original by recycling the same story and music (and many of the same iconic shots and locations, including the lions' distinctively shaped Pride Rock), is as close as Hollywood gets to courting charges of blasphemy. 

Visually, the original was 88 minutes' worth of stylized paintings in motion, like a child's storybook come to life, but with expressionistic or psychedelic elements (like the freaky green highlights in the "Be Prepared" sequence, and the stylized hellfire and skewed camera angles during the end battle) that tickled the sensibilities of film-buff parents. In contrast, this new "Lion King" is rooted deeply in the real, from its plain, sometimes drab colors to the animals' intricately rendered bone structures, muscles, and fur. Even when the characters are singing the familiar songs and repeating the familiar lines (or, in one hilarious and oddly postmodern interlude, quoting another Disney movie) the entire crew is working double-overtime to convince you that these creatures exist, that they shed fur and drop scat on the jungle floor. 

Favreau and Deschanel's camera (or "camera"—this is a digital movie built from ones and zeros) follows closely behind the animals as they gallop through grasslands, scale cliffs and hills, tumble and wrestle and fight, and romp through water and rain. It's as as if they were real animals with intelligence and agency who allowed camera crews to follow them rather than eating them. (Disney always released animal documentaries in addition to their animated and live-action features, and this one sometimes feels like a very basic one from the 1950s, where an editor would cut to an unremarkable close-up of a bear panting in the summer heat, and the narrator would tell you it was sad because it missed its mom.)

It's impossible to deny that this movie represents a technical milestone. We've seen digitized versions of real animals before (perhaps most strikingly in the recent "Planet of the Apes" movies, and in Favreau's "Jungle Book") but they're presented so matter-of-factly by Favreau that if they didn't talk and sing, and if you squinted just a bit, you'd never know they weren't the real deal. And the filmmaking itself adds credibility. The "camera" (again, there is no camera, just CGI) seems to have weight. When it "flies" over "Africa," you'd swear it had been attached to an actual helicopter. When the elder lion king, Mufasa ( James Earl Jones, the only actor from the original reprising his part), scales the walls of a canyon to rescue his son  from rampaging wildebeests unleashed by his evil brother Scar ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ), it's clear that the filmmakers have put a lot of thought into how a 400-pound alpha predator would do such a thing, whereas the original was content with "the lion climbs up the rock."

Of course there's something to be said for sticking to "the lion climbs up the rock" rather than proving you that know how to answer the question "How does a 400-pound lion climb up a rock?" The Dad Joke answer is, "Any way he wants to," but animators need more direction than that. It's easy to make a case that lions and hyenas and baboons and hornbills and antelopes drawn with ink and paint, with an eye towards the simple yet daring gesture rather than Nature Channel texture, register as more emotionally "real" than things that might be mistaken for photos, especially when they're doing vaudeville wordplay and delivering sad monologues and singing songs by Elton John and Tim Rice . 

But that doesn't fly, not anymore, because the movie industry has conditioned audiences to think that "reality" and "believability" are the greatest of all creative virtues, and that the live-action blockbuster is the classiest, most respectful way to tell a story. That's why visually daring animated films like " Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse " only make a fraction of the box office haul of more literal-minded live-action Marvel movies. And it's why almost every spectacle-driven live action (or "live action") blockbuster, from Marvel and DC to the " Star Wars " franchise and the American Godzilla films, and the Transformers, and even Pixar, are obsessed with making sure that countertops and pavement and glass and hair and skin and fur and fire and water look photographically real, and that everything moves believably even you're watching wisecracking toys or combat droids or city-destroying kaiju. To quote a friend, if you follow this creative impulse too slavishly, it's like using a magic wand to make a toaster . 

Where you fall on this stuff is anyone's guess, if you care about it at all. You might not, and that's OK. But it should be said that even if you're not obsessed with cinema minutia, this film is still a fascinating aesthetic experiment, less reminiscent of Favreau's previous photorealistic Disney animal picture, "The Jungle Book," than of Gus van Sant's 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock 's "Psycho," a curiosity that wasn't quite shot-for-shot but got eerily close. Watching this new "Lion King" reminded me of seeing the "Psycho" remake in a theater and hearing people scream their heads off at the film's jump scares, even though they were near-exact reproductions of things Hitchcock had done 28 years earlier, with the same music, but in color instead of black and white, and with different actors. 

Who deserves credit for inspiring that powerful emotional reaction in 1998? Alfred Hitchcock, for making "Psycho" in the first place? Or Gus van Sant, for realizing that the master's work was so fully realized that if he copied it as closely as possible, audiences would still scream in the same places 38 years later? If you retain as much of an original work as possible while reimagining it, is it a gesture of respect or timidity? Is the result a thought experiment, or just an easy way ("easy" in terms of imagination, not effort) to make lots of money by creating a slightly different version of a thing people already know they like? Maybe films like the new "Lion King" take the phrase "give the people what they want" absolutely literally, and that's the whole (cynical?) point of their existence. But is slavish fidelity to an old text really what "the people" want? Or is it possible—to paraphrase a different showbiz maxim that's equally true—"the people" don't actually know what they want until someone shows it to them?

There are parts of the new "Lion King" where that second maxim comes into play, and it's beguiling, sometimes glorious. Like many "live action" Disney remakes of animated movies, this one is much longer than the original, and yet (like Favreau's "Jungle Book," still the best entry in this photorealistic remake series) it uses the extra length to make a statement, creating a sense of stillness. This might sound odd in a review of a CGI-driven 2019 Disney movie, but Favreau often appears to be trying to create a mid-twentieth-century motion picture made with the shiniest new tech—the kind of movie that took its time and gave viewers a bit of mental breathing space, permitting them to contemplate what they were seeing as they saw it.

There are times when the movie clears out music and dialogue and just lets you hear natural sounds and watch lions, giraffes, elephants, birds, rodents, and insects move through the frame. This movie uses the motif of "light" more subtly than the original, because it's striving to look "real" rather than stylized, and the result is a great example of how CGI animation can achieve a different kind of poetic effect that's different from the kind that old-fashioned cel animators might attempt. 

When Mufasa tells young Simba that his domain is "everything the light touches," the scene is illuminated by a golden, dawn-like glow, and when they have what proves to be their final conversation before Mufasa's death (that's not a spoiler, folks—"Hamlet" is 400 years old) the sunlight ebbs and gives way to darkness, and the sky fills with stars, foreshadowing Mufasa taking his place among the ghosts of kings and queens up above. A sequence two-thirds of the way through takes a brief transitional bit from the original—Rafiki the baboon realizing that Simba is still alive by catching his scent in the wind—and builds a lengthy, chain-reaction sequence around it, with a tuft of Simba's fur traveling, like the " Forrest Gump " feather, from the Eden-like jungle where he's exiled himself to the pridelands. 

And while the photorealism of the animals snuffs out any possibility of subtle "human" facial expressions, the creatures' bodies provide more characterization detail than you might expect. Especially impressive is the way Scar's physique contrasts with Mufasa's. The former is angular and raw, a Mick Jagger or David Bowie sort of body that lopes and limps, while the latter is a magnificent bruiser like Dave Bautista or Dwayne Johnson , so thick and powerful that when he moves, you can imagine the air parting around him. When Scar licks his paw and grooms himself absentmindedly as his brother pontificates, the gesture comes across as decadent and contemptuous even though it looks like something a real lion would do. That's filmmaking magic of a different kind than was contained in the source, and it's not necessarily lesser. 

What distinguishes all these choices is that they aren't blatantly trying to re-create or pay homage to something that viewers loved in an original work, in order to comfort us and press our nostalgia buttons. That means they can stand on their own two paws, making unflattering comparison harder. When the movie is doing its own thing, you don't think about whether Donald Glover's performance as the adult Simba is better or worse or merely different from Matthew Broderick's Simba (he's different—more internalized and shell-shocked), or whether Beyonce gives a better acting performance as Nala than Moira Kelly (she doesn't, except when she sings), or whether Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen are a funnier meerkat-warthog duo than Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella (call it a tie, and ties go to actors with Broadway-caliber singing voices). The movie is never less interesting than when it's trying to be the original "Lion King," and never more compelling than when it's carving out negative space within a very familiar property and strutting to the beat of its own, new music. 

The worst thing you can say about this movie, and perhaps the highest compliment you can pay it, is to say it would be even more dazzling if it told a different story with different animals and the same technology and style—and maybe without songs, because you don't necessarily need them when you have images that sing. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Lion King (2019)

Rated PG for sequences of violence and peril, and some thematic elements.

118 minutes

Donald Glover as Simba (voice)

Beyoncé Knowles as Nala (voice)

James Earl Jones as Mufasa (voice)

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar (voice)

Alfre Woodard as Sarabi (voice)

John Oliver as Zazu (voice)

John Kani as Rafiki (voice)

Seth Rogen as Pumbaa (voice)

Billy Eichner as Timon (voice)

Eric André as Azizi (voice)

Florence Kasumba as Shenzi (voice)

Keegan Michael Key as Kamari (voice)

JD McCrary as Young Simba (voice)

Shahadi Wright Joseph as Young Nala (voice)

Amy Sedaris as (voice)

• Jon Favreau
• Jeff Nathanson

Writer (story)

• Brenda Chapman

Writer (characters)

• Irene Mecchi
• Jonathan Roberts
• Linda Woolverton

Cinematographer

• Caleb Deschanel
• Mark Livolsi
• Hans Zimmer

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Animation — The Lion King: Symbolism and Themes in a Timeless Classic

The Lion King: Symbolism and Themes in a Timeless Classic

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Published: Mar 8, 2024

Words: 731 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The circle of life, identity and self-discovery, family and community.

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Lion (2016 Film)

By garth davis, director's influence on lion (2016 film).

Lion is director Garth Davis ' first feature film, and brought him widespread attention. Adapted from a book called A Long Way Home , Lion sensitively explores the themes of identity, alienation, hardship, love, and perseverance. Before directing the film, Davis had directed a short and some episodes of the acclaimed miniseries Top of the Lake.

Filming took place in 2015, first in Calcutta, and then in Melbourne, Australia, and Tasmania. Davis first got involved with the project after reading an article about Saroo Brierley 's experience. In an interview with Deadline , Davis said, "Because it’s a true story, I felt that I had to get as much real life exposure as possible. The first thing I did, and this is even before we had a writer, I went to India by myself. Actually at the time, I tied in with 60 Minutes , who were going over. They took the adopted mother to meet the birth mother. I was actually in the village during that moment, which is extraordinary because I got to meet everybody in a very deep emotional space, so that was really interesting, and I learned a lot from that. The way I work is I like to immerse myself in the world of the film and in the character’s lives, and then from that, I get a lot of ideas of how the film could be made, how it could be told. I suppose the thing that I absorbed was the way village people unite—this sense of togetherness and family and culture was very strong. The landscape was very strong. The textures and the colors, I thought, was a very big part of home for Saroo. I really absorbed that, and just watching the kids of today playing in the dam as Saroo did, I got a lot from that."

Reviews of the film were positive, and although Davis did not receive any award nominations for his work on the film, many critics praised his sensitivity as a filmmaker. In her review of the film for The AV Club , Esther Zuckerman wrote, "Davis deftly conveys the desolation of Saroo’s situation without wallowing in it, and Pawar gives a terrific performance...Davis, throughout this part of the film, plays with the idea of smallness. The opening finds the camera panning over a series of landscapes, finally revealing a tiny figure running. It’s a nod to the technology that will be a factor later in the movie, but also to the vastness of the world around Saroo."

Lion (2016 Film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Lion (2016 Film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does the director use a range of techniques to develop empathy for certain characters in the movie

Although I liked the movie, this is only a short answer space. Check this out:

https://variety.com/2016/artisans/production/lion-cinematographer-1201935242/

Saroo is the protagonist of the story. He vanishes from his village after getting separated from his brother at a train station. Living by his wits, Saroo is able to stay out of harm's way, and eventually gets adopted and moves to Tasmania, where...

What is it like for Saroo to live in the orphanage?

The orphanage is a difficult place to live. They cut Saroo's hair and show him a bed in a giant room filled with beds. He worries that he will never leave, and witnesses mistreatment of the children by the adults in charge. One boy, who clearly...

Study Guide for Lion (2016 Film)

Lion (2016 Film) study guide contains a biography of director Garth Davis, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Lion (2016 Film)
• Lion (2016 Film) Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Lion (2016 Film)

Lion (2016 Film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Lion (2016 Film), directed by Garth Davis.

• How Loss Is Presented in Garth Davis' Lion and Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo

Wikipedia Entries for Lion (2016 Film)

• Introduction