'The Lion King' Taught Us About Death Before We Were Ready — elle.com

In a surprising turn of time magic, today marks the 20th anniversary of the wide release of The Lion King—the highest-grossing hand-drawn film of all time. Also, according to me, the saddest. Though I have been accused of having a particularly impressive memories of all the damaging things that happened to me as a child—being terrified of my own shadow, having my front teeth slammered out of my mouth, getting straight-up rejected at my own Bat Mitzvah—nothing was quite as scarring as the first couple of times I was confronted with the fragility of life and death. When I cast my mind back to when I first registered this big picture injustice, I often recall two things: 1) my grandma Lucy, a former magazine journalist, who went prematurely blind and had to stop writing; 2) Simba pawing his way across Mufasa's glorious head, refusing to believe that his heroic dad just died in front of his eyes.

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