THE LION KING (Walt Disney animation. Directed by Roger Allers, Bob Minkoff. With the voices of Jeremy Irons, Mathew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Rowan Atkinson, Cheech Marin)

A bunch of talking and singing animals, including a hippy lion, a flatulent wart hog and a wisecracking meerkat, struggle against the rise of fascism on the African planes. Or something like that.

First things first: my kids loved this film, and I guess it is their verdict that really counts. They laughed and they cried, and they have been singing all the songs at home, just like I did with the Jungle Book. There is a particularly catchy number that hails the praises of being a complete layabout (It’s a problem-free philosophy) to which they know all the words, a ‘Bare Necessities’ for a new generation. For all Disney’s attempts to ensure that the moral of the story is typically righteous – the young lion king forsaking the good life to go back and fight for his throne – I suspect the young slackers I took along would rather dwell on the idea that life’s a ball in the jungle (as long as you’re at the top of the food chain).

But do we care what moral they take from a cartoon, as long as they have a good time? The Lion King has come roaring out of America, already a massive blockbuster success, bigger even than Aladdin, but it has also trailed its own controversies. It has been accused of being racist, reactionary, sexist and homophobic by critics who, let’s face it, have been paid to go and analyse a cartoon that normally they would have to be dragged into by their kids. I mean, Mickey Mouse never had to put up with this kind of thing. Did anyone ever take him to task for his chauvinistic relationship with Minnie? And what about that mean-spirited, tight-fisted, acerbic duck, Donald? What kind of role model was he?

These days Disney films are subjected to the kind of critical analysis normally reserved for obscure foreign art movies. But it is hard to feel sympathy for the cartoon corporation, since the critics generally appear to have put a great deal more thought into their product than its creators. Part of the problem with The Lion King stems from the fact that it is the first time Disney have made a feature length cartoon based on an original story, and not adapted from a children’s classic, a myth or a fairy tale. The result, a kind of sexually reversed Bambi, in which a cute lion’s father is killed and many things happen before junior returns full grown to his Kingdom, is an ill conceived tale filled with contradiction, populated by clichéd animal characters, and constructed around a highly dubious political system.

For one thing, the animators appear to know less about wildlife than the average ecologically aware child, concentrating on the archetypal lion when, in fact, it is the lioness who is the great hunter. The female characters are so marginalised in this tale that accusations of sexism are unavoidable – in the absence of a strong male, the lionesses abjectly cave in to the demands of a week, camply effeminate, machiavellian male (hence the accusations of homophobia) and his pack of nasty, goose-stepping hyenas (who, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin, come over as stupid ghetto blacks and South Americans, hence the accusations of racism). All is lost until the manly king comes back to reinstate the status quo, where everybody knows their place and no one steps above it. Now that’s the kind of lesson we want our kids to learn, eh?

But of course, all of this will go right over the heads of those for whom the film is marketed. Instead they will get off on the dazzling, colourful animation, well paced mix of comedy and drama and damned catchy songs, which is probably just as it should be. But, where Beauty and the Beast was an imaginative and even soulful retelling of a classic tale, and Aladdin a witty pop take on another, The Lion King is an instant myth, which, for all its loud trumpeting about the circle of life (lion eats antelope, lion dies and its bones decay into the earth, fertilising the grass that feeds the antelope or some such pseudo-ecological tosh) is about as tasty and filling as a fast food burger.