The first thing we're going to cover is how this particular movie treats gravity. For the most part, The Lion King keeps pace with real life gravity, but there are certain objects in certain scenes that break the rules entirely. The very first scene that comes to mind is when an older Nala confronts Simba about running away from his past, and Simba so very casually hops on a hammock made out of vines. Now, at this point in the movie, Simba is a fully-grown adult lion, which in the real world weigh somewhere in the ballpark of 500 pounds -- more than enough weight to snap a few thin vines.
"I don't know how I'm suspended up here, either!"Somewhat along the lines of this is the scene when Timon and Pumba find a young Simba near death in the middle of the desert and decide to take him home. It takes a little effort on both of their parts, but they manage to get Simba up onto Pumba's nose -- at which point they proceed to prance their way to a screen fade-out like he's not carrying several dozen pounds of lion on his face. There's even a whole musical number dedicated to trampling on the laws of gravity titled 'Hakuna Matata', where not only does a lion somehow manage to use a single vine to support himself, but the happy trio trample across what is obviously a rotted out old log several times throughout the song, and none of them are getting any smaller. This is subverted somewhat when an older Simba attempts to use the same vine to swing into the water below and it actually snaps. Of course, in each of these scenarios, gravity is altered because otherwise there'd be an abrupt sense of action, or a scene would drag on too long, or simply because regular gravity doesn't allow for such fun musical shenanigans, and our protagonist can't die simply by falling through a rotten old log.
When Simba is first born, it makes sense for him to be so very small that he fits in his mother's arms, but when transitioning to what we can assume is a late childhood stage -- he walks and talks perfectly well, and he's allowed to wander about -- he doesn't appear to have grown that much bigger at all. Sarabi is still very capable of cradling him, his father's footprints are ridiculously huge in comparison, and a hornbill is roughly the same height he is.
Then later on, we see in 'I Just Can't Wait to be King' just how small he is. Or, at least, how large giraffes are. They're much taller than any other animal in the Savannah, and are perfectly able to hold posture while a lion cub jumps on their heads, and at one point Simba uses one of their backs as a stage. In fact, these cubs are so small, they're the peak of the giant animal tower at the end of the song. If I can commend them on one thing, it's that at least they kept them consistently puny. But once again, this seemingly strange oversights make sense; because everything and everyone else is so huge, we're drawn to the things that stick out most -- that is, Simba and Nala and their freakishly small animal bodies.
The last and probably the least offensive of all the physics-defying aspects of The Lion King is the way they handle their arcs and paths of actions. They mainly come in two different flavors, the first and most prominent being pouncing. Now, real life lions can in fact leap enormous lengths -- roughly 30 feet, in fact, but the way they handle it during the stampeding scene is just this side of too much. Mufasa leaps and dives and handles himself as to be expected when one is faced with a horde of wildebeest, but even if he weren't facing those odds, it'd be impossible for him to jump straight up vertically as high as he did to be able to climb out of the valley. The way he falls is also a little suspect, because Scar really didn't do much other than push his paws off the rock, which wouldn't be enough force to propel him the way that it did. And although it was super awesome, Simba probably wouldn't flip and spin the way he did throughout the course of that entire scene. Another pouncing scene that seemed a little strange was when, at the movie's climactic battle, Simba tackled and pinned Scar with what seemed to be little to no lead-up. But besides those sort of intense battle scenes, there are those 'running away' moments, both when Simba is running through the spikes to escape the hyenas, and when he's chasing Rafiki down, where the viewer is focused in on his face and his path and instead of turning, it just seems like he's really, really dizzy and off-balance. Much like anything else, these effects are present to create drama and also because shaky-cam is really cool.
So a movie about talking animals -- several of which wouldn't even be found in this specific biome -- trashes some of the more traditional aspects of human physics. At the end of the day, we know it's not real. Flora is played up to be ultra-tough because, ultimately, these animals are mimicking human actions, and it wouldn't be very pretty to paint them sitting on rocks or stumps all the time. Lion cubs are made smaller than their real-life counterparts because that just means more fun adventures, more drama and excitement, and mostly, to connect with viewers who are just as small as them. Venturing away from real paths of action help create a sense of drama and urgency. At the end of the day, all these deviances play an important role to make The Lion King what it is -- a visually stunning piece of art.
