The Ultimate Boon of Blogs

        In this blog, I want to talk about how the Hero’s Journey is represented in Disney’s 1994 The Lion King. I wanted to write about the Hero’s Journey and how a Disney movie adapts to this template, and when I started to think about which Disney movie to choose, I realized that almost every Disney movie I thought of follows the Hero’s Journey template at least partially, but I thought The Lion King fit the template especially well. The Lion King is about a young lion named Simba who is next in line to become king after his father Mufasa. Simba’s uncle (and villain of the story), Scar, murders Mufasa and banishes Simba. Simba then meets two new friends: Pumba and Timone. He grows up with his new friends and eventually returns home to reclaim his throne from Scar. Since there are too many steps to discuss in detail, I will be highlighting the more important steps and how these steps relate to the movie. The first step, Call to Adventure, could be placed wi...

     Victoria Lynn Schmidtt first published her version of the Heroine’s Journey surprisingly recently in 2001. I have a lot of issues with Schmidtt’s template, but one of my biggest is simply how boring it is. The heroine only experiences internal change, and there’s no opportunity for her to go on an exciting, world-saving adventure. If I had read books as a kid that followed the Heroine’s Journey, I probably would have abandoned them halfway through due to a lack of excitement, action, and interest. The Hero’s Journey has potential for high-stakes adventures, such as Luke traveling through the stars in A New Hope, Frodo saving all of Middle-earth in The Lord of The Rings, or Harry Potter saving the world by defeating Voldemort. All of these masculine heros stories’ follow the Hero’s Journey template, and their adventures are some of my favorite books/movies, but I don’t understand why a new and less interesting template needed to be created specifically for heroines, ...

George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New Hope is perhaps one of the most well known movies in American culture today, despite the fact that it was released 45 years ago. The film’s timeless nature is due in part to its adherence to the Hero’s Journey template, which is followed perfectly in the first steps of the cycle. The protagonist, Luke Skywalker, is first introduced on his home planet of Tatooine, where he is forced to spend his days as a farm boy, helping his aunt and uncle. His everyday life is dull and monotonous, which is a perfect setup for him to receive a Call to Adventure. Joseph Campbell’s first step in the process of the Hero’s Journey specifically states that the hero should start in a “mundane situation of normality,” and Lucas executes this requirement flawlessly by including scenes of Luke complaining about never doing anything interesting like his friends, and showing resentment towards the droids when he first meets them. However, soon after meeting R2D2, Luke sees Leia’s m...