Roger Allers
Roger Allers is a writer, born 1949.
Allers worked in animation as a storyboard artist and story man long before he directed, and that background explains a lot about The Lion King. He co-directed it in 1994, and it remains the highest-grossing traditionally animated film ever made. He also wrote the Broadway adaptation, which is the rarer achievement: turning a film built on drawings into something that works with actors, puppets and a live audience.
He stayed with story rather than spectacle after leaving Disney. Open Season in 2006 was Sony Pictures Animation's first feature, a broad talking-animal comedy that did its job. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet in 2014 was the personal one: an anthology adaptation of a book of poetry, which is a fundamentally uncommercial idea and the film he clearly cared about most.
He was also a familiar face in animation documentaries, appearing as himself in Waking Sleeping Beauty, The Sweatbox and Howard, all of them about Disney animation and the people inside it. He voiced a laughing hyena, uncredited, in The Lion King. He was born in 1949 and died in 2026.
Movies (8)
Where to start with Roger Allers
The Lion King is unavoidable and correct: it is the film that defines him, and rewatching it with the storyboard artist in mind makes the staging much more interesting than the nostalgia does.
After that, go to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, which is the one nobody saw and the one that shows what he wanted to do with the form. It is uneven, since it moves between separate poems in separate styles, and the good passages are genuinely beautiful.
Open Season is the commercial job, fine for children and unremarkable otherwise. For context on the era that produced him, Waking Sleeping Beauty and The Sweatbox are the two documentaries about Disney animation's boom and its aftermath, and he appears in both.