on the song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight". Impressed by Weaver's performance as a young Michael Jackson in the miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream, songwriters Elton John and Tim Rice recruited him to record "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" and "Hakuna Matata" while the film was still in its early stages of production. Weaver's vocal tracks were well-liked by Allers and Minkoff that they offered Weaver the speaking role, but later learned Jonathan Taylor Thomas had already accepted the part. As directors, Allers and Minkoff worked closely with the actors in order to ensure credible performances. As frequently done in animated films, the filmmakers videotaped the actors while they recorded their dialogue, allowing the animators to incorporate their specific mannerisms into the designs of their characters. Personality and design When The Lion King was green-lit, its concept and story were not well received by studio employees. To guarantee the release of at least one successful film, Katzenberg divided the studio into two separate projects: The Lion King and Pocahontas (1995), the latter of which was expected to be the more successful film. Because of this assumption, the majority of the studio's more seasoned animators gravitated towards Pocahontas, while less experienced animators were assigned to work on The Lion King, which was deemed a "risk". Co-director Rob Minkoff received this positively, saying that this decision "gave a lot of newer animators a chance to step up to leadership roles." The role of animating Simba was divided between Ruben A. Aquino and Mark Henn, the former of whom was the first animator to be assigned to the project. While Henn served as the supervising animator of Simba as a cub, credited as young Simba, Aquino was placed in charge of animating the character as he appears as an adult. The Lion King was Disney's first animated feature film to feature absolutely no humans since Robin Hood (1973). According to Aquino, animating four-legged creatures is difficult because the artists are faced with the task of drawing "twice as many legs ... as you do with human characters" and must also attribute to them both human and animal-like qualities. For assistance, Aquino drew influence from previous animated films that feature four-legged creatures as their main characters, citing Bambi, Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Jungle Book (1967) as his main sources of inspiration. Before The Lion King, Henn's experience