The Lion King was released into the
IMAX 70mm, 15 perf theatrical film format on December 25, 2002. This movie lent well to this process, since it was produced entirely on the
Disney CAPS (
Computer Animation Production System), which stores all the line drawing in
vector format.
This allows all the art to scale cleanly up to whatever size the producers want. A bit of cleanup was necessary, especially on characters that are farther away in certain scenes, so the audience can make out their faces on the huge IMAX screen. Some changes were also made to the scene were Mufasa's ghost appears; he looks a lot more ghost-like in the revised scene. The famous dust cloud which many fans thought they could see the word "SEX" in was also changed to quench that rumor.
Other changes included a remixed soundtrack and some additional orchestration in certain scenes.