Can You Feel the Dub Tonight?
Unlike the tourists pushing strollers and browsing bedazzled “Frozen” T-shirts at the midtown Disney Store on a recent morning, the activist and voice actor Fernando Valencia and the filmmaker Augusto Zegarra were on a pilgrimage, riding up a preposterously long escalator to the second floor with a sense of expectation and anxiety. “It’s like entering the Death Star,” Zegarra said, referencing “Star Wars,” a piece of very lucrative intellectual property that Disney did not create but that it does now own. “You feel like the cashier might introduce you to Mickey himself, and we could make our pitch.”
Valencia, handsome and slight, with a black ponytail and an embroidered fedora, was a bit more nuanced. “My relationship with Disney has changed every day since I was a little boy,” he said. “But I can’t help but see it as that impossible giant.”
The pitch they’d make, to Mickey Mouse or to anyone else in the Disney organization who might listen, is fairly simple: Valencia and Zegarra were in town to screen “Runa Simi”—a new documentary about Valencia’s years-long quest to dub Disney’s movie “The Lion King” into Quechua, an Indigenous language spoken by more than three million people in Peru’s highlands. Zegarra, burly, with a friendly smile partially obscured by a mustache, is the documentary’s director. And although showing the documentary in New York was exciting, what Valencia and Zegarra really wanted was to release it in Peru. The film—or, rather, the films, both the Quechua-dubbed “Lion King” and the documentary—is a love letter to a language, and to the culture woven into and defined by that language. (All told, there are some ten million Quechua speakers across the Andes, from northern Chile to southern Colombia, making it the most widely spoken Indigenous language of the Americas.)
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
The documentary chronicles Valencia’s stubborn attempts to get permission from the Disney corporation for his “Lion King” project. He e-mails, he calls, he D.M.s, but he never hears back from the company. “Runa Simi” uses very little copyrighted material, but Peru has more rigid rules regarding fair use than does the U.S. So far, Zegarra told me, no commercial distributor has been willing to risk showing “Runa Simi” in Peruvian theatres without written permission from Disney. It’s all very meta: a documentary about the unauthorized translation of a film, both caught in a legal limbo. When “Runa Simi” screened at the Lima Film Festival last year, it won the Audience Award. Zegarra has made the most celebrated Peruvian documentary in decades. Still, only a handful of Peruvians have been able to see it. (Disney declined to comment.)
The two collaborators last visited New York in June, 2025, for the Tribeca Festival, when Zegarra won the award for Best New Documentary Director. After attending a screening of “Runa Simi,” an audience member was so moved that he gave Valencia tickets to see “The Lion King” on Broadway with his teen-age son, Dylan, who voices Simba in the Quechua version. (There are no lions in the Andes—or kings, for that matter—so the title is one of the relatively few phrases that remain untranslated.) When the curtain went up, Valencia spent the first several minutes overcome by emotion, glassy-eyed and weeping. “Every language has a spiritual meaning,” he said. “And the characters had different personalities for me because I’d translated them.” Watching the musical, he felt as if he knew the lines by heart. “In my head, I was hearing it in Quechua.”
Released in 1994, the original “Lion King” was the highest-grossing film of the year, and the highest-grossing animated film in history until “Finding Nemo” broke that record, in 2003. But, more than three decades later, “The Lion King” doesn’t take up much real estate in the Disney Store: besides plush toys of Simba and Nala, there’s hardly any trace of it. So, why did Valencia tackle “The Lion King”? He saw it in 1995, when he was six years old, on a small black-and-white television at home in Cuzco. “It was the first movie I saw all the way to the end,” he said.
This was more than Zegarra had managed. He, too, was six years old when he saw the film, at a theatre in Lima; he cried so much that he was dragged out halfway through. “My version of ‘The Lion King’ ends with Mufasa dying,” he said.
Valencia believes that the way to preserve a language is to get kids to speak it. “Entertainment is a right,” he said. “Quechua saved my life. It gave me purpose.” Just then, the strains of a familiar song wafted across the store, and Valencia and Zegarra followed it, past a Lightning McQueen replica, to a tiny area where a half-dozen child-size chairs were arranged before a screen. The song was “Hakuna Matata,” sung by Timon, Pumbaa, and a young Simba. The scene happened to be the first clip that Valencia had translated and dubbed a decade ago, when his quixotic project had begun. “The Lion King” has been dubbed into more than forty languages, most of which keep the song’s Swahili title. For the unauthorized Quechua version, Valencia took the liberty of changing it: “Hakuna Matata” became “Hakuchu Munayta,” which means, roughly, “Let’s walk together in beauty.” As the chorus played, and as the cartoon characters bounced along the screen, he sang along, in Quechua. ♦