General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The King and I (1999 film)

The King and I is a 1999 American animated musical film adapted from the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, released by Warner Bros. Family Entertainment on March 19, 1999 and produced by Morgan Creek Productions.¹ Directed by Richard Rich, it retells the story of the English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens, who arrives in the kingdom of Siam to teach the royal children and clashes with the stubborn King, while an evil sorcerer schemes to steal the throne.² The film was a critical and commercial failure, and the negative response led the Rodgers and Hammerstein estates to rule out further animated adaptations of their musicals.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	March 19, 1999 (wide), Warner Bros. Family Entertainment; produced by Morgan Creek Productions¹^•⁴
Director and cast	Richard Rich; voices of Miranda Richardson (Anna Leonowens), Martin Vidnovic (the King), Ian Richardson (the Kralahome), and Darrell Hammond (Master Little)²
Running time	87 minutes, rated G⁴
Box office	$12,064,440 domestic (The Numbers) or $11,993,021 (Box Office Mojo), against a $25,000,000 budget⁴^•⁵
Critical reception	13% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 23 reviews; Metascore of 29 on Metacritic²^•⁶
Soundtrack	Released March 16, 1999 by Sony Music Distribution, recorded in Toronto and London, including a medley sung by Barbra Streisand¹
Aftermath	The Rodgers and Hammerstein estates declared there would be no more animated features based on their musicals³

Spoilers

Story and adaptation

The film follows Anna Leonowens, a widowed English schoolteacher who travels to Siam in the 1800s to provide a Western education to the many children of the King.⁴^•⁷ As in the stage musical, Anna and the King clash over language, customs, and etiquette while a wary friendship grows between them.⁸

Changes from the stage show. The adaptation reworks the material substantially for a family audience. The Los Angeles Times reported before release that the film does not reprise all the songs from the original Broadway production but keeps "Getting to Know You" and has added a fire-breathing dragon to the tale.⁹ The synopsis centers a new villainous thread in which the Kralahome, the King's chief minister, is an evil sorcerer conjuring a plot to steal the throne, with the comic servant Master Little alongside him.² The Deseret News review noted that director Richard Rich, whose earlier credit was The Swan Princess, took liberties including more villains and cute animal sidekicks, all aimed at holding children's attention.⁷

The songs themselves were treated conservatively. According to a production interview with Mark Berger, the song melodies of the classic tunes are completely intact, some verses were deleted and no new ones added, and none of the lyrics were changed; all changes were made with the blessing of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, and each character received a distinctive theme drawn from the classic material.¹⁰ The soundtrack, released by Sony Music Distribution on March 16, 1999, was recorded in Toronto and London and featured "I Whistle a Happy Tune," "Hello, Young Lovers," "Getting to Know You," and other numbers from the show, along with a special medley sung by Barbra Streisand.¹

Production

The film was produced by Burbank-based Rich Animation, which used an unusual distributed workflow for its era: animation scenes were transferred between artists located in California, Europe, China, India, Korea, and Canada over the Internet.¹¹ Clean-up work was centralized at Hanho Heung-Up Studio in Seoul, Korea, to keep visual consistency across the scattered studios.¹¹ The Numbers classifies the production method as hand animation.⁴

Morgan Creek financed the picture at a time when Disney dominated the animation market and both Fox and Warner Bros. had launched their own animation studios to compete; Bomb Report characterizes the production as a comparatively cheap, TV-quality effort rather than a big-budget feature.¹² Producers were reportedly encouraged by the success of Paramount's animated The Rugrats Movie, a $25-million feature that had reaped $100 million at the box office.⁹

Release and box office

The film opened wide on March 19, 1999 in 2,352 theaters, earning $4,007,565 on its opening weekend and ranking sixth for the frame.⁴ Business fell steeply thereafter, dropping about 50 percent in the second weekend, and the run ended after eleven weekends with a domestic total of $12,064,440, all of it domestic.⁴ Box Office Mojo lists the total slightly lower, at $11,993,021, against a budget of $25,000,000.⁵ The film therefore returned well under its production cost in theaters, and The Numbers' inflation-adjusted figure for the domestic gross is $28,403,684.⁴

Critical reception

The film was panned. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 13% Tomatometer from 23 reviews and a 41% audience score from more than 10,000 ratings, with the critics consensus reading, "Charmless and shoddily animated, The King and I pales in comparison to its classic namesake in every way."² Metacritic recorded a Metascore of 29, labeled Generally Unfavorable, with 2 of 20 critic reviews positive, 9 mixed, and 9 negative.⁶

Reviewers faulted both the animation and the reworked story. The Chicago Tribune found the animation "just OK" and judged the reworked script mostly a device to pull the story to its conclusion.⁶ Roger Ebert, the longtime Chicago Sun-Times critic, gave it 2 of 4 stars, writing that it was good to hear songs including "Whistle a Happy Tune," "Hello, Young Lovers," "Getting to Know You," and "Shall We Dance," but that the movie seemed kind of stuffy and that the story was not intrinsically interesting to kids.²^•¹³ The Washington Post called it bad animated filmmaking and criticized its portrayal of the British as innately superior and their Asian wards as children in need of guidance.¹⁴ The trade papers Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both found the animation short of state-of-the-art and the reworked story misfiring.⁹

Aftermath and legacy

The failure had consequences beyond the film itself. According to IMDb, in response to the overwhelmingly negative reviews, the estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II declared that there would be no more animated features based on their musicals.³

Like the 1956 film and other adaptations of the Anna Leonowens story, the 1999 animated version was banned in Thailand, where portrayals of the monarchy deemed disrespectful are prohibited under a 1930 censorship law.¹⁵^•¹⁶ The film has since circulated on home video and streaming; it was released on video by Mill Creek Entertainment on October 6, 2020, and streams or rents on services including Prime Video and Fandango.⁴^•²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026