Costume designer Marina Toybina has pulled off one of the biggest jobs of her career – putting together the costumes for Disney’s “The Lion King” 30th anniversary celebration at the Hollywood Bowl.
The live concert was recorded in May 2024 and is now streaming on Disney+.
Back in 2024, Toybina invited Variety into her Glendale studio a week before showtime. There’s a calmness in the air. Animal prints and fabric are all over the place as cutters and assistants sit at their stations, zeroed in on their tasks. “I haven’t tapped into my principals yet…that’ll start on Friday,” Toybina says. If she’s feeling pressure, she doesn’t exude it.
One has to wonder, how will she do it? Can she do it? SPOILER ALERT! Yes, she does pull it off effortlessly.
Elephant heads were 3D-printed.
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Toybina, whose credits include “The Masked Singer” and “Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration,” is no stranger to working under pressure, and enjoys a challenging project. Disney’s 30th anniversary of “The Lion King” was an immersive concert experience celebrating the franchise’s evolution from the 1994 animated film to the Tony Award-winning musical, and the 2019 and 2024 live-action films. Among the cast are alumni of the original animated film Jeremy Irons and Nathan Lane (who voiced Scar and Pumbaa); Billy Eichner (Timon in the 2019 remake), Jennifer Hudson, Heather Headley and North West. The project is one of Toybina’s largest to date, with 10 principal cast members and 30 dancers.
Before landing the job, Toybina reveals she had seen every iteration of “The Lion King” franchise, including the episodic TV series. But since this would be onstage, one of the first things she did was work with the Broadway team. “I wanted the principals to pop against the background projections and not overstep what had been laid out in the Broadway production,” she says. “We had a call to make sure we were aligned and there was a clear distinction between Broadway and what I was doing, which was not mimicking them and supporting it with my designs.”
In addition to that, Toybina spent hours looking at photos as part of her research. “From zebra ears to giraffe tails, to all the colors of the animals, right down to rhino horns, we zoomed in on it all,” Toybina laughs.
Costume designer Marina Toybina with a giraffe head. She spent hours looking at giraffe photos for research.
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Toybina paid extra attention to being culturally accurate when designing tribal prints. She explains, “It’s South African tribal. We needed to have the right colors and jewelry and make sure there were no crossovers, that we weren’t pulling from others.”
In approaching the actual costumes, Toybina’s process was to break it down by characters. Toybina created a style deck and mood board for Hudson, which was then presented to her stylist and team. With West, who appears as Young Simba that were then handed to their respective stylists and teams. “Vision-wise, I know what the whole show looks like.” West, who sings the young Simba song, “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” Toybina says, “I spent time on the board to make sure it’s her aesthetic and vibe.”
Once she had that, it was about picking fabrics, prints and colors. She also had to take into consideration any quick changes. “I have three hyenas. They wear masks for a while, and they go backstage, throw on capes and become wildebeests,” she explains.
Rhinos, zebras and elephants are among the Pride Land creatures she was tasked with bringing to life through costume. Toybina used bodysuits as a base for many of the designs and added elements on top, whether it was airbrushing stencils or hand-painting details onto them. “Everything is lightweight and danceable. It has the durability to be a performance piece,” she says, making sure each outfit was comfortable for the dancers to move in.
Many of the animal costumes started with bodysuits.
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Not everything was custom-made — Toybina notes that some items were based on store-bought materials – “At one point, we were at Joann’s and I was buying weave baskets to cut out.” Those baskets eventually became part of the elephants’ troupe.
Tribal jewelry and adornments for the costumes.
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Having risen to the challenge of designing costumes for both “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” live, Toybina has one more item on her bucket list: to design costumes for a live-action Disney movie. Your move, Disney.