The Internet will not let stuff die, and this was proven once again when conversations around The Lion King turned into a revisiting of the Japanese anime Kimba the White Lion.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kimba was an animated series that aired in the 1960s and it was based on the 1950 manga Jungle Emperor created by Osamu Tezuka.
Now Tezuka wasn’t just some low-level employee who did storyboards for a B-level animation studio. Tezuka, who died in 1989, is literally considered the father of manga (Japanese comics) and some have even christened him the Walt Disney of Japan (well, him and another animation great, Hayao Miyazaki).
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So when The Lion King came out in 1994 claiming to be an original story, certain folks couldn’t help but notice similarities between the Disney flick and Kimba. Although Kimba has more themes dealing with animals and human interactions, both Kimba and The Lion King are coming-of-age stories focused on an African lion cub whose father was killed in the first act.
Even if Kimba had different storylines, the series had similar characters to The Lion King, including a villain with a Black mane and a scar-like eye and a bird who served as the voice of reason to the lion cub. Check out more similarities for yourself below.
I meeeean….
Both animations are very similar-like.
Disney representatives have repeatedly said that they didn’t rip Kimba off to make The Lion King and at one point, the co-director for 1994’s The Lion King, Rob Minkoff told the Times:
“Frankly, I’m not familiar with [the TV series]. I know for a fact that [Kimba] has never been discussed as long as I’ve been on the project.”
A screenwriter on The Lion King, Linda Woolverton added, “This is the first I’ve heard of Kimba or Tezuka. I never heard anything or saw anything about his work.”
Welp, that’s that, right?
Nope. Hit the flip for incidents that followed that’ll have you questioning whether The Lion King might have taken more than enough inspiration from Kimba.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Matthew Broderick — the voice actor for older Simba in 1994 Lion King — once told the Austin American-Statesman that when he was casted as Simba, he “thought [they] meant Kimba, who was a white lion on TV when I was a little kid. So I kept telling everyone I was going to play Kimba.”
Eesh.
According to THR, the co-director of The Lion King, Roger Allers, lived in Tokyo for two years in the 1980s. Kimba‘s creator Tezuka was still alive and the series would have aired on TV often.
You think Allers was taking in some Saturday morning cartoons with Kimba?
When Kimba first began airing in 1965, it was actually commissioned by NBC, since the network already had a relationship with Tezuka. The show premiered in the U.S. on September 11, 1966 and it aired in syndication throughout the ’70s and ’80s. The Lion King animators were definitely around during this time.
At one point, a well-known Japanese animator, Machiko Satonaka, sent an open letter to Disney, accompanied by a petition signed by 82 other artists and hundreds of Tezuka fans. They simply asked that Disney recognize Tezuka’s impact:
“To Japanese, Mr. Tezuka’s works are a national legacy. Therefore, the respect and admiration we Japanese felt for Disney Co. is severely diminished. It is not possible to explain the damage inflicted upon our love of this aspect of Japanese culture.” Satonaka ends her letter by requesting “a few lines paying respect to the origin of the story” be featured in the beginning of The Lion King.
Disney didn’t oblige, however, and a lot of the public didn’t support Satonaka’s cause because according to Yasue Kuwahara, who wrote a 1997 essay on the debate, “As much as Tezuka is considered important, the Japanese love Disney. They recognized Lion King was a copy of Jungle Emperor, but it was OK with them.”
Even Takayuki Matsutani, the president of Tezuka Productions, said that despite similarities between Disney’s work and Tezuka’s, “Lion King is absolutely different from Jungle Emperor and is Disney’s original work. If Disney took hints from the Jungle Emperor, our founder, the late Osamu Tezuka, would be very pleased by it.”
I meeean…okay.
There’s even been paraphernalia aimed at Disney, accusing them of taking from Kimba. At one point, another big name in the Japanese anime world, Toshio Okada, came on TV in 1997 and showed off a shirt reading “The Lying King” with a picture of Kimba looking at a mirror of Simba. Below, Kimba is quoted as saying, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who created me after all.”
Dang.
This definitely stirs up the debate around intellectual property, what’s copied vs. what’s inspired by, etc.
What do you think of the Kimba/Lion King controversy? Worthy of outrage, or do the greats inspire the greats? Let us know in the comments!
