While waxing nostalgic over our favorite cartoons from the 60s and 70s with some friends, we suddenly realized that Disney’s The Lion King bears a striking resemblance in plot and cast to the Japanese-made 60s TV series Kimba the White Lion (of which we can all remember every word of the theme song, by the way).
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Well, it wasn’t a cheap rip-off–have you been to a first-run movie lately? You also missed a few other parallels: (7) name similarity: Kimba/Simba (duh); (8) evil Japanese lion, Claw, with one eye versus evil Disney lion, Scar, with scar over one eye; (9) little lion looks up to see the ghost of his father in the clouds; (10) heroic pose of lion on jutting rock. Item number 10 is particularly striking–see www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/tanaka/ Tezuka_Disney/Tezuka_Disney.html.
A coincidence here and there I could see. But ten? When The Lion King came out in 1994, a lot of people concluded that Disney, so zealous in defending its own intellectual property that it once demanded removal of Mickey and Minnie Mouse images from a day-care center, might have appropriated someone else’s.
But Tom, I said, making an animated film is a collaborative process. You throw out ideas, dredge up dimly recalled stuff from your youth–and how many animated productions about lions have there been? It’d be only natural to lift an idea from Kimba and not remember where you’d seen it. What’s more, none of the younger animators had seen the Japanese show, so there’d be no one at the table saying, No, can’t do that, been done. One source quoted by the Chronicle, in fact, said Tezuka’s influence may have been “subliminal.”
