“I have no vested interest in defending Disney. “Believe me when I say that this Kimba/Lion King parallel is a nonstory,” Sito told me. He worked on storyboards for The Lion King but is now directing for Warner Brothers. Most animators for The Lion King are still with Disney and have to clear their comments with the head office, but I was able to reach Tom Sito, the head of the animators’ union. They haven’t budged on that story since - and I’m not just talking about Disney brass. They claimed the parallels were an inevitable result of working with similar material, and in fact the two stories are quite different in many respects. But virtually everyone involved denied Tezuka’s influence, saying the real inspirations were Bambi and Hamlet (you know, prince avenges father’s murder by evil usurper). Of eight production people for The Lion King contacted by the San Francisco Chronicle, three admitted familiarity with the series.

Disney refused, saying that the similarities were coincidental and that it had had no knowledge of Kimba. More than 1,100 Japanese manga and anime (animation) artists and fans signed a petition asking Disney to acknowledge its debt to Tezuka. When The Lion King opened in Japan, the uncredited Kimba parallels caused an uproar. The show’s 52 half-hour episodes could be seen in syndication until the late 70s and are now available on video. Originally called The Jungle Emperor, the white lion’s adventures appeared in print during the early 50s and were made into a weekly TV series that aired on NBC starting in 1966. Kimba the White Lion was the work of legendary Japanese manga (comic book) artist Tezuka Osamu, who also created Astroboy. 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. Item number 10 is particularly striking - see /hyplan/tanaka/Tezuka_Disney/Tezuka_Disney.html.Ī coincidence here and there I could see. 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.

Kimba the white lion vs lion king