i am a relly big lion king fan and was shocked to see that item in this website.
there are too many coincidences in that story, so it must be true. i mean kimba, the white lion, father (the king) gets killed by evil uncle, claw. simba, the prince, his father, mufasa the king, killed by evil uncle scar. what are the odds of that?? i think the disney people should own up!!
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Did Disney’s The Lion King rip off an old Japanese TV series? (24-Dec-1999)
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Knowing that Tom Sito (see Straight Dope article) says that Hamlet would be a more accurate story to look at for having inspired the writers of The Lion King, I am disappointed that young Simba didn’t deliver a long soliloquy on the possibility of settling for a peaceful death rather than going through all the misfortunes that await him.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it agian.
The Lion King has many similarities to Bambi.
If you watch the two films back to back it is very easy to see.
The real difference is the attitudes towards parental roles that come from the very different times the films were made.
In Bambi, the mother is the primary care giver. Father is off at work and really has no emotional attachment to his own son, or at least not one he can express very well.
Mufasa, on the other hand, is Bill Cosby.
Both films start with a gathering of the animals to view the new prince.
Both of these gatherings is sort of run by the wise animal. In Bambi it is the Owl that calls the shots, The Lion King has Rafiki.
In both films the prince loses the primary care giving parent to death while young. A quick montage later and the prince is a young man.
Bambi has two side kicks. Thumper, who is very energetic and fast talking and Flower, who makes bad smells.
Simba has Timon and Pumba.
Both films feature a sequence where the hero and his girlfriend have sex. The kids don’t get it but Can You Feel the Love Tonight and the I Bring You a Song are filled with the film language of sex.
Both films have the hero face again the cause of their parent’s death. Although Bambi does’t kill the hunters they do return, threathen his girlfriend and set the place on fire.
Both films end with another gathering of animals for the children of the hero.
Look at the rock that the great stag of the forrest stands on and then look at pride rock.
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on a similar topic, the Disney movie Aladin is very VERY similar to one of the Sinbad movies (I think it is the seventh voyage of Sinbad, but I am not totaly sure) in repect to character design and even character names. I did a total double take when I was channel surfing one day and came across the movie and saw that the actors all looked like live action versions of the movie Aladin.
So Disney didn’t come up with the Lion King. So what? Here’s a shocker for you: Disney didn’t come up with Snowwhite, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood or Pocahontas either.
Yeah they didn’t but nobody in the US with even the smallest amount of knowledge of western liturature thought they did. It sure looks like from the article that Lion King had more to do with Kimba the White Lion than Snow White has to do with the traditional Snow White story.
So? When this first started making the rounds I heard people righteously indignant that Disney didn’t come up with Lion King. My response then was “so?”, and it still is. Disney had never come up with any of their movies on their own.
There’s the slightest bit of difference between retelling a folk tale or a legend and stealing someone else’s story written a few decades ago.
Point. If Disney does in fact, when asked, claim that their story is entirely original and their own creation (and if the similarities are as great as said here; I haven’t seen the Japanese show), then yes, they’re thieving bastards.
This is just one of my pet peeves. When I started hearing this it was always the very fact that the story wasn’t an original Disney creation that was the point of the rant, and it always confused me.
While there are similarities between The Lion King and Kimba, the White Lion, I doubt very much that you could set up a decent case for plagiarism. There is too much of Hamlet in the Disney, and too much of about 69,105 other children’s stories.
However, some people have said that in the early, early days of developing The Lion King, Disney actually thought they had licensed Kimba (and occasionally said so in public), and structured some things in that general direction.
Many of these points have been rehashed many times (just FTR, I do think that The Lion King owes more than a liitle to Kimba the White Lion, right down to the name, and Disney shoulda owned up to this). It certyainly does owe something to Hamlet
What annoys me is that not one reviewer or commenter that I’ve read had acknowledged the debt to Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
Isn’t it obvious – Simba gets effectively raised by the humorous and low Falstaffian characters of Timon and Pumbaa. In fact, just as Falstaff later got his own spinoff play, Timon and Pumbaa got their own TV series, and even direct-to-video sequel (Lion King 1 1/2). The difference is that, being Disney, Timon and Pumbaa come to a better end that Shakespeare’s characters, and Simba doesn’t have to reopudiate them upon gaining the throne.
The name? Not really. Many of the names are swahili, including Simba, which means … lion.
But wouldn’t it have been cool if they had, and if Disney had followed through the idea of having a carnivore be king of a bunch of herbivores to its logical conclusion?
“Simba, now that you are king, it is not proper for you to have plant-eaters as friends. However, we do think you should invite them to the big feast tomorrow. Tell them they’re the ‘guests of honor.’”