Did Disney steal 'The Lion King' from something written decades earlier?

A side-by-side character comparison of Disney's The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion from Alli Kat's YouTube channel (Alli MacKay)

The release of the new version of The Lion King is reigniting a debate over whether the classic Disney story was copied from a Japanese manga series created decades earlier.

In a trending Twitter moment, side-by-side comparisons of The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion, a Japanese manga from the 1960s created by Osamu Tezuka, played out with startling similarities.

Tezuka, who also created the iconic series Astro Boy, passed away in 1989 and was regarded one of Japan’s most beloved and well-known artists.

Kimba the White Lion was based off of Tezuka’s earlier 1950 manga, Jungle Emperor. It was first played for U.S. audiences in 1966, and continued to be shown through to the 80’s according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The basic stories of both The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion share similar tenets. Both are set as ‘coming-of-age’ parables centered around young lion cubs, both of whom lose their father.

While Kimba the White Lion focuses on man’s encroachment on nature, and therefore includes human characters, The Lion King is an all-animal cast and is set around an internal power struggle within the ruling pride of lions.

However, fans of Kimba the White Lion were quick to point out the similarities in characters, concept art and scenes between the two films, going as far to allege that Disney lifted their designs directly from Tezuka’s work, which predates The Lion King by decades.

A lot of the anger directed at Disney online has to do with their insistence that The Lion King was their studio’s first “fully original” story, from inception to its 1994 release.

It’s not the first time that The Lion King has been criticized for “stealing.”

Madhavi Sunder, a law professor at Georgetown Law and an intellectual property specialist, wrote about The Lion King controversy in her 2012 book ‘From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice.’

Sunder touches on the lawsuit brought forward by the family of Solomon Linda, the South African musician who composed the hit ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,’ and “received virtually nothing” until a journalist from Rolling Stone uncovered the truth in 2000 and exposed “the sordid history of exploitation of Lindas’s copyright.”

She goes on to describe the so-called ‘Kimba versus Simba’ debate, calling the similarities “abundant,” with one of her major points being a comparison of the characters.

“Nearly every animal character in Kimba the White Lion has an analogue in the Lion King,” Sunder writes. “In both versions a baboon serves as an old sage, the henchmen for the evil lion are hyenas, and the hero lion’s adviser is a parrot.”

Sunder goes on to compare the major plot points of both The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion, which seem to mirror one another to an uncomfortable degree, and ends her list saying “most importantly, there are several scenes of nearly identical cinematic and artistic expression in the films.”

Sunder points out that fans of Tezuka were “outraged” after Disney “denied lifting any of the plot of characters” from Tezuka’s work, “but went even further, claiming not to have even heard of Tezuka or Kimba the White Lion.”

A Los Angeles Times article published in 1994 quotes a producer, Fred Ladd, from the Kimba the White Lion TV series saying “when one sees the film, it’s inevitable that one should be reminded of similar material in the TV series of 30 years ago.”

The article goes on to compare and admit several differences between the two productions, including a message from then-president of Tezuka Productions, Takayuki Matsutani, saying “our company’s general opinion is ‘The Lion King’…is an original work,” but only after admitting that there were similarities.

Alli MacKay, a 24-year-old film editor living in Vancouver, is the creator behind the YouTube channel Alli Kat whose two videos researching “The Kimba vs Simba Controversy” both have more than one million views.

In an email to CTVNews.ca, MacKay says they saw Kimba the White Lion on TV in the early 2000s and after assuming it was a “ripoff of The Lion King,” did more research to “learn about Kimba’s history, and the fact that it was created 44 years before The Lion King.”

“I really take issue with the monopoly Disney currently has on popular media,” MacKay said. “I think the Kimba/Lion King topic deserves more publicity, if only to draw people’s attention to Kimba.”

Scouring academic essays and newspaper archives, MacKay painstakingly curated the information they found in their video ‘The “Original Story” – The Kimba VS Simba Controversy’ to showcase what they called the “shocking number of parallels” between the two productions.

The second video, ‘Kimba& The Lion King – How Similar Are They?’ goes one step further, and sets up the two animations side by side for the audience to decide for themselves what side of the argument they fall on.

“Reactions to the videos have definitely been polarized,” MacKay said. “There has been a lot of love for Kimba from people who watched it as kids, or are shocked by the uncanny similarities between the two properties.”

“I think it’s important to note that I’m not trying to take The Lion King away from people who love it, I just like drawing people’s attention to where their media comes from,” MacKay said.

Disney has continuously and strenuously denied any and all allegations of plagiarism.