The claim that The Lion King (1994) plagiarized Jungle Emperor Leo, coupled with many westerners being unfamiliar with the actual content of the latter franchise, has led to a lot of misinformation about the series being more similar to The Lion King than it actually is. Whereas in reality, any similarities beyond parts of the basic premise and some very surface-level visual and character tropes generally don't actually exist; one might as well claim that Futurama is very much like The Jetsons because both are cartoons about a redheaded man in a futuristic setting and the comedic misadventures he gets involved in.
(Some of these claims might also stem from conflation with a similar fight over Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where the Japanese side did come out and say they felt Disney had ripped them off.)
- Easily the most egregious of all misconceptions is the notion that Kimba the White Lion was a single 1965 feature movie instead of a 52-episode anime, to say nothing of the franchise it spawned. Some of the original anime's episodes were incorporated into an amalgamation movie but it never got dubbed, and needless to say, it bore little resemblance to the plot of TLK, as the 1965 anime itself was very episodic in nature and sometimes featured Random Events Plots.
- Some people claim that Disney was originally in talks with Tezuka Productions to make an adaptation of Jungle Emperor Leo, but after Osamu Tezuka’s death in 1989, Disney continued the production after removing any explicit ties to the franchise, leading to the creation of The Lion King. There is no source whatsoever verifying this claim and by all accounts, it's a fabricated story that got blown out of proportion. Alternatively, some claim that the 1997 movie was first conceived in the late '80s but went through production troubles following Tezuka’s death for nearly a decade, and Disney caught wind of it and beat it to the punch with their own King of Beasts movie. Once more, there is zero verifiable evidence to suggest the 1997 movie entered production prior to the release of The Lion King, let alone during the late '80s, and the production of the 1989 series, which Tezuka greenlit just before his death, seemingly wasn’t affected by his passing.
- When Adam of YourMovieSucks.org looked into the latter claim, the closest thing he could find to evidence was an Anime Works DVD of the film from 2003 dating a trailer for the movie as being from 1987 during its copyright screen. However, not only does no other trailer on this DVD use this method of copyright dating, no other DVD release that Adam could find used this copyright date. As best as he could tell, this was nothing more than a typo.
- The name "Simba" is often thought to be "Kimba" with one letter changed. In fact, it's the reverse. "Simba" is actually the Swahili word for lion, and has been a Stock Animal Name for lions both real and fictional as far back as the 1920s. This has been such a common lion name for such a long time that the English localizers were originally considering making Leo's dub name Simba, but decided against it because they feared the name would be too generic for them to claim as their intellectual property.
- The claim that Simba and Kimba’s respective character journeys are “too similar”, when they are actually polar opposites of each other. Kimba was born on a ship after his pregnant mother got captured by humans and his father shot dead, swam back to shore after the ship sank (with his mom dying too), spent his early life being Raised by Humans, and then returned to his home and became a humble and responsible ruler while still a cub (albeit making mistakes along the way and learning life lessons), while Simba knew both of his parents as a cub and started off as a cocky and somewhat self-entitled kid who then went into self-exile after being led to think that he caused his father’s death, spent his formative years as a slacker, and only returned to the Pridelands as an adult after being convinced to finally face his past. And in the 1966 anime at least, adult Kimba (or Leo) became more standoffish and prone to violence (even venturing into Abusive Parent territory at times), while Simba became humbler and more laidback as an adult.
- You’ll frequently see images and clips of Kimba or his father standing and/or roaring atop a cliff or rocky overhang, which gets compared to Simba and Mufasa standing atop Pride Rock, leading many to assume that there is a Pride Rock equivalent in Kimba, but there isn’t one in any iteration of the franchise. What you’re actually seeing is the lion characters standing on random, miscellaneous rock formations, usually as their introduction or as the final shot of an episode, and these are common tropes that aren't unique to either of these franchises.
- Claw is commonly claimed by some sources to be Kimba's Evil Uncle and the Big Bad of the series in order to compare him to Scar. In truth, Claw has no mentioned biological relationship to Kimba, and only appears in a few episodes. Moreover, his personality is very different from Scar's, being a temperamental and brutish figure rather than suave and playfully sarcastic like Scar is. Claw is also only an antagonist during Kimba’s early years and completely disappears by the time the latter reaches adulthood in every continuity where he appears, whether that be the manga, the 1966 anime, or the 1997 movie.
- Pumbaa is often said to have been inspired by a Kimba character named Gargoyle G. Warthog. But Gargoyle isn't the happy-go-lucky comic relief character Pumbaa is, he's a very angsty and insecure guy who has a character arc about discovering his own self-worth. On an additional note, Gargoyle is not nearly as important a character as Pumbaa, only appearing in a single episode of the 1965 anime.
- Pauly Cracker is often compared to Zazu since both are birds, and thus many assume Pauly to be a royal majordomo with a similar uptight personality. In fact, Pauly is just a friend of Kimba's who doesn't have any such position in the court, and has a Hair-Trigger Temper in contrast to Zazu's timid, loyal, and polite personality. Alternatively, Pauly may be compared to Timon, specifically in regard to his dynamic with Bucky mirroring Timon and Pumbaa’s. But again, besides being the smaller and more domineering one of the duo, Pauly’s standoffish and temperamental personality hardly matches Timon’s, who is a laidback wisecracker and smartass, and like Zazu, is hardly the feisty type.
- Many sources mention both series having a wise baboon/mandrill as characters. However, Dan'l Baboon is not an eccentric witch doctor like Rafiki is, and is more of a stereotypical Grumpy Old Man who is often a victim of slapstick and isn't always portrayed in the right. Furthermore, their dynamics with the respective lion protagonists are entirely different, as Dan’l served as a Honorary Uncle and sometimes even a Parental Substitute to Kimba during the latter’s formative years, while Rafiki only presented the newborn Simba to the animals but was otherwise absent from Simba’s life until the latter was an adult, with the older Simba having no idea who Rafiki is upon being properly introduced to him.
- Some have claimed that an Animal Stampede was a key event in Kimba’s life, akin to the wildebeest stampede Scar and the hyenas orchestrated in order to kill Mufasa and Simba. But while a stampede did occur in the 1965 anime, it was not part of some villain’s plan to try and kill the hero, it was just a migrating herd of antelope, and it was not a pivotal moment in Kimba’s life either, but rather the conflict of a single episode and it was largely Played for Laughs.
- You’ll frequently see comparison shots with The Lion King that show Kimba hanging from a cliff while a villainous lion looms over him, usually taken from the 1965 and 1966 anime. However, none of these lions are Claw, but rather miscellaneous one-shot antagonists (and one of them is a lioness), and furthermore, cliff-related battles were not only a dime a dozen throughout the lengthy Kimba franchise, but all of them were little more than random, inconsequential conflicts that had no lasting impact on Kimba’s character, in sharp contrast to Scar pushing Mufasa off a cliff and then trying to do the same with adult Simba, both of which are pivotal story beats in the movie.
- One can find many videos
comparing shots from Kimba to shots from The Lion King. What these videos generally don't say is that many of the Kimba shots are from a movie released in 1997, three years after The Lion King came out, and were made exclusively for the movie and have no counterpart in any earlier Kimba-related content. If anything, they're evidence that that particular iteration of the franchise was deliberately aping TLK, rather than the other way around. The shots that did predate 1994 are generally cherry-picked from more than 3,000 minutes' worth of footage, often not only implicitly given more importance than they ever were in the source material but also edited together in misleading ways to make it look like they happened in sequences mirroring events in TLK. As Adam Johnston of YourMovieSucks.org fame has pointed out, one could very easily make the same arguments about Kimba being superficially similar to properties that have predated it. - A panel from the manga with a very leonine cloud is often cited as similar to the ghost of Mufasa that appears to Simba. But this isn't the ghost of Kimba's father note , nor was it the inspiration for the dead Mufasa appearing before Simba — that came from Hamlet.
- For what it's worth, Tezuka's son Makoto thinks that the comparisons are overblown and notes that he and his father's studio never seriously considered litigation against Disney. Makoto observes that Western and Japanese animation regularly borrow from each other (noting that Kimba itself was heavily inspired by Disney's Bambi) and he wouldn't be surprised if The Lion King drew some inspiration from his father's work, but that's hardly the same as plagiarism.
