Lion King (1994) explaining the importance of stylized 2D animation: Lion King (2019) and Cats (2019):
Kimba The White Lion (1965) explaining the importance of an original idea:
Lion King (1994) Lion King (2019) Cats (2019)
Shakespeare (1564) explaining the importance of an original idea:
Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):
Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1160 – c. 1220) explaining the importance of understanding that all creative work is inherently derivative once you study the oral tradition of storytelling and history and that’s okay because generations have always reformatted tropes and themes to make them relatable to their current audiences
Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):
Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1160 – c. 1220) , Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):
Just a heads up, the video in question is 2.5 hours long but totally worth it.
HOWEVER if you want a tl;dr
Simba is named Simba because it’s Swahili for lion. Kimba is named Kimba because they thought “Simba” would be too hard to trademark and would be too generic.
Kimba the White Lion is a manga that was adapted into multiple seasons/versions + several movies. As both TLK and Kimba take place in Africa, there’s a limited “palette” of animals that either artist could pull from when making a movie about African animals. What this means is that sometimes the same animal is used in an episode of Kimba, but that doesn’t mean much due to the amount of Kimba there is + the “palette.”
For example, in both Kimba and TLK there’s a warthog. In TLK, it’s Pumba, in Kimba it’s a character that only shows up in a couple of episodes, is a child (?), is a noted coward, and has a masochism kink. No joke; an actual clip of the show has him see a monkey mom spanking her monkey baby, and asking to also be spanked.
HOWEVER if you just saw a picture of the two warthogs side by side with the note “and both series have a warthog!!” without context to the amount of weight given to the characters in each story, you could see why they’d be thought of as “similar”.
A lot of the comparisons are just like… Tropes. Like “Simba has a love interest who is also a lion. This is a rip off of Kimba” level of tropes. (Spoilers: characters having love interests is actually super common.)
Kimba on cliffs/fighting on cliffs/pride rock looking things is super common, and the video even has a multicut of several times this happens.
Kimba just carries around the corps of his dead dad, and sometimes wears him. This is not something that occurs in TLK.
Kimba contains humans, TLK does not.
Kimba…. contains very racist depictions of humans. It’s really really bad.
Kimba also has a really blatant pro-colonization stance? Kimba really wants to make the animals “civilized” (which includes everyone being vegetarian, I guess.)
“Africa is changing. The continent is coming of age. The people must say goodbye to devil’s masks and voodoo drums. That was all part of the past on the dark continent.“ <- Actual Kimba quote
Also a Kimba quote:
“Kimba, your fur is white because you come from a long line of great leaders.”
“I hope I can be like my ancestors as well as look like them.”
To be clear, I’m not saying TLK is perfect - see, the number of white voice actors for example, but like… It’s definitely a #yikes, and something to keep in mind when you see comparisons.
The alive “father” figure that you see in some of the clips is not the supposed Mufasa parallel, but rather from a sequel series where Kimba is grown up; more analogous to Simba in the sequel.
He is also an abusive father.
A lot of the more blatant comparisons between the two, when it comes to side-by-side comparisons, actual come from the movie Jungle Emperor Leo which came out in 1997, three years after TLK.
At the end, the creator of the video “compares” Kimba The White Lion to a 1940s comic called Simba: King of Beasts that “proves” using out of context imagery that Kimba is a rip off of KoB
Obviously, the actual video goes into a lot more detail; again, it’s 2.5 hours long, but if you’re not up for watching it, here’s a tl;dr?
additional tl;dr look, I’m not saying Disney is a good company, just that “TLK ripped of Kimba” is incorrect.
Getting shot while literally dismissing people’s concerns about gun violence under a tent with the words “Prove me wrong” printed on all sides is the most fucking hilarious way to die
thing is if you’re pro guns and pro gun violence you have to accept that your stance by definition means you’re also pro guns and pro gun violence potentially being inflicted on you, so. zero sympathy
It’s one rule for me and another for thee. Certain groups are happy to advocate for unrestricted gun ownership or to advocate against abortion because to them, gun violence and lack of access to healthcare is for the majority. It’s for people who aren’t them. They can be pro gun because they can reasonably expect that they’ll never be the targets, and the moment they are it’s suddenly not acceptable because that’s not how it’s supposed to work in their minds. Gun violence for thee, not for me
my dear friend just looked up from the hat she’s crocheting for a very large spherical rock we found in the river and said, in a slightly haunted tone that revealed this was the first time she was having this thought, “i should make something for my cousin’s real human baby”
This looks so much worse in retrospect too because the biggest animated movie of the summer is fucking KPop Demon Hunters, a niche story with 0 white characters that never explains anything to the audience at all. Like god. I would be so humiliated. They’re trying to blame their failures as a loss of mass appeal while Sony’s two biggest films are one about Korean pop-stars fighting demons and another about a black + latino superhero like I’m sorry Disney/Pixar idk if it’s unsustainable levels of executives meddling or bad marketing or obsession with mass appeal or what but y'all truly seem to have forgotten how to make and market a good movie and it’s wild to blame that on non-white creatives making stories based on their own cultures and histories.
Like it’s crazy the Best Animated Picture Oscar has been a thing for the last like 23 years and I can count on just my hands the amount of movies that have won that were not Disney films(only 9), that thing used to essentially belong to Disney, and they haven’t won it since 2021. The winners instead have been a Ghibli movie set in post-WWII Japan(The Boy and The Heron), a Latvian indie film made in Blender starring exclusively animals with no spoken dialog(Flow), and Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio which is set during WWI that pulled exactly 0 punches on the topic and is explicitly based on a version of Pinocchio that almost none of the intended audience was familiar with. Just. Where the hell are they getting the idea it’s niche cultural films that are the problem, they’re clearly very much not. Something at Disney is just fucking broken and until they fix it we’re just gonna get incoherent sequels no one asked for and occasional original films which get left to fucking drown by Disney’s marketing department like they’re trying to Treasure Planet their entire animation department and/or Pixar as a studio.
