Disney’s blockbuster film “The Lion King” has aroused a roar of protest from those who say the record-breaking animation feature borrows substantially from a Japanese comic created 40 years ago.
Disney has promoted the film as its first cartoon feature since 1970 not taken from an existing story, but there are striking similarities to a tale that began as a Japanese comic book in the 1950s called “Jungle Emperor” and was in a Japanese TV series in America in 1966 called “Kimba, the White Lion.”
Claims of unacknowledged borrowing are common in the film world, but this dispute is particularly significant because the creator of the Japanese story is a animation pioneer, the late Osamu Tezuka, whom American journalists sometimes call “the Walt Disney of Japan.”
Both Disney and Tezuka’s animations center on lions in Africa. In both, a father lion is the king and is killed early, leaving a young son. The son returns after an exile and struggles with himself over his responsibility to become the new king. In both stories, the son overthrows an evil lion who has usurped the throne.
In both, the good lions are aided by a wise old baboon and a talkative bird, while the evil lions are aided by henchmen hyenas. The hero in the American TV adaptation of Tezuka’s story was called Kimba. In Disney, he is Simba. The evil Japanese lion has one eye and was called Claw. The evil Disney lion is called Scar and has a scar over one eye.
Even some images-the promotional shot of a lion on a jutting rock or the outline of a dead father lion in the clouds talking to his son-are common to both.
And although the stories differ in major respects-humans play key roles in Tezuka’s saga, for example, and the plots diverge -the parallels are close enough that many people familiar with the Japanese story are “up in arms,” said Trish Ledoux, editor of San Francisco-based Animerica, a magazine on Japanese animation.
“I was horrified,” said Toren Smith, owner of San Francisco’s Studio Proteus, which licenses American versions of Japanese comics. “It looks awfully fishy.”
“I’ve received calls every day from people all over the country who are outraged by this,” said Robin Leyden, a former animator in Canoga Park who wrote a history of the “Kimba” TV series.
The co-director of “The Lion King,” Rob Minkoff, said he was unaware of Tezuka’s story during production. “What’s amazing to me is that it didn’t get brought up,” he said, adding that he could not rule out the possibility that it was discussed before he joined the 4-year-old project in April 1992. The basic story line and many characters were already developed when he joined, he said.
Takayuki Matsutani, president of Tezuka Productions in Tokyo, noted the similarities and said they have been much discussed.
“If Disney took hints from `The Jungle Emperor,’ our founder, the late Osamu Tezuka, would be very pleased by it,” he said.