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Disney: Professional Cat Burglars
By
Nadia Oxford
October 04, 2007
Early "Lion King"
© Walt Disney
Plagiarism. It's a word that makes writers and artists sink their head into their hands and inspires lawyers to flex their claws. It's most easily defined as claiming ownership to a creative work that happens to be someone else's baby. But as it so happens, few instances of plagiarism are really that easy to peg, and that goes double for manga and anime.
Last summer the manga news site ComiPress published an excellent feature about the history of manga and anime plagiarism in Japan, America and China. The article gives a lot of insight into how the creative process works differently in different countries. What we consider out-and-out theft in America is merely considered inspiration elsewhere. Of course, there are still those infuriating instances where it's crystal clear that some "author" simply said "Yoink!" and made with some heavy duty tracing.
One of the most notorious examples of plagiarism lies with Disney's The Lion King. The story of the misplaced regal named Simba may not be a direct copy of Osamu Tezuka's jungle-based Kimba the White Lion, but there are undeniable similarities. It proves, if nothing else, that they're not short on chutzpah over at the Mouse House. It also brings up a variation on an old schoolyard question: What do you do when the class bully steals your homework and tells the teacher it's his?
The Lion King was produced in 1994 when the internet was still in its infancy. The scattered anime fans who noticed something fishy about the early production art for Disney's first "original" motion picture voiced their opinion with the effectiveness of a mime slapping against a sealed glass box. Not too many people got the message.
It didn't go totally unnoticed, however. This long-running Kimba fansite contains a lot of interesting observations from the staff involved in the production of The Lion King. Animators and voice actors initially thought they had been hired to do a remake of the cartoon they "watched as kids." Early concept art clearly shows Simba as a white lion romping alongside a brown cub (Kimba's childhood friend was a brown cub named Kitty). The site even contains a particularly damning Disney chat transcript from 1993 in which a mother asks if the company plans to animate any strong female characters. Roy Disney himself responds by telling the mother to watch for "Kimba's mother" in their upcoming feature presentation.
There are also a slew of character and story similarities. These are a little harder to peg because Kimba spans episodes whereas The Lion King is one movie. Regardless, Kimba's core of close friends are strangely familiar, including a parrot and a mandrill.
Simba's steward, Zazu, has been labeled by Disney as an African eagle. Zazu isn't quite as colourful as a parrot, but at the same time he's not exactly a solemn and dignified eagle, either. Disney never ventures far from typical animal typecasting. More interesting to note is Rafiki, Disney's "baboon" shaman who is miscoloured and miscast as a mandrill--as was Kimba's wise simian companion. This might not seem like a big deal, but anyone who's old enough to recall the hype surrounding the Lion King's release might remember how Disney boasted biological accuracy. They claimed to have sent animators to the zoo and the African Savannah, so how did they miss such an easy detail?
It's pretty clear The Lion King took some measure of inspiration from Kimba the White Lion. There's even hearsay suggesting that they intended to produce a modern remake of the anime. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. Some anime fans might take great offence to Disney's tendency to lighten up dark and brooding stories with song and dance numbers, but it's also hard to deny that the Lion King is gorgeous to look at and entertaining to watch. The voices are cast perfectly and, contrary to what some critics believe, there is an important message about identity and responsibility. The Lion King might not take its young audience as seriously as an anime like Kimba (not to mention any moral lesson can be watered down with enough shameless marketing), but its well-worn "coming of age" story is still well-told.
Disney's sin isn't plagiarism so much as denial. When protests against got louder (including a country-wide protest against the film in Japan) and more evidence came to the forefront of their shenanigans, even Tezuka's family spoke up. They reportedly weren't interested in monetary compensation as much as mere credit or some indication that Disney had lifted aspects of their late patriarch's work; after all, Tezuka himself had been inspired enormously by Disney and was never shy about saying so.
Disney, not one to show a sliver of humility since the death of Walt, denied Tezuka's existence, saying it had never heard of Osamu Tezuka or Kimba the White Lion before the release of The Lion King.
Ouch!
It's an out-and-out lie, and a very bold one at that. But going back to that schoolyard bully question: What can be done? There are just enough changes to The Lion King that would save the film from being torn apart by a jury. Even so, Tezuka's wife resolved not to sue Disney because of her husband's sadly misplaced love for the company. Everyone just kind of shuffled away from the controversy and Disney went on to spew out a bunch of sequels. They already made sequels to fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White; why should they care if they mutilate and discredit the work of some dead Japanese guy?
As long as people write and draw ideas that others become jealous over (even if they're separated by oceans), this will probably continue. Disney is hardly the sole offender: As next week's column will indicate, there are plenty more.
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