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
“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.
