Originally posted by O2Destroyer@Sep 27 2005, 07:04 AM
I really feel like the similarities in lion king were more of a nod to kimba than a rip off. Just as much as Tezuka was doing nearly non-stop homages to Disney at one point in his career. Although people may be justified in wanting to criticize Disney, this is a case of the fans either not being too familiar with Kimba, or just wanting to jump on the bandwagon. Honestly, once you get past the similar characters, there isn't really too much there.
Perhaps the original intent was just that, a nod to Tezuka. However, in light of the flat-out denials that the Disney people had even heard of KTWL, much less been influenced by the series, I must conclude that they did rip-off Tezuka. It is a matter of borrowing material but failing to cite the sources from which it was borrowed. There are cases of unintentional plagiarism, such as writers using ideas from memory, but failing to remember that they got those ideas from someone else's work, but these cases are still classified as plagiarism.
Everytime I took a history class in college, I was required to complete a plagiarism awareness exercise, & I had it drilled into me half a dozen times. moreover, I was also required to submit my term papers to a third-party organization that would do a textual comparision between them and other term papers to see if any more than a few consecutive words matched. I became fearful not only of accidentally ommitting a citation, but that my original work would use three or four words that some other work already used.

But now that is in the past, & I have recovered from the anxiety.
I suspect that some personnel changes might have occurred on the team that worked on the Lion King, or perhaps within the top management at the Disney company that made it, because I read something about Eisner himself or some other high-ranking person saying something about making their own version of KTWL.
