So some of you may have heard before of a controversy involving the Lion King and its ripping off of Kimba the White Lion, by Osamu Tezuka. Now for my part, I was never sure about what was going on with this as I had zero context of Kimba's content but my tentative opinion based on what I had seen was that The Lion King may have ripped off visuals from Kimba but that the actual story was not. But recently an extensive video going into very VERY deep detail on what the content of Kimba actually is has come out.
And I can't help but feel like laughing maniacally over this. Repeat a lie enough and people will believe it. In this age of the internet, with so much information at our finger tips, we STILL can't be bothered to do anything but parrot what we've heard someone else say, even if it's all vague.
Edit: As has been requested, I am going to put a summary of the video here.
First, the main through line of what is trying to be done with this video is how just because something looks similar to something else, doesn't mean that someone plagiarized someone else. Just because something is similar when reduced to its based components doesn't mean it that they are not very different in execution. The main strength of this video is not a single smoking gun example but a constant stream of fact after fact after fact. That there is so much evidence that proves that Lion King is only similar to Kimba at its most basic level that is makes it baffling and somewhat horrifying that it took this long for a major personality to show this.(I say this because SHINOBI-03 actually also made a video pointing out some of these facts but it is poorer quality and never got much attention)
The shots that people use as comparisons of plagiarism are edited to remove all context from the scenes that show them to have nothing in common with scenes from Lion King. Lots of the most similar looking shots come from a movie made AFTER 'The Lion King' came out, meaning that the people who made that movie are much more likely ripping off Lion King.
Characters are compared between each other as if they are 1 to 1 the same when they aren't. Kimba has a parrot friend, Poly who is like a Scrappy Doo character that always wants to fight people yet because he's friends with a larger, less intelligent animal, this makes Timon a complete rip off of him. At the same time Zazu is also somehow a rip off of him despite their only similarities being that they are birds. These kinds of comparisons have been made of lots of characters from the entire history of the Kimba IP and are cherry picked from, as YMS says, over 3000 minutes of Kimba content.
A main talking point throughout the video is about how it's essentially impossible for The Lion King to have NOT had images and characters similar to Kimba since they both take place on the same continent and involve animals found on that continent. Kimba is also a very episodic series with very little, if any, continuity being carried from one episode to the next, it is nothing like the overarching plot of The Lion King and by virtue of being episodic the stories and characters in it are incredibly varied which makes it even harder for anything with the same setting and basic premise to NOT somehow look similar.
There have been official books that have talked about this as if this controversy is true despite it very clearly being not when some actual research is done. Not even Tezuka's son believes it and he's on record saying he's appalled by how his father's work has been turned into a weapon for people to use to attack a corporation, a corporation that you don't need lies to point out the bad things it does.
Near the end of the video he even shows many MANY panels from a comic about a lion named Simba from before even Kimba was made that is just as easy to make comparisons with as if Kimba ripped it off. That's how easy it is for something like this to happen.
This is the biggest pie in the face I've ever seen over something like this. The way so many people bought into this and made videos speaking this controversy as truth while NEVER actually watching the series they were defending is awful. This is the age of the internet, non of this information was being held secret or anything, just how lazy ARE we as a species that it took this long to debunk this?
And I can't help but feel like laughing maniacally over this. Repeat a lie enough and people will believe it. In this age of the internet, with so much information at our finger tips, we STILL can't be bothered to do anything but parrot what we've heard someone else say, even if it's all vague.
Edit: As has been requested, I am going to put a summary of the video here.
First, the main through line of what is trying to be done with this video is how just because something looks similar to something else, doesn't mean that someone plagiarized someone else. Just because something is similar when reduced to its based components doesn't mean it that they are not very different in execution. The main strength of this video is not a single smoking gun example but a constant stream of fact after fact after fact. That there is so much evidence that proves that Lion King is only similar to Kimba at its most basic level that is makes it baffling and somewhat horrifying that it took this long for a major personality to show this.(I say this because SHINOBI-03 actually also made a video pointing out some of these facts but it is poorer quality and never got much attention)
The shots that people use as comparisons of plagiarism are edited to remove all context from the scenes that show them to have nothing in common with scenes from Lion King. Lots of the most similar looking shots come from a movie made AFTER 'The Lion King' came out, meaning that the people who made that movie are much more likely ripping off Lion King.
Characters are compared between each other as if they are 1 to 1 the same when they aren't. Kimba has a parrot friend, Poly who is like a Scrappy Doo character that always wants to fight people yet because he's friends with a larger, less intelligent animal, this makes Timon a complete rip off of him. At the same time Zazu is also somehow a rip off of him despite their only similarities being that they are birds. These kinds of comparisons have been made of lots of characters from the entire history of the Kimba IP and are cherry picked from, as YMS says, over 3000 minutes of Kimba content.
A main talking point throughout the video is about how it's essentially impossible for The Lion King to have NOT had images and characters similar to Kimba since they both take place on the same continent and involve animals found on that continent. Kimba is also a very episodic series with very little, if any, continuity being carried from one episode to the next, it is nothing like the overarching plot of The Lion King and by virtue of being episodic the stories and characters in it are incredibly varied which makes it even harder for anything with the same setting and basic premise to NOT somehow look similar.
There have been official books that have talked about this as if this controversy is true despite it very clearly being not when some actual research is done. Not even Tezuka's son believes it and he's on record saying he's appalled by how his father's work has been turned into a weapon for people to use to attack a corporation, a corporation that you don't need lies to point out the bad things it does.
Near the end of the video he even shows many MANY panels from a comic about a lion named Simba from before even Kimba was made that is just as easy to make comparisons with as if Kimba ripped it off. That's how easy it is for something like this to happen.
This is the biggest pie in the face I've ever seen over something like this. The way so many people bought into this and made videos speaking this controversy as truth while NEVER actually watching the series they were defending is awful. This is the age of the internet, non of this information was being held secret or anything, just how lazy ARE we as a species that it took this long to debunk this?
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