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Did Disney's The Lion King Rip Off an Old Japanese TV Series? (1999)
- T3RMINATED 12y agoyes it did and they dont want to admit it.
- imjk 12y agoHere's some visual comparisons: http://www.kimbawlion.com/kimbawlion/rant2.htm http://www.kimbawlion.com/kimbawlion/rant2.htm
- gjkood 12y agoThank you that was amazing. I didn't think it was that close. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago> Imitation is the sincerest form of copyright infringement after all. FTFY. Also http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/ http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyrig...
- tmd83 12y agoThe drawing of Simba honestly looked nicer to me but there is really no confusion that they copied a lot. And imitation and flattery excuse might have worked until you sue to stop the original show from begin shown ... then you are no longer even a thief but a robber beating up the owner. I got the legal thing from the article so not sure if its accurate or not. And also if you don't let other do the same with your work then your own excuse don't hold anyway.
- rsynnott 12y agoWell, I assume it was far higher budget; it had better look nicer.
- laumars 12y agoIt wouldn't be so bad if Disney weren't so heavy handed in protecting their intellectual property nor so keen to lobby for the constant extension of copyright law. But the real kicker is that Disney made their fortune from leeching stories from the public domain: The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Jungle Book, etc. Which I guess answers the question about whether you can have your cake and eat it. In Disney's case, you can.
- derekp7 12y agoI think that the similarities might be a form of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. That is, there are many millions of creative works in existence throughout all time. With that many, you are bound to find multiple examples of pairs of works that have similarities, even if the creators were unaware of each others' works. Non-creative works of the same fallacy include the Lincoln/Kennedy comparison, the one book (can't remember the name) that seemed to predict the sinking of the Titanic decades earlier, and the various Nostradamus "predictions". Also see the Birthday Paradox.
- gwern 12y ago> That is, there are many millions of creative works in existence throughout all time. Yes, but creators will typically only be aware of a few thousand. And the Disney staff had indeed watched the original.
- toxican 12y agoI skimmed that article, but I like how it went from very accusatory and "how dare they!" about Disney's adaptation of the style to confessing that it's ultimately a good thing because it helps get people into Kimba and the film is a decent spiritual successor to the show.
- nothrabannosir 12y agoNot mutually exclusive. Just as good intentions can turn out badly, so can bad intentions can have good side effects.
- fluidcruft 12y agoBlurred Lines, indeed.
- sreyaNotfilc 12y agoYes...
- gjkood 12y agoI remember as a child watching Kimba the white lion. If I remember rightly it was translated from Japanese. There were some amazing Japanese Animes then as now. I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and Disney was just being sincere. With permission I am sure if it indeed was based on the original Kimba show. Kimba..Simba.. Nope can't see any coincidences there.
- yrochat 12y agoOsamu Tezuka, author of Jungle Emperor Leo, was a huge fan of Disney's work, and he was his main influence. Personally, I love to see this as a tribute rather than as plagiarism. And I'm saddened every time this story pops up, especially when it's framed like that. Just found a discussion on that topic on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/board/thread/235177489 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/board/thread/235177489 I hope that the discussion in this actual thread is not going to end like that :-)
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago> Personally, I love to see this as a tribute rather than as plagiarism. Try to create a similar tribute to Disney's intellectual property, then explain it to their lawyers. Here's what happened with deadmau5: http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/09/disney-attempts-to-block-deadmau5s-trademark-application-deadmau5-responds-with-cease-and-desist/ http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/09/disney-attempts-to-blo...
- savanaly 12y agoThat doesn't mean it was wrong for Disney to do it in the first place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- pyre 12y agoIt makes them hypocritical in a morally reprehensible way.
- ffn 12y agoYes, I agree that the anal-retentive nature that these big firms go after copyright cases is reprehensible. And also that copyright law hinders as much creativity and progress as it supposedly serves to protect (especially the dumb shit supreme court decision that computer loading data from a CD into RAM falls is copyright infringement)... But, technical point, the Joel Zimmerman thing is trademark law, and not copyright law. There is a big difference between the amount of original work and money Disney put into producing Lion King (with or without inspiration from Osamu Tezuka) and how much work it takes to draw 3 black circles in Illustrator and exporting as SVG. I mean, Lion King was based around the idea of "tell Hamlet with lions", which, as an idea, isn't even copyrightable. Combined with the original lines (in fact, even the language was different), original music, original songs, vastly different coloring, different camera angles, mostly different scenes, etc., it'd be a very hard case for any copyright lawyer to win in court. That's not to say Disney's lawyers wouldn't try their hardest to prosecute if the tables were turned on them; they would and they did. But it's unfair to merely say Disney copyright lawyers are the scum of the earth, when the truth is closer to that all copyright lawyers (and judges) are the scum of the earth - that is, they all labor under what has become a terrible system of laws that, through a select few awful decisions, have come to oppress creativity in the interest of protecting existing corporation rather than foster improvement.
- agos 12y agoSee also “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” and “The secret of blue water”
- nicolaslegland 12y agoBack in 2001: http://www.thesecretofbluewater.com/atlantis2-i.htm http://www.thesecretofbluewater.com/atlantis2-i.htm
- Spooky23 12y agoNo more than Star Wars ripped off "The Hidden Fortress" and "Midway". Art riffs off other art. In the Star Wars sense, there were a lot of parallels to the other works, but it was and is still an original creation.
- pyre 12y agoI get that art riffs off other art, but the actions of Disney are what upset people. In cases like this, they will "take" from others without giving anything in return, but if someone gets too close to their "intellectual property" they pull out the big guns and attempt to erase that person from existence.
- billyhoffman 12y agoBetteridge's law of headlines wins again!
- settsu 12y agoCame to comment specifically with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
- saraid216 12y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=betteridge&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=betteridge&sort=byPopularity&p...
- settsu 12y agoS̶o̶?̶ Fuck it, I don't give a shit. It's painfully lazy headline writing like every other commercial site on the web and it has made Hacker News as fucking useless as the articles it links to...
- saraid216 12y agoSo leave. Flag the articles. If you comment on a shitty article with a shitty headline, the algorithm very probably gives it more weight and makes it more likely to show up on the front page. Leaving comments like this is painfully lazy writing, if you can call it writing at all, and it has helped make Hacker News as fucking useless as you are.
- Avshalom 12y agoThey also ripped off Hamlet. People seem less annoyed by that though
- morganvachon 12y agoWell, Hamlet (like all of Shakespeare's works) is not copyrighted. A manga that had been out only a few years before The Lion King would certainly be. But you make an excellent point: There's not really any originality left in the arts. It's all been done before.
- cujo 12y agoIt wasn't a "few" years. It was ~30 years.
- morganvachon 12y ago"Few" relative to Hamlet.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago>Well, Hamlet (like all of Shakespeare's works) is not copyrighted I find it interesting that the HN community is usually deeply anti-copyright until they're own works or the works they like are used seemingly without permission. Then we all become copyright nannies and strict copyright lawyers. This is why I think IP reform will never truly work. We're all to hypocritical about it. We want to use Disney's stuff but we don't want to let Disney use anyone else's. If the stuff that someone else owns is more valuable that ours we want it. When someone takes something of value from us, we freak out. That isn't politics, that's just envy and theft. I saw reddit take down a site that was using some redditors clip-art without permission, most likely accidentately. The outrage and DDOS was unbelievable for a place where "free culture" is the norm. It seems like there is no real anti-copyright movement, at least an organized one. Just a disorganized group engaging in hypocritical self-interest under the guise of "political reformer." Shame really, 10+ years ago, it seemed guys like Lessig were making progress and we were just one SCOTUS ruling from change. If anything, we're farther from reform than ever now.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- arunix 12y ago“You must avenge my death Kimba, .. I mean Simba.”
- colomon 12y ago"If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest."
- logfromblammo 12y agoYes. By now, The Simpsons have surely made every joke possible. General Disarray: "Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!" Mr. Stotch: "That's it! Butters, you are grounded for plagiarism! Go to your room!"
- madaxe_again 12y agoDisney ripped of Kimba in much the same way as DS9 ripped off B5... or vice-versa, depending on who you talk to. This won't have been down to a storyboarder or artist going "mwahahaha, appropriate the things", rather down to execs going "hey guys... you know... I was thinking it'd be neat if like the daddy lion appeared in clouds like a ghost... above a pointy rock or something. Left a bit. Slope it more. Give the baddie lion a scar or something. Hey, hyenas are evil, let's use hyenas as a sort of critical greek chorus.". This is apparently largely what happened with DS9 - "hey, it'd be great if there were like, some aliens or something, and if we had long expansive plot arcs... and let's make it on a space station. with a bar. and hookers. and blackjack. ok, forget the hookers and the blackjack.". Typically, the people who are doing the ripping off have absolutely no idea that this is what they're doing. Talk to a web developer who, after the event, realises he's been made to clone a site through drip-fed inference by their client.
- agumonkey 12y agoRandom note : I took DS9 as District 9, not ST Deep Space 9.
- philwelch 12y agoHaving watched both B5 and DS9, I would agree that they have similarities, but a great number of them are coincidental, overblown, or convergent evolution. For example, in DS9 they eventually get the Defiant and in B5 they eventually get the White Star, but any series that takes place on a space station is eventually going to want some way for the characters to get off the station and take trips. Did Paramount see that B5 was in development and decide, "we need a space station show too"? Yes. Are the two series especially comparable? No. There's ten times as much similarity between the backstory to Star Trek: The Next Gemeration and the writings of the Argentine Marxist J. Posadas, who believed that nuclear war on Earth (World War III in TNG) would inevitably lead to visitation from benevolent communist aliens (first contact with the Vulcans, as shown in Star Trek: First Contact) who would usher in a utopian paradise of communism (as repeatedly established in TNG, where Picard gives passionate speeches about people no longer caring about accumulating wealth and that there's no money in the future). But back to the point with Kimba: the article I jj posted in the comments repeatedly mentions references to the notion that Disney was explicitly working on an adaptation to Kimba until their effort to get the rights fell through, to storyboard artists using stills of Kimba as points of reference and to quotes from people involved in the project implying that it was an adaptation.
- binxbolling 12y agoJust curious: why are we dredging up stuff from 1999? Is it throwback Friday now?
- Gravityloss 12y agoPretty incredible if all this is coincidences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72AVvgRNf2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72AVvgRNf2Q
- Osiris 12y agoThis is similar to the questions around "Blurred Lines" and whether or not it was a copy of a copyrighted work or just inspired by another work but still a creative work of its own. Look at industries that aren't protected by copyright, like fashion. There is a lot of progress and change in that industry because it's legal to borrow from other people's ideas while still making a unique work. Scientific progress is another area that requires the sharing of knowledge and ideas freely in order for all of society to benefit and progress. I'm not convinced that borrowing, even heavily, from someone else to make a new work is a bad thing as seems to be the implication in this article.
- laumars 12y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the issue here is the double standards used by Disney. On the one hand, they borrow ideas from other people; and on the other hand, they extend copyright law and sue anyone who is inspired by them (even people who aren't profiting from their content)
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoBut that applies to anyone who owns a copyright. If you don't attempt to enforce it, you can't then sue if someone does significantly violate it. Not a Disney thing; its a copyright thing.
- laumars 12y agoYou're thinking of trademark law where you have to be seen to protect your trademark. Copyright law works a little differently as you can pick and choose your fights to some degree (and many artists do operate this way by turning a blind eye to YouTube bootlegs but upholding their claim when their intellectual property is used commercially without permission).
- honkyderp 12y agoI believe Kimba may have been a possible influence in some regard(at least prior to Roger Allers coming on board and changing the story to the Hamlet-esque plot). However, a lot of those "scene comparisons" are absolutely utter nonsense or just grasp-strawing. The only single one that's worth noting is the lion in the clouds similarity(although Mufasa appeared as a ghost in the clouds, whereas the Kimba one's just a cloud formation). A good example of this article just trying to trick people into thinking that it is a rip off if that cliff dangling comparison. In truth, Kimba is actually just trying to climb out of a small hole with a spiked trap at the bottom of it, and the female lioness herself gets herself caught in trouble soon after that. A lot of these comparisons are pretty much just a classic case of grabbing similar looking screen captures, and pairing them together out of context to fool people into thinking the scenes themselves are exactly alike. I have no doubt that Kimba played some influence very early on in production, but plot-wise, they're significantly different at the end of it. This old article really needs to have a bullet put its head. It's caused so much damage and warped the whole thing into an unnecessary "rip off" controversy.