Nala (The Lion King) accompanying her and her best friend Simba on their adventures. Pronounced "me too", the character's name is a reference to this personality trait. Simba was intended to save the cub from a wildebeest stampede, and Nala would eventually become responsible for protecting Mheetu from Simba's tyrannical uncle Scar. Nala also had a fox friend named Bhati. According to Woolverton, Mheetu and Bhati were eventually written out of the film because their stories were beginning to distract from Simba's, in addition to the Mheetu-Scar subplot making the film too dark when combined with the death of Simba's father Mufasa. At one
Simba of inspiration. Before "The Lion King", Henn's experience as a supervising animator was limited to predominantly female characters; he had just recently completed work on Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" (1989), Belle from "Beauty and the Beast" (1991) and Jasmine from "Aladdin" (1992). When he became involved with "The Lion King", Henn initially expressed interest in animating the film's villain, Scar, because he wanted to do "something different." However, producer Don Hahn felt that he was better suited for animating Simba. Henn approaches animating new characters by "put[ting himself] into the character’s situation." Simba proved to be a challenge because