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
Kimba the White Lion Symphonic Poem" (by Isao Tomita) was released on LP in 1966. As a number of media journalists and fans watched Disney's animated feature film "The Lion King" they noticed characters and events in the story resembling those of "Kimba". Although the two works follow different screenplays, there are strong artistic similarities, and "The Lion King" contains numerous sequences that closely match "Kimba"′s. Other similarities are thematically deeper and more pronounced, such as that both feature the theme of the circle of life. Alleged similarities in the characters, beginning with the protagonist lion cubs "Kimba" and "Simba", include the evil lions,