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 Magic Kingdom, which retold the story of the film using fully articulated puppets. Other Disney attractions that have featured Simba include the Mickey's PhilharMagic 3D show and the Hong Kong Disneyland version of "It's a Small World". He appeared as one of the main characters at Epcot's Land Pavilion 12-minute edutainment film "", until its closure in 2018. He currently appears in animatronic form in Festival of the Lion King at Disney's Animal Kingdom. Although "The Lion King" itself has garnered universal acclaim from film critics, reception towards Simba has been generally mixed. "The Christian Science Monitor"s David Sterritt hailed