Animation Source Forums

here is a pic from 1994 - 1997 . the 1994 - 1997 ceromony's say that simba and nala's cub is a son , while books made in 1998 and up say they had a daughter ! post pictures of simba and nala's cub in the end of the books !

I voted for 'no' because I look at the matter from the perspective of the entity of the official story in which the cub at the end is a girl and yet some books still say it's a boy. But it's not their fault because the official gender didn't come until 1998. If there had been an option of "it doesn't matter because the cub in canon is genderless", I would've picked that.

the people who made the books should have said ''it'' instead of ''him'' !

True, that way it wouldn't contradict anything even these days. But I suppose that Disney's book department approved the gender reference--(heck, they even approved an entire identity to the cub)--because no sequel was in plans at the time and Disney animation studios weren't big on sequels before TLK2 so it wasn't even likely there would ever be a sequel. Oh, and I think another reason why they approved the gender reference is that all the books are just fanfiction. They even approved storybooks contradicting each others, probably in order to show that the book universe has nothing official to do with the movie universe. And then the film makers made it official by ignoring the gender from the book universe, on the commentary track.

You Got that right

I Agree with you Kali.

i don't mind your belifs , but i belive the cub was gendrless !

Beliefs are irrelevant to the truth. As no film maker ever said which gender it is (until it became Kiara) and even its original design has significant differences to the only absolute baby boy we know (Simba)--thus naturally it was genderless and there's just no other option in factual logic. ^^

Actually the cub is not Kopa and it is not even known if it is male or female. This has a lot of information, but I highly doubt anyone that should read it will. -.-

There's extremely official and undeniable proof of that it NEVER WAS KOPA, if you'd just bother to actually read it:

1.) The first film's makers did not call it Kopa or even talk about Kopa in 1995 when Kopa already existed in the books. As in, if Kopa had anything to do with the film's story, they would've said at least half a word about him but they did NOT. Up to 1998 the cub was FLUFFY with no gender.
2.) Because in 1998 the sequel film's makers used Fluffy as baby KIARA in their film's official trailer--thus making it literally undeniable that the TLK cub and Kiara are one in essence with no Kopa and no any siblings whatsoever.
3.) And because the sequel's makers don't say half a word about Kopa in their Making-of documentary "Proud of Simba's Pride", it is highly likely they never even considered him.

Actually that argument means little to nothing as there were different animators.