Inuyashiki was one of the first shows I watched when I began to keep up with seasonal anime (that and Magus Bride), and I'll echo your recommendation. A great little one-cour series with a little of everything: action, humor, drama, and suspense.
Plus it's noteworthy for giving us one of our first anime Trumps, if not the first:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UE_DWgjZFMw
I'd definitely recommend anyone who believes in the whole "Disney ripped off Kimba" thing giving the video a watch, or at least skimming through it. Adam was
extremely thorough in debunking the myths surrounding Kimba and The Lion King. Like you said, originally this was just going to be a small section in his review of The Lion King (2019), but once he started digging through it all (including watching all Kimba-related movies and anime series), he realized that there was a lot more to delve into. As someone who repeated those claims for years based off of imagery taken out of context, it opened my eyes. There's plenty to hate about Disney without repeating baseless accusations.
If you don't want to watch the whole thing, here's a couple quick bullet points:
- A lot of the "DISNEY RIPPED OFF KIMBA" videos use footage from a Kimba movie created in 1997 that was basically created to ape off of the success of The Lion King. It's safe to say that if there was any ripping off in those instances, it was the Japanese studio doing it.
- Even in the original manga/anime series, most of the things that look similar can be marked up as coincidental since they have completely different contexts. Just because a warthog shows up in a single episode doesn't mean Disney stole the idea of animated warthogs to create Pumbaa. If you set a fictional work in Africa, chances are you're going to have certain visuals show up.
- Kimba isn't even the name of the character in Japanese. The Kimba name was created by people at NBC for American audiences. Originally they were going to name him "Simba" because it means "lion" in Swahili, but they decided to change it to make it easier to copyright (then Disney went and did it anyway).
- While it's possible, even probable, that people at Disney were aware of Kimba when creating The Lion King, they didn't really draw from it as inspiration. About the only similarities between the two are being set in Africa with a lion main character. Nothing in The Lion King's overall plot can be found in the Kimba manga or anime. If The Lion King had cub Simba running around wearing Mufasa's skin and using it to trick enemies into thinking he was actually Mufasa, that would be a different story.
- Most of the people who accuse Disney of ripping off Kimba have never actually done any research into the matter, or watched anything Kimba-related, for that matter. He shows this multiple times throughout the video, including a "scholar" who used shots from the 1997 movie as proof that Disney stole Tezuka's work.
- A funny aside at the end comes up when Adam talks about a 1940s comic book that was brought to his attention called Simba: King of Beasts. He points out how dumb it is to make the argument that similar visuals means malicious intent by creating a mock comparison between this comic and Kimba, "claiming" that Kimba actually ripped off Simba. In reality, culture gets recycled all the time, similar visuals pop up occasionally, and you should always do more than a surface-level analysis before accusing a creator of stealing another's work.
I still say it's worth a watch if you want to see the full breakdown. I imagine there will still be people pushing the Kimbaspiracy in the years to come, but no one has done as much work to debunk it as Adam. And while he does poke fun at the anime a lot (especially the dub), he also gives it a fair amount of praise to boot, certainly way more than he's gonna give The Lion King (2019).
Be warned: if you watch the video, that damn wah wah song is gonna get stuck in your head.