The Lion King family tree, film by film

In the 1994 film Scar kills Mufasa by throwing him into a wildebeest stampede. He makes Simba believe that the death was his fault and tells him to leave the Pride Lands.¹ Timon the meerkat and Pumbaa the warthog take Simba in, and he grows up with them far from home.^1,3

Nala, Simba’s friend from childhood, meets him again as an adult, and she becomes his mate and his queen. Her mother Sarafina appears briefly.^1,3 Simba returns, Scar falls from Pride Rock and the hyenas who served him kill him, and Simba takes the throne. In the last scene Rafiki presents Simba and Nala’s newborn cub to the animals of the Pride Lands.¹

The cub of 1994 is not named in that film. The sequel of 1998 gives Simba and Nala a daughter, Kiara, and press guides such as SlashFilm presume that she is the cub presented at the end of the first film.^2,5 The chart shows that cub without a name in the 1994 story point and gives her the name Kiara at Simba’s Pride.

The 2024 film adds one more child. Its story is told by Rafiki to Kiara, Timon and Pumbaa, and at the end Kiara meets her newborn brother.⁴ In the television series The Lion Guard her little brother is Kion, as SlashFilm sets out, and no source opened for this page says whether the newborn of 2024 is meant to be the same cub.⁵ This page keeps to the films, so the brother is named here but not drawn on the chart.

Simba’s Pride brings a second family onto the Lion King family tree. Zira leads the Outsiders, a pride that lives outside the Pride Lands, and she is Scar’s most loyal follower.² Her children are Nuka, the eldest, Vitani and Kovu, the youngest.²

Zira raises Kovu to take the Pride Lands as Scar’s chosen heir.⁵ Inside the story Kovu tells Kiara that Scar was not his father.² The film never names the father of any of Zira’s three children, so the chart hangs them from Zira alone. A grey dashed arrow, and not a parent line, runs from Scar to Kovu, and its two ends say that Scar chose him as heir and that Kovu is not his son.

The fight between the two prides ends the film. Nuka dies after the Outsiders ambush Simba, and in the last battle Zira falls from a cliff into the river.² Kiara and Kovu persuade both prides to stop fighting, Simba lets the Outsiders return to the Pride Lands, and Kiara and Kovu become mates.² On the chart Kovu moves into the gold of the Pride Lands at this story point, and a double line joins him to Kiara.

Three ties on this Lion King family tree depend on which film you trust. The first is Scar and Kovu. According to Wikipedia’s account of the production, Kovu was first written as Scar’s son, which would have made his romance with Kiara a match between cousins, and the finished film turned him into Scar’s heir instead.² This chart follows the finished film.

The second is Scar and Mufasa. The 1994 film calls them brothers and gives them no parents.¹ The 2024 film makes them brothers by adoption, with Masego and Afia as Mufasa’s parents and Obasi and Eshe as Taka’s.⁴ The prequel follows the photorealistic remake of 2019, which retold the 1994 story, so the two films belong to the later line of the series.¹ The chart draws the 2024 version because it is the only film that names any parents.

The third is the fathers who are never named. The sources for the four films name no father for Nala, for Sarabi or for Zira’s three children, and the chart leaves those spaces empty instead of filling them with a guess.

A square is a male and a circle is a female. A double line is a mated pair, and the line that drops from it leads to their cubs. A cross on a symbol marks a death. Mufasa has two lines above him, a solid one to his birth parents and one of the adopted kind to Obasi and Eshe.

Each pride wears its own colour, with a letter at the corner of every member. Gold is the Pride Lands, blue is Obasi’s pride, dark red is Zira’s Outsiders and green is Hakuna Matata, where Ma and Uncle Max join Timon at the end of the 2004 film.³ Scar starts in blue and changes to gold in the 1994 story point, when he rules from Pride Rock.

The coloured lines tell the story between families. The red dashed arrow from Scar to Mufasa is the betrayal of the 2024 film, and it turns into the dark red arrow of a killing in the 1994 story point. To build a family tree of another film, open this chart in the editor or start from the story charts. The symbols are set out in the genogram symbols, and the Riveras of another animated film are drawn in the Coco family tree.