Actually, Lion King is a testament Disney knows how to do this. When it came out, nobody was saying “This movie is trash. It’s just Hamlet with talking animals”, even though when you’re told you can clearly see it takes lots of themes and character archetypes from said play. But it also changed things up a bit to warrant being it’s own thing, and praised accordingly.

One more thing (I’m making a new post because I forgot about this point a few days ago…)

All the parts that weren’t stolen from Hamlet were stolen from the 1966 Japanese-anime “Kimba the White Lion”. Which were basically the animal parts. Simba himself is damn near identical to a golden-fur’d Kimba.

The actually unique story, which Disney had to pour tons-and-tons of money into to actually get done, was Pocahontas. But as we all know, Lion King made more money, so Disney learned its lesson.

Uniqueness / new stories don’t sell as well as you think they do. Unfortunately. Its a lot easier to take designs from 30+ years ago (ie: a 1990s cartoon stealing a successful style from a 1960s anime) than to invent a new style.

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The difference was that in 1990s, we didn’t have Wikipedia, so it was harder to notice what was, or wasn’t “stolen” or “borrowed” from other cultures.