An old character model sheet for Through Death & Love, from 1999.
Please see the description for this piece for background info on this story.

This is Nearlitee, supposedly Simba & Nala's orphaned cub who was raised by the leopard mother. He is based off of the lion cub from Beauty & The Beasts - and just in case you didn't watch the (very traumatic) video I linked two uploads ago, the cub died in the documentary.

He was renamed to Nyota (Swahili for "Star") in later iterations of the story. Yes, I know it's a girl's name. No, it had nothing to do with Star Trek (I actually never watched The Original Series, let alone know Uhuru's first name). And yes, there's a very good in-fiction reason for why he was named thus.