I mean, the animal part seems intuitive, however I’d like to hear the whole story…
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This is one of those things kind of like how bats aren’t birds, whales aren’t “fish”, and spiders aren’t insects. It has to do with evolution and biology, rather than just how things look.
The “tree of life”, in science, refers to how everything we generally call “alive” on earth evolved, starting from some ancient cell we call the LUCA – Last Universal Common Ancestor – and down to every modern or extinct species we know about. Nowadays, we can use genetic sequencing to predict exactly how this tree looks with pretty high accuracy. That means we can see which species of things have very similar genomes, and are thus likely to connect somewhere pretty close to modern day on the “evolutionary timeline”.
It turns out that, when you really study them at a cellular level, fungi are more similar to humans than plants! Other commenters have given you specifics, but I wanted to try to put it into the context of the evolutionary tree. Basically, fungi may look like plants on the surface, but you can think of them almost like super ancient animals that just took a COMPLETELY different evolutionary path and started to behave more like plants – not because they’re related, just because they evolved that way. In a way, this is kind of like “convergent evolution” on a huge scale – just like how whales are mammals whose ancient ancestors actually lived on dry ground, but eventually evolved to “return” to the sea, making them quite different from the fish that also live there.
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