Kimba the White Lion

Leo the Lion

kimba the white lion jpn Jungle Taitei, aka Jungle Emperor. 1965. TV series. (52 X 30 min.) Adventure. org Osamu Tezuka (manga). dir Eiichi Yamamoto, Rintaro (as Hayashi Shigeyuki). scr Shun’ichi Yukimuro, Masaki Tsuji, Eiichi Yamamoto, others.

leo the lion jpn Jungle Taitei Susume Leo, aka Jungle Emperor Onward Leo!. 1966. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) dir Rintaro (as Hayashi Shigeyuki). -bc

The first color animated TV series in Japan aired in America as Kimba the White Lion and told the starkly dramatic tale of a white lion cub who takes his rightful place as the king of the African jungle and attempts to keep a shaky peace among the many animals.

Kimba (Leo) is an orphaned white lion cub who returns to the jungle where his father, Caesar (Panja), was the ruler, and attempts to follow in his footsteps. Guided by the simian sage, Dan’l Baboon, and assisted by Pauley Cracker, a nervous parrot, and Bucky, a gazelle, Leo strives to unite the animals of his jungle in peace and use what knowledge he gained in the human world to try to civilize the place. He initiates several large-scale projects, including a farm, a restaurant, and an amusement park. Through it all, he has to contend with rival animals seeking to either maintain their independence or take over the jungle from Leo. The elephants frequently take issue with Leo’s edicts, as does Samson, the water buffalo. One fierce enemy is Claw, a scarred lion with a trio of sidekicks, a panther and a pair of hyenas. The wild dogs who roam the adjacent desert are also persistent threats to Leo and the animals under his protection.

Leo frequently interacts with humans and, alone among the animals, develops the ability to talk to them. Most of the humans encountered are hunters, poachers, and treasure hunters who mean trouble for the jungle and must be dealt with harshly by Leo, while others, such as agent James Brawn, young wildlife manager Roger Ranger, and the good Dr. Walrus (Higeoyaji), along with the occasional native and lost child, become Leo’s allies, sometimes earning him the enmity of the most distrustful of the animals.

In the series’ second season, Leo has grown to adulthood and mated with Liya to produce two offspring, a male and female, Runi and Ruki (Rune and Rukyo). Leo raises his son to succeed him but must sometimes show tough love to the youngster, while still maintaining his benevolent rule among the rest of the animals, warding off outside threats, and dealing with the occasional human interlopers.

Jungle Emperor Leo (1966, movie)

The New Adventures of Kimba the White Lion (aka Jungle Taitei, 1989, TV, 52 eps.)

Jungle Emperor Leo (1997, movie)

Although color animated features had been produced in Japan since 1958, and both creator Tezuka and series director Yamamoto had previously worked in color animation, this was the first animated TV series in color in Japan. Perhaps as a result of working under budget and time restraints, experiments were allowed that produced distinctive backgrounds and settings, and an imaginative use of color that was quite unlike anything else seen in anime at the time (or since). The result is a spectacular, feverish, and often breathtaking vision of the African jungle, as unique and otherworldly in its way as the Africa of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels and the subsequent Tarzan movies. Every episode offers something different and unpredictable.

The backgrounds are often quite stylized and sometimes given over to whole fields of unusual color choices, such as yellow, pink, orange, and various shades of red. The settings are marked by bold, jagged lines and shapes, with frequent splashes of garish color. Trees are never just trees, but bundles of dark, forbidding branches, reaching out chaotically in all directions and threatening to engulf the characters. Rocks and mountains are foreboding and difficult to negotiate, never offering an easy path for animals or humans, and often bathed in the light of a looming full moon. And yet there are also scenes of sheer natural beauty, such as vast meadows of wildflowers in a full spectrum of colors, attended by flocks of butterflies and a golden sun shining, or a high angle shot of the entire jungle landscape with storks flying gracefully overhead.

The character design includes several comic animal characters drawn and animated in traditional comic cartoon fashion, surrounded by a surprising array of realistically drawn animals, from the malevolent African wild dogs who roam the plains, to the rhinos, elephants, water buffaloes, zebras, and apes that Leo deals with on a regular basis. The flying lizards living in the rocks that Leo must traverse to find a rare medicinal plant in one episode look distinctly uncartoonish and are downright scary. Leo himself, both as a cub and full-grown adult, is a magnificently drawn creature, with unmistakable charisma, majesty, and reservoirs of tightly coiled strength and agility that come into play in the frequent fight scenes.

The human characters in Kimba tend to be divided into three types. There are the standard caricatures seen in every Tezuka piece, such as Higeoyaji, of walrus mustache fame (Mr. Pompus in Astro Boy), and Hamegg, the creepy, ferret-faced villain, along with a few other recognizable faces. Then there are the usual cartoon bad guys—hunters and treasure hunters—painted in broad, stereotypical strokes, and given names in the English dub like Colonel Badd and Graspen Grab. And finally, there are the nominal hero-types, usually young, slim, and handsome, who aid Kimba at various points.

The soundtrack is worth singling out for the work by composer Isao Tomita, who provides a full-bodied, symphonic score that enhances the mood and dramatic feelings in many a scene, using the brass section for stirring moments and spectacular action, and the strings for softer, more tender ones. A plaintive high-pitched trumpet solo punctuates some of the quieter character moments. Many sequences are simply animated action with accompanying music.

While Astro Boy gave Tezuka the vehicle to indulge his scientific and futuristic fantasies, Jungle Tai­tei gave him the outlet to delve much deeper, to explore the primordial side of his storytelling impulses. Here was a story of animal nature, ancient instincts and age-old battles, into which Tezuka injected idealistic human values in the character of a white lion, the acknowledged king of the jungle, but something of a freak because of his color and orphan status. Only a conflicted character like Leo could bring the warring species of the jungle together, which was Tezuka’s aim in telling his sprawling story.

While the animated version was clearly aimed at children even in its original Japanese form, the series was much more dramatic than any cartoon series with animal characters had ever been. This was no Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry gagfest. Even in toned-down form in its first season, the animal- and human-on-animal violence was often quite brutal. Characters did, in fact, die regularly, starting with both of Kimba’s parents in the first episode. Animals fought on a regular basis and Kimba himself had to fend off steady assaults from rivals and aggressors, slashing his claws across their faces or plunging them deep into skin and fur. As a result, the series was filled with entertaining, violent action but also boasted a realistic subtext that offered its audience something closer to the actual natural world than could be found in the sugarcoated version of The Wonderful World of Disney.

Although seen by few American viewers, the series’ second season, titled Leo the Lion, offered a greater sense of Tezuka’s vision for the whole series. The English dub, although poorly executed, at least provided a fairly close translation of the original and didn’t rename the characters too drastically. The violence was left intact, and is often surprisingly graphic. There are far more scenes of carnivorous animals catching and eating weaker ones in this season. The original music was kept (with the exception of incongruous 1980s rock themes replacing the original opening and closing music), so that in scenes of wordless beauty, viewers are hearing exactly what they should be. But when the characters start talking (all dubbed by the same three or four expressionless voices), the magic starts to fade a little.

Still, the stories in the second season represent pure Tezuka adventure, as Leo encounters a wide range of problems and threats requiring that he marshal his abilities and the resources of the jungle to counter them. In “Candle Rock,” a wandering herd of elephants needs a place to eat and sleep and Leo obliges them, only to find his own elephants, incited by vicious gossip, preparing to fight off the “invaders.” In “Rick the Lycon,” Leo helps a wounded wild dog and watches him befriend his cubs, knowing in his heart the dog’s ill intent, but choosing to treat him courteously and see what happens. In “The Golden Bow,” Leo helps an African warrior and his son, the last of their tribe, protect the title heirloom from a rival tribe. In “The Green Plague,” a human doctor and his crew work with Leo and his animals to prevent a plague afflicting a herd of elephants from spreading to the rest of the jungle. There was action, suspense, emotion, and personal drama in almost every episode.

Oddly, the series never did get around to reconciling the carnivorous animals’ dietary requirement of fresh meat on a regular basis with Kimba’s noble goals of protecting the weaker animals and making sure everyone got well fed. Kimba himself is seen eating prepared meat while in captivity in one episode. Later, as king of the jungle, he happily eats . . . something, but it doesn’t appear to be meat and it’s never identified. At one point, when a plague of locusts sweeps the African veldt, he kills two birds with one stone by offering the insects up to the carnivores as a meat substitute. There are plenty of references to carnivores that do indeed get away with killing and eating other animals, but are invariably painted as bad for doing so.

A TV series remake made in Japan in 1989 sought to tell the whole story found in Tezuka’s original manga. It was seen in the U.S. years later in edited, incomplete form as a video series entitled The New Adventures of Kimba the White Lion, with new music and a dub track filled with inappropriate contemporary American slang. While the animation was slicker and more polished than the 1965 series, it lacked the original’s raw power.

Jungle Emperor Leo (1997) was a movie version that sought to tell the whole Leo story, complete with tragic ending, with lavish, computer-enhanced theatrical-quality animation and a few nods to Disney’s The Lion King, a worldwide hit three years earlier that boasted many (uncredited) similarities to the original Kimba. It’s an enjoyable and stirring movie, but tells two completely different stories, one a Disney-style tale about cute little Runi’s adventures in the human world and the other a harrowing adventure story (with echoes of Edgar Rice Burroughs) about a dangerous ascent of Mount Moon in search of treasure, with Leo and Professor Higeoyaji attempting to head off a villainous party led by the ubiquitous Hamegg. The tone of each is different and the two plotlines never merge effectively, each tending to undercut the other.

An earlier original movie of Jungle Emperor Leo (1966), made under Tezuka’s supervision and also telling the original story as found in the manga, has never been made available in the U.S. in any form.

Osamu Tezuka produced the series, based on his manga which ran from 1950–54, predating his own Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) manga series. Eiichi Yamamoto (One Thousand and One Nights, Cleopatra, Belladonna, Space Battleship Yamato) was Kimba’s supervising director and cowriter, as well as producer of the second season.

An early Leo the Lion episode entitled “Leo Becomes a Father,” features Leo’s wife Liyah giving birth to a son and daughter, Runi and Ruki. As Runi gradually, fearfully steps out into the world, Leo gives him a measure of tough love by deliberately taking him miles from home and abandoning him, monitoring his progress from a distance as the cub confronts all sorts of potential enemies and natural perils. Since the episode is basically action and original music, with few subsidiary characters, the weaknesses of the dub soundtrack are not as pronounced and viewers get a better sense of the Japanese original.

While the English dubbing in the Leo the Lion episodes left a lot to be desired, the writing was sometimes quite impressive. A dying elephant in “Candle Rock” suddenly recites a short poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay in its entirety (“I burn my candle at both ends. . . . ”). Was this in the original script or did one of the dub writers have a burst of inspiration? Either way, it’s one of the many pleasant surprises found in the series.

Kimba the White Lion, the English-dubbed version of the series’ first season, was the result of a coproduction (the first of its type) between Tezuka’s Mushi Productions and the American TV network NBC, which provided financing in the hopes of reaping the same kind of profits it got from syndicating Astro Boy. The same New York-based crew that dubbed Astro Boy also worked on Kimba, with Astro “himself,” actress Billie Lou Watt, handling the role of Kimba. NBC’s involvement meant strict demands on the content and conformity to the broadcast standards of children’s television in the U.S. at the time, which required a significant reduction of violence and death. It also meant keeping Kimba a child for the full fifty-two episodes and preventing him from maturing, so that kids would have the same audience identification figure for the entire season. The continuing story line was abandoned so that individual stations could run episodes in whatever order they wished.

When Mushi Productions embarked on its second season of Jungle Taitei, they financed it from profits of the first season and chose to follow Tezuka’s original vision for the series, with Leo now an adult and involved in more serious, violent story lines. NBC was not consulted, and refused to license the finished product for American broadcast. As a result, the series was not seen in the U.S. until the Christian Broadcasting Network licensed it nearly twenty years later (1984) for its cable channel. The season was subsequently released on home video.

One problematic issue with the original 1960s episodes of Kimba and Leo is the prevalence of black stereotypes in the portrayal of native African characters. Curiously, whenever an African character is foregrounded in a serious manner, as in the Leo episode “The Golden Bow,” he is portrayed in a serious, dignified, unstereotyped manner. But when the character is a comical background character, he is portrayed as fat, with big lips and caricatured features, as in the portrayal of a greedy tribal chief in another Leo episode, “The Case of the Moonlight Stone,” which also features a white woman character in blackface disguise.

Disney’s animated hit The Lion King (1994), the basis for a subsequent Broadway musical, tells the tale of an orphaned lion cub named Simba and his battle for his rightful place as king of the jungle, aided by a wise baboon and a nervous hornbill, against villains that included a scarred lion and a pair of malevolent hyenas. The similarities to the original Kimba series were striking, and when this was brought to Disney’s attention, the studio insisted that it had never even heard of Kimba, despite voice actor Matthew Broderick’s statement in an interview that when he was offered the role of Simba he had immediately assumed it was a remake of Kimba.

violence There is much violence in the series as Kimba bites, scratches, claws, and grapples with all manner of animal and human opponents. Given the nature of the animal world, the violence seems appropriate. advisory Stereotyped caricatures of black natives are found in some episodes.