ジャングル大帝 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Compact Manga Epic about Africa, Nature, Animals, Human Beings, Civilization, and Life and Death **This review is about all three volumes of the manga** When I was about ten, I enjoyed watching Kimba the White Lion anime on tv in California, mesmerized by scenes of the hero running over the African plains to adventures with quirky animals and inimical people, so I was curious to read Osamu Tezuka’s source manga Jungle Taitei (1950-54), or Jungle Emperor. I found that the two are very different, as, for example, the anime Kimba stays young, while the manga Leo grows up, and the anime has fewer disturbing moments. The manga is a 534-page mini epic about a family of white lions living in a jungle in east Africa in the Great Rift Valley and the interactions between the lions, other animals, and human beings. After introducing Leo’s legendary father Panja (called the Demon Beast by the local natives because he hinders their exploitation of animals), the story shifts to his son Leo, who’s born on an ocean liner bound for a London zoo, is raised for a while in Aden among people like the Japanese youth Kenichi and Hige Oyaji (Moustache Uncle), returns to his birthright in Africa, attempts to pacifically rule an obscure jungle, and finally leads a party of men on a Quixotic cold-war quest for the source of the Moon Jewel on a legendary inaccessible mountain. It ends with Leo’s son Rune, who finds the reality of NYC less magical and more nightmarish than he’d expected and tries to escape back to Africa. My favorite parts are about young Leo trying to fit into human life (including attacking a movie screen showing a film of Africa and visiting a zoo and trying to free its animals) and later trying to establish himself as Jungle Emperor in the face of a hostile local tribe, a rival lion, an uncooperative herd of elephants, and a horrifying plague. Also, the climactic scene of mountain blizzard chaos and terror is hair raising and the late large picture of Leo as a giant white cloud is magnificent. Throughout, Tezuka highlights and blurs the dichotomy between wild animals and human beings, as Leo wears human shorts till he finally casts them off to be more au naturel, learns human language, and seems much more humane—brave, generous, non-violent—than most of the humans in the story (like the awful ex-Nazi war-criminal Ham Egg, the delusional and selfish Pierre, and the amoral gangster-spy Adam Dandy). There are, to be sure, some good people, like the early hero Kenichi and the late hero Hige Oyaji. The anti-heroine of the middle part of the epic, Mary, is great: feisty, violent, and, she thinks, unbeatable. When tribesmen capture her in the first volume, Mary sure doesn’t swoon and wait for rescue! Instead, not unlike H. Rider Haggard’s She or Robert E. Howard’s Belit (and as offensive to people of color), she takes over the tribe, names herself Konga of the Upper River, and starts carving out an empire in the jungle, demanding total obedience from her human and animal subjects. She tries to extinguish her persona as white civilization representative, dressing native (leopard skin bikini top and feathered headdress) and wielding a sharp spear and a cutting whip. She is insane and brutal, but read with Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi, in which the girl Sapphire dresses and passes for a fairy tale prince, Mary is an interesting female character for the 1950s manga world. But—alas—Tezuka domesticates her by making Kenichi take her to Japan, where she becomes a typical quiet young Japanese mother! Although the manga makes plenty of fun of the large number of venal and or stupid white characters, it is egregiously offensive to people of African descent, as every dark-skinned native is an absurd, repulsive caricature, naturally serving white (or Japanese) people. The callous, “comical” depiction of them, the use of them as porters and props, and the lack of interest in their cultures and needs let alone in their exploitation at the hands of white imperialist countries, is disappointing. That’s especially so because Tezuka shows a breadth of vision vis-à-vis animals, wanting to take human arrogance down a peg and to demonstrate the characters, needs, lives, and fascinations of animals and the frailty of human life in the face of the awesome power of nature. The manga features some sad, painful scenes involving abuse, disease, and death (like when young Leo dons his deceased father’s skin), and as there are no small syllabary to help young readers who don’t know many Chinese characters read Japanese, it almost seems like the manga, unlike the anime, is more for adults than for kids. This feels especially the case as Jungle Taitei becomes an anti-war cold-war story, with Countries A and B rivals in spies and exploration etc. finally (almost) transcending their rivalry via hardship and adventure on Moon Mountain. The compact, three-volume edition that I read had such small font that I often had to use a magnifying glass to read the text (I have old man eyes), and at times Tezuka draws at least a dozen small panels on a single small page, so it’s hard to read and appreciate in this format. A larger size would be more impressive and pleasurable for sure. Throughout, Tezuka uses all his manga techniques and tricks: zooming in and out, silhouettes, broken frames, shaky lines, establishing shots, strategic point of view and camera angle shifts, and dynamic, beautiful, impressive, creative art and layout, as in the following example. There are more that I couldn’t find pictures online of to link to, like these: A great sequence: Leo freshly returned to Africa shocked by vultures feeding on a zebra carcass, with closeups of his appalled face interspersed with different angle shots of the carcass and birds, the vultures beautiful in their stark black silhouettes on the white pages. An impressive frame: pitch black frame but for the malevolent large eyes of a black panther at night. A majestic picture: a full page showing the jungle river landscape with mountains in the distance, the human party like tiny ants dwarfed by the land. A surreal sequence: Rune fantasizes a Hollywood movie musical scenario where he goes to the big, tall-skyscraper NYC and goes to the zoo and sets free all the animals and is a celebrity and then imagines he’s flying around with butterflies and then comes to a mountain top where he sees all of Africa spread out in the sunset below him. Finally, Jungle Taitei is a weird, unpredictable story. It has powerful and wonderful and strange moments, but it also has silly ones, repetitive ones, and head-scratching ones, perhaps down to the impromptu plotting. I think too much time/space is spent on the exploration of the mountain (nearly the entire third volume). Finally, I’m glad to have read it, but I prefer Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi. View all my reviews
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