50 Years Ago is a monthly article series that discusses notable anime from 50 years in the past, roughly aligned with the current month. With this series, I hope to expose classic old anime to younger viewers and give some light education about the early age of anime.

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50 Years Ago This Month

This month, it is August 2016 so we are looking back to August of 1966. That month, a lot of people went to the theatre to see a film called Jungle Emperor. You might not recognize that name, but I think you might recognize one of its other names: Kimba the White Lion.

Jungle Emperor is notable in its own right, as it was very popular both domestically and internationally and is still fondly remembered today as one of the great works of Osamu Tezuka. But it also holds another particlar claim to fame – it was the first anime television series to be produced in colour. This was a major milestone for the anime industry, a huge step in becoming closer to on-par with the American animation industry (which had produced its own first colour television series in 1957, and by this time had many widely popular colour series, such as Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, and many more).

Today, we'll take a look at both the first Jungle Emperor television series and the 1966 composite movie of the same name.

 

Background

[Leo the] Jungle Emperor was a manga created by legendary manga writer and artist Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka, often called "The God of Manga", created over 700 manga series throughout his career (from 1945 until his death in 1989), including dozens (if not hundreds) of classic hits that are still fondly remembered today. Some of his most famous titles include Jungle Emperor, Princess Knight, New Treasure Island, Black Jack, Buddha, Message to the Adolfs, Metropolis… and of course Astro Boy.

Tezuka's Jungle Emperor manga series ran from November of 1950 to April of 1954. In 1961, Tezuka left Toei Animation and created his own studio, Mushi Productions, where they immediately started adapting Tezuka's own manga series (Mushi wouldn't produce a single non-Tezuka work until 1968). They started with the revolutionary Astro Boy adaptation which began in 1963, then followed that with New Treasure Island and The Amazing 3 in 1965… and then Jungle Emperor.

This first TV series adaptation of the Leo the Jungle Emperor manga began on October 6, 1965 and would run weekly until September 28, 1966. Near the end of the TV show's run, they used scenes from various TV show episodes and some new content to create a theatrical film version, which began showings on July 31, 1966.

 

U.S. Influence, Distribution and Modification

When Mushi Productions made their first anime – Astro Boy – it was originally funded solely by Fuji TV. But after its first year, the American broadcaster NBC signed a deal with Mushi for the rights to produce and distribute a dubbed version of Astro Boy in the United States. While the first year of Astro Boy had been created with approximately 1000 cels per episode, the additional funding allowed them to use approximately 2500 cels per episode in Astro Boy's second year. Hence, after Astro Boy's success, Tezuka and his studio were highly motivated to continue making further deals with NBC, and if they could make them in advance this time they could have a higher quality show right from the start.

By 1965, NBC expressed interest to Mushi in a new project, and Tezuka pitched the basic plot of Jungle Emperor. NBC liked the concept… but they wanted it in colour! Tezuka and the rest of Mushi were hesitant, worried that the series wouldn't look very good since they had never done a colour production before. But NBC sent them reassurances that they were confident Mushi could pull it off, and even offered to pay for any conversion/upgrade to the studio necessary to produce the show in colour.

Reassured, Tezuka submitted a formal proposal for the series to NBC, but again there were some difficulties. Tezuka had proposed a serial-format series, with multi-episode plots, cliffhangers, and a full progression of the main character Leo from a baby to a full adult, ending with a noble-sacrifice death in the finale. NBC, however, didn't like these ideas – they wanted each episode to be self-contained, that Leo would stay young for the whole series, and that the series end with Leo alive and happy. They also wanted less direct violence than Tezuka had originally proposed.

Ultimately, Tezuka acquiesced to NBC's desires, though NBC gave him some compromise. Leo never became a full adult and didn't die, but he did grow from a cub to a youth. Tezuka didn't show characters being outright killed by another character, but a gun might go off accidentally and kill them instead (which would upset some of the NBC executives, but Tezuka just told them "Sorry, of course we won't do that again" … and then did it again anyways). NBC, for their part, licensed and funded a full 52-episode series in advance and expressed that if the series did well, they would be interested in co-producing an additional 52-episode follow-up series which would show the more mature content Tezuka had originally proposed.

From our modern perspective, these events are strange indeed. It is almost inconceivable today that a foreign investor/distributor would have so much influence on an anime production. Even a show like Space Dandy, which already had a partnership for U.S. distribution at the time of its production, had a much more unilateral creative control, with the Japanese production executives even having veto power over some elements of the English translation and dubbing. Nowadays, the industry is large and well-established enough within Japan that there is no need for studios to seek support from an American company. But in the 1960s, when these studios and the industry itself were just starting out, there was not a lot of choices in finding companies to enter partnerships with, and dealing with American companies that were actually more knowledgeable and experienced with animation – especially colour animation – than they were made a lot of sense.

It's also easy from our modern perspective to see events with the lens of "big bad investor interferes with the artistic studio, ruins show". There have certainly been many occasions where that was indeed the case, in anime and otherwise. But this is not necessarily one of those cases. In many ways, NBC was right to insist on their changes: for example, the dubbed American version of Jungle Emperor was broadcast out of order by many television stations (as was common in the United States at the time) and the serial-format originally proposed by Tezuka would have otherwise made the show very confusing. Keeping Leo as a cub and having each episode be a more easily understood self-contained story made the show very popular amongst children. The partnership between Mushi and NBC required a great deal of compromise on both sides, but ultimately both parties both offered and gained a lot. NBC even flew Tezuka to Hollywood to tour the animation studios there, and brought some of the Mushi animators to a workshop in New York, all in order to assist Mushi with switching to colour animation.

 

The Anime Itself

The plot revolves around Leo/Kimba, who is born and lives for a couple years in human captivity but then goes to the jungle to take up his deceased father's title of Jungle Emperor. Having lived among humans and animals, Leo tries to sort out the differences between different animals, as well as between animals and humans, through peaceful means and transform their jungle society into a unified multi-animal society of peaceful cooperation. Each episode presents Leo with some new crisis in the jungle for him to solve, such as a disease spreading or a cheetah having mixed up all the birds' unhatched eggs.

There's a few interesting concepts going on here. For one, Leo is not infallible. Leo portrays himself as a leader, but he doesn't actually get much acknowledgement of being a "jungle emperor" by anyone, so he's more often than not just an influential young man-lion trying to persuade everyone else. And he's definitely not perfect: despite his lofty ideals, he's occasionally a bit of an asshole until his friends set him straight.

What's also interesting here is the integration of humans into the story. Unlike what you might expect, there isn't one particular stance taken on whether humans are good or bad, or whether they can or can't coexist with the jungle animals. Many of the humans seen are hunters that threaten the jungle, but there are plenty of friendly humans or just not-particularly-on-either-side humans. One human, Kenichi, is a pacificst, a friend of Leo and teaches the other animals to talk to humans, but another human, Ham Egg, plays a frequent antagonist role.

Now, I don't want to overhype the narrative complexity or themes of this show. Just like Astro Boy was mostly about Astro getting into hijinks or fighting other robots, and only occasionally questioned the nature of artificial emotions, so too do most Jungle Emperor episodes just revolve around some whacky jungle animal drama like a winged tiger declaring himself the new Jungle Emperor. In particular, you'll see a lot of episodes that follow the common tropes of some petty squabble developing between the jungle denizens, only for them to set aside their differences and realize they don't hate each other so much when they must come together to ward off a greater danger that affects them all.

However, there are a number of moral questions and dilemmas featured in certain episodes and spread across the series, where the show goes beyond its comfortable adventure narrative into more complex issues. These dilemmas frequently revolve around the nature of the animals themselves – e.g. how will Leo get everyone to live together peacefully when some animals are carnivores and need to kill the other animals to survive?

Also of interest is how Leo's position changes over the course of the series. Despite not becoming an adult like Tezuka originally envisioned, the relationship between Leo and the main adult animals noticeably grows from a child-mentor dynamic into a relationship of equals. Likewise, the relationship between Leo and the other young animals shifts from a band of young, playful friends into Leo being a leader and mentor of the group.

 

The 1966 theatrical movie, on the other hand, is… not great. Much like those sorts of film productions are made by studios today, the movie version is almost entirely made out of existing scenes from the TV series haphazardly combined together. The entirety of the first episode of the show establishing Leo's backstory is chopped up into various flashbacks spread throughout the film, and the rest plays out more like a montage of various small incidents Leo encountered throughout his tenure.

There are changes to the dialogue to make things fit into something resembling a cohesive narrative, but it lacks the overall build-up and resolution structure that a self-contained chapter should have and doesn't add anything new to the story.

I'm not even sure what the reasoning for this movie being made was. The TV series was still ongoing at the time of the movie's release but ending soon, and there was not yet any plans to produce a sequel series. By most accounts it seems the series was still doing well in terms of viewership. So it's not like they needed the movie to advertise the show. It wasn't a case of using the film abroad to promote the series, either, since as far as I can tell the film was only shown in a few countries outside of Japan. In fact, it might be that the main reason for the film was to distribute it specifically to places where the TV show was not planned to air – for example, the movie was shown in Italy, but the TV series would not air there until 1977.

Or, perhaps the movie was made so that it could be shown at film festivals, since there was not an equivalent "publicity tour" available for the TV series.

In any case, the movie is not abjectly awful, but it is certainly lacklustre in comparison to seeing the complete series in its proper order.

 

Legacy

The biggest and most immediate impact Jungle Emperor had was of course to kickstart the rest of the Japanese animation industry to fully convert to colour. Jungle Emperor of course cannot take all the credit – there had been theatrical colour anime films since Toei's The Tale of the White Serpent in 1958 and by 1966 all the theatrical anime films were already being made in colour. However, unlike theatrical films, Jungle Emperor aired on home televisions every week, and unlike when colour animation on television first began in the United States colour televisions had already been popular in Japan for several years.

Thus, Jungle Emperor's vivid colours quickly captivated the home audience, especially children. This undoubtedly contributed to the show's popularity, and the rest of the industry didn't fail to notice. It would take a little bit of time for other studios to finish their current productions and convert their studios, but the number of black and white anime TV series began to dwindle within a year. By 1969, only three of the eighteen shows that debuted that year were black and white… and two of those were cancelled before the year was over (the third, Toei's Moretsu Ataro, continued to air throughout 1969 and 1970, but converted to colour in late 1970). The last black-and-white anime TV series was Chingo Muchabei, which was made by Tokyo Movie Shinsha around 1968 but TV stations were so uninterested in airing a black-and-white series that it couldn't air until February of 1971 where it was aired in a weekday evening timeslot reserved for anime reruns.

Beyond that, well, Jungle Emperor was just a really well-received show. It was popular, especially among children, in Japan, the United States, and many other countries once it aired there. In fact, it was so popular that it inspired Tezuka to do something a little risky: even though NBC had offered to co-produce a second series which could incorporate the adult ideas Tezuka had originally pitched, Tezuka decided to cut out any American interference and have Mushi be the sole producer of the sequel series, giving himself total creative control (which he did indeed use to continue the story into Leo's adulthood, more realistic depictions of violence, a more serial format, and ultimately Leo's death).

Beyond the immediate sequel, a remake was made in 1989, an OVA in 1991 and two more films in 1997 and 2009. The 1997 movie, by Tezuka Productions, which adapts the second half of the manga (differently from how the sequel series did) was especially well received. The character of Leo has cameo'd in some video games, a Leo Ieiri music video, the American TV show Fringe, and is the mascot of the Saitama Seibu Lions baseball team.

As for the 1966 movie, it had little influence on its own compared to the TV series of the franchise. But for the modern anime viewer looking back today, it can serve as an interesting lesson: We see a lot of "watered-down" composite movies made out of successful TV series today, and we may be tempted to label this as an idiosyncracy of the modern anime industry… but as the Jungle Emperor movie shows us, this trend actually extends all the way back to anime's earliest beginnings.

There was also a big controversy when Disney's The Lion King came out in 1994, with a lot of people believing it was largely copied from Jungle Emperor (more than simply an homage). Disney's official statement is that the people producing The Lion King were not aware of Jungle Emperor's existence, but there are many accounts which indicate that numerous people involved in The Lion King's production were not only familiar with Jungle Emperor, but even used it for inspiration. No one can say for sure what the truth is; many believe that Disney had begun the movie as a remake of Jungle Emperor expecting that they could acquire the rights to it, but when acquiring the rights became impossible they simply went ahead and insisted on denying any connection.

Mushi Productions would use Jungle Emperor and its sequel as a stepping stone to produce several more fondly-remembered colour TV series over the next few years, such as Princess Knight and Ashita no Joe. They also began producing some non-series-related theatrical films and did a series of American co-productions with Rankin/Bass Productions. Tezuka left Mushi to create Tezuka productions (which originally focused only on manga and managing his copyrights) in 1968, but Mushi continued for a few years before declaring bankruptcy in 1973. Mushi was later refounded in 1977, and Tezuka Productions began doing animation itself in the interim.

Tezuka himself would go on to work on many more anime productions and write many, many, many more manga, including The Phoenix, Tezuka's self-described life's work, which was published sporadically from 1967 all the way until his death.

 

Where Can I Find It?

The original Jungle Emperor series has been re-released on DVD both in Japan and North America. As far as I know, there is no multi-language or subtitled versions, only the Japanese-audio Jungle Emperor edition and several different English-audio Kimba the White Lion editions.

You can also find many of the North-America-version episodes on YouTube (e.g.).

Note that the original American version had some scenes shortened or altered if NBC thought they were too violent. Any later releases based on these versions may have the same changes. Though some versions, such as the Kimba Ultra Edition DVD box set, include the deleted sections as Extras.

As for the 1966 composite theatrical movie… I haven't been able to find it in any format today.

 

Next Month

Cyborg 009: the progenitor of Tokusatsu-as-anime