The Cultural Odyssey of the Japanese Lion King
A cub who witnesses the death of his father. An evil lion with a scar across his right eye. A wise baboon and a bird that guides the lost prince to retake his kingdom.
That’s the plot of The Lion King. Yes, and also the plot of the Japanese animated TV series Kimba the White Lion which aired across the United States in the 1960s.
Ever since the release of The Lion King in 1994, film critics and journalists alike have been quick to identify the similarities between the Disney Classic and the Japanese show. Today, articles are still being written on how The Lion King stole from Kimba the White Lion.
But rarely do these articles discuss the story behind this Japanese anime. In fact, whether it was an inspiration for The Lion King or not, the show itself remains a testament to an interesting period in film and television history which saw the globalization of the genre.
The plot of Kimba the White Lion was set in Africa; its creator, Osamu Tezuka, was a Japanese manga artist; and its spiritual successor, The Lion King, was an American film. It is proof that the stories we tell through film can be universal in their appeal.
The creation of Kimba the White Lion was a mismatch of different cultural and creative decisions. Because they had different goals for the production, the conflict between the program’s creator, Osamu Tezuka, and the American TV network, NBC, resulted in a program that no one quite knew what to do with. Tezuka wanted a more serious character drama, while NBC wanted a superhero show to market to children. With conflicting messages for the direction of the show, when the series was finally adapted for American TV, the production team often had no idea what they were doing. But remarkably what resulted from the American production was an exciting, imaginative, and charming show that became an international success, translated into sixteen different languages since its release in 1965.
The narrative of Kimba the White Lion originated from a Japanese manga novel. Famous manga artist and writer Osamu Tezuka, often credited as “The Father of Anime,” published Jungle Emperor (Jungle Taitei) from 1950 to 1954, a story about a white lion named Leo who upon experiencing and learning about human society returns to Africa to unite the animal and human worlds. The series was immensely popular in Japan. Music from the Jungle Emperor’s pilot episode became a musical classic for Japanese children and its protagonist, the lion Leo, became the mascot for the Seibu Lions, a Japanese professional baseball team. Leo the lion along with Tezuka’s other characters like Mighty Atom (Atom Boy) became emblems for the genre of manga itself comparable in recognition to Disney’s Mickey Mouse in Japan.
Although the original manga never reached a global audience, it laid the groundwork for the international success of the later TV show Kimba the White Lion with its seeming incorporation of a myriad of Japanese and Western influences in artistic style, story elements, and character design. These mixtures of Japanese and Western cliches embodied the philosophy of Tezuka, the mukokuseki.
Meaning ‘stateless’ or ‘without nationality,’ the mukokuseki was a concept to create stories that could resonate with audiences despite any cultural boundaries. For Tezuka, this kind of story could be accomplished through plots that dealt with universal human experience. Oftentimes, his manga focuses on the issue of equality among different races or species which he conveyed through a recurring theme of a divide between humans and non-humans like animals or robots. For instance, in Jungle Emperor there was ongoing conflict between the human hunters and the hunted animals. It was a depiction of a moral conundrum, our tendencies to value human lives over animal lives, a message that speaks beyond the divisions of races and cultures.
These cliches of human experience even affected his artistic style which sought to deliberately create characters without obvious ethnic and gendered features. The big sparkling eyes of his characters, a hallmark of Tezuka’s manga, while possibly a stylistic choice, also remove ethnic and gendered features from the faces of his characters. These impossibly large eyes are entirely a fictional creation, not rooted in any real facial characteristics.
However, Tezuka’s character designs do have connections to cultural histories. For instance, it is likely that Tezuka’s sparkly eyed characters were inspired by Japanese Takarazuka, a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe. Growing up in the city of Takarazuka, Tezuka’s mother would often bring him to watch Takarazuka performances. These Takarazuka performers would act Japanese renditions of Broadway-style productions wearing large false eyelashes and thick eye shadow so that their eyes would shine when reflecting the spotlight allowing their expressions to reach the furthest seat in the auditorium. In an interview commentating on the development of his own artistic and storytelling style, Tezuka responded, “Takarazuka is a city of memories as well as the starting point of my work, where my philosophy was born.”
But these artistic choices could have also come from his exposure to Western, mostly American, cartoons and comics in the 1940s and 1950s. The facial features of exaggerated eye size and head-body proportions may have originated from Max Fleischer’s animated show Betty Boop. In an interview later in his life, Tezuka said: “Speaking of myself, when it comes to comics, from 1947 or ’48, for the next fifteen or sixteen years, I was heavily influenced by American comics.”
Disney animation was another major source of inspiration for Tezuka. Writing in 1973, Tezuka said about himself, “I liked Disney, I adored Disney, here before you is a man whose life was determined by Disney.” Tezuka has long held that the 1942 movie Bambi was his inspiration for Jungle Emperor. The theme of the hunted versus the hunters and a cast of talking animals appear in both productions. At a 1978 comics festival in Los Angeles, Tezuka described Jungle Emperor as a homage and a critique of Bambi.
With both Japanese and Western influences on his artistic style and story writing, Tezuka truly sought to create a story that could feel internationally familiar, a story that traversed cultural barriers. His stories focused on concepts universal to human experience and his characters were stripped of recognisable ethnic and gendered features to endear them to different cultural expectations of the common human. The result is a product that an audience from anywhere in the world can relate to.
However, despite the emphasis Tezuka places on the idea of mukokuseki, it is important to recognize that when he did intentionally portray racial characters, particularly of Africans and African Americans, they were often stereotypical and derogatory. For instance, in Jungle Emperor, Africans and African-Americans displayed large lips, comically dark skin, and heavily caricatured facial features reminiscent of many old American cartoons from the Jim Crow era. On this subject, Dr. John G. Russell wrote: “Tezuka continued to draw stereotyped blacks in Japan until his death. He knew they were considered derogatory, yet he continued. He could not plead ignorance.”
In 1965, Tezuka succeeded in adapting Jungle Emperor into a 52-episode TV series, Kimba the White Lion. It earned international acclaim, winning several awards including the prestigious St. Mark's Silver Lion Award at the 19th Venice Film Festival. While the show achieved success rather effortlessly, its production had been utterly chaotic. Throughout each stage of production, Kimba the White Lion experienced numerous changes which culminated in a heavily compromised version of the original story.
The most drastic change perhaps was the removal of the human hunters from the main plot which were fundamental to the original moral dilemma Tezuka was introducing with Jungle Emperor. All elements of this serious character drama were regulated to side characters and story lines. Instead, the American version of the show would be simplified down to a light-hearted hero’s journey of the lion Kimba learning to take his place as prince of the animal kingdom. Yet, despite these changes to the original story, it was this process of simplification, introducing more cliches to the show to make it more marketable to a larger audience, that was able to further internationalize the TV series. With the sidelining of the human hunters, the violence of the show, which may have deterred a younger audience, was toned down, creating a story that could be enjoyed by all ages.
The adaptation of the series to an American audience began with the names of the characters which were deemed too ethnically Japanese. Characters like the human uncle Higeoyaji were changed to Mr. Pompous and the side character Kenichi was changed to Roger Ranger. Moreover, to avoid association with the famous MGM lion, Leo became Kimba. Originally the producers intended to name their hero Simba meaning lion in Swahili; however, it was later rejected given the possibility of a number of African-American trademark applications for the Simba name.
The show also eliminated almost half of the original plot. Critically Kimba, who in the manga grew up to become an adult, remained a cub for the entire show so children could relate to him. If Kimba grew up, the American network, NBC, felt it would lose viewership. The same reasoning led NBC to limit the violence in Tezuka’s story. Rather than a lion who spent his entire life fighting long, bloody battles to win back his animal kingdom, NBC made Kimba into a super-lion who won all his battles without much effort and without much bloodshed. More room was instead made for character development and humor. It was believed that this simplified version of Kimba would be more palatable to American children who were used to watching superhero cartoons.
On the occasion that the American team received a scene from the Japanese production team featuring more violence than NBC had allowed, the voice actors would have to find creative ways to censor the story. In one episode where Kimba is held back by his friend from attacking a human hunter after Kimba learns that Specs was responsible for the jungle’s peril, Kimba says, “Don’t try to stop me, Ranger… I’m gonna see to it that he doesn’t do it again!” But in the original Japanese, Kimba says something closer to, “Get out of my way unless you want to get hurt, too!” NBC also modified the original story into an episodic series with each episode holding a self-contained storyline. A simpler story would reach a wider audience who did not need to tune in every week to keep up with the story. It would also let NBC broadcast the show to local TV stations without concern for the order of the episodes.
The final product was aired in Japan in October 1965 with its original Japanese title of Jungle Emperor. In America, the show premiered a year later as NBC waited until all 52 episodes were dubbed and edited by the American production team. Finally, in September 1966, the first episode of Kimba the White Lion aired on TVs across the United States.
It was a massive success. By the early 2000s, Kimba the White Lion had aired and been distributed in 24 different countries. It was even awarded the St. Mark's Silver Lion Award at the 19th Venice International Film Festival in 1967.
A sequel, Onward Leo!, was later developed by Tezuka as a more faithful adaptation of the manga, but, in doing so, the magic of the original was lost. In the sequel, Leo (Kimba) had grown into an adult lion. He was married and had children. The show was also gritty with more mature themes. Leo was no longer the superhero-like protagonist that could win every battle; instead, he would struggle in fights and fought aggressively with excessive violence at times.
Understandably, NBC wanted nothing to do with the project. This older Leo who fought bloody, realistic animal battles was too far removed from the kid-friendly cartoon NBC had instructed Tezuka to create for the original show. It was a no-sale.
Almost 20 years after its release in Japan, the sequel under the name Leo the Lion aired briefly in 1984 in the United States before being quickly relegated to a VHS home video release. Even in Japan, Onward Leo!, which was produced solely by Tezuka and his Japanese team, was not as popular as the original show; it aired once in 1966, unlike the original show which had numerous reruns.
Ultimately, it was through these changes to the original story by NBC and the American production team that Tezuka’s efforts to create a story with the philosophy of mukokuseki would truly thrive. Kimba the White Lion approaches the realm of international mass culture by seemingly effacing its own origins through a transformation of its original premise to suit an international audience. It was this fusion of Eastern and Western cultures that allowed the story of Kimba the White Lion to become a story with universal reach. This process of simplification condensed the story of Kimba into cliches of fundamental human experience that all cultures could appreciate. As Umberto Eco writes, “a cliche can take on immense reverberation in the right context and even create Homeric depth.”