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ジャングル大帝 [Jungle Taitei] #1
Chúa tể rừng xanh - Tập 1
Leo là một chú sư tử trắng. Chú là con trai của Panja - chúa tể rừng xanh ở một cánh rừng tại châu Phi. Cha chú đã bị thợ săn bắn chết, còn mẹ bị bắt đem tới vườn thú và hạ sinh chú trên tàu vận chuyển. Khi sinh chú ra mẹ đã căn dặn chú hãy trở về châu Phi thừa kế ngôi vị của cha. Tuy nhiên, con tàu vận chuyển gặp bão và bị đắm. Mẹ Leo đã chết chìm cùng con tàu ngoài khơi xa, còn chú lại lênh đênh trên biển và trôi dạt vào bán đảo Ả Rập. Tại đây chú được một thiếu niên tên Ken nhận nuôi. 1 năm sau, Ken và Leo cùng đoàn nghiên cứu đến châu Phi. Để bảo vệ những động vật nhỏ yếu nơi đây khỏi cuộc sống mạnh được yếu thua, Leo đã đứng lên nhận trọng trách của một vị vua.
174 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1977
1 person is currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
Osamu Tezuka
2,149 books1,286 followersDr. Osamu Tezuka (手塚治虫) was a Japanese manga artist, animator, producer and medical doctor, although he never practiced medicine. Born in Osaka Prefecture, he is best known as the creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. He is often credited as the "Father of Anime", and is often considered the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney, who served as a major inspiration during his formative years. His prolific output, pioneering techniques, and innovative redefinitions of genres earned him such titles as "the father of manga" and "the God of Manga."
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 22, 2021
Officially a big fan of Osamu Tezuka, he’s created lots of great manga with fantastic in depth Story’s and great art👍😁❤️
September 13, 2022
Déçu, je regardais l'animé quand j'était jeune et la manga ne se ressemble pas.
February 10, 2023
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.
**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.
June 16, 2023
This should be 3 1/2*
Kimba the Lion or Jungle Emperor, Leo is certainly a charming work, but also a slightly odd and frustrating one. I'm not sure if there's a preferred audience of children or older teens and it's certainly difficult to tell if its meanderings were ever meant to come together as a coherent story. It feels churlish to criticise a comic-book for being episodic though, and yet for every thing this story does right it seems to do something wrong. It's lovely the way Kimba grows throughout the series, from a naive cub wanting to take on the word, to vengeful and wanting to return to Africa and punish those who killed his father, to a much nobler and caring father figure himself who in turn is mirrored by his own offspring being naive and wanting to take on the world. The art is generally very lovely and Tezuka is able to shift between mostly comic tomfoolery to more meaningful and rewardingly heartfelt panels. it's clear to me already that one of Tezuka's strengths is his versatility and playfulness.
Yet, I found this fundamentally a little unsatisfying in its attempts to weave larger plotlines into the whole. A story about the African moonstone, tectonic plates and conquering Africa come to nothing. As do Kimba's son's wanderings and capture by humans or an explorer's daughter's odd conversion to becoming an African tribe leader. On their own they are along the right lines but they've made me look forward more to a manga - hopefully astroboy - that's better suited to truly episodic storytelling since Kimba at its heart wants to be a journey.
There's no reason to regret picking this up though, at it's heart it's a lovely portrait of anthropomorphised life in Africa (and beyond) full of lots of lovely details and interactions that will inevitably put a smile on one's face - I loved the animals building a palace for Kimba's wife when she's upset at losing her child. I loved the animal's suffering from plague and the human explorer's attempts to rescue them or the elephants being resentful because they don't think jungle animals should speak human. I love Tezuka's expressive artwork, which isn't flash but draws you into its humorous world. I'm talking this up to being a 4* work ...
Kimba the Lion or Jungle Emperor, Leo is certainly a charming work, but also a slightly odd and frustrating one. I'm not sure if there's a preferred audience of children or older teens and it's certainly difficult to tell if its meanderings were ever meant to come together as a coherent story. It feels churlish to criticise a comic-book for being episodic though, and yet for every thing this story does right it seems to do something wrong. It's lovely the way Kimba grows throughout the series, from a naive cub wanting to take on the word, to vengeful and wanting to return to Africa and punish those who killed his father, to a much nobler and caring father figure himself who in turn is mirrored by his own offspring being naive and wanting to take on the world. The art is generally very lovely and Tezuka is able to shift between mostly comic tomfoolery to more meaningful and rewardingly heartfelt panels. it's clear to me already that one of Tezuka's strengths is his versatility and playfulness.
Yet, I found this fundamentally a little unsatisfying in its attempts to weave larger plotlines into the whole. A story about the African moonstone, tectonic plates and conquering Africa come to nothing. As do Kimba's son's wanderings and capture by humans or an explorer's daughter's odd conversion to becoming an African tribe leader. On their own they are along the right lines but they've made me look forward more to a manga - hopefully astroboy - that's better suited to truly episodic storytelling since Kimba at its heart wants to be a journey.
There's no reason to regret picking this up though, at it's heart it's a lovely portrait of anthropomorphised life in Africa (and beyond) full of lots of lovely details and interactions that will inevitably put a smile on one's face - I loved the animals building a palace for Kimba's wife when she's upset at losing her child. I loved the animal's suffering from plague and the human explorer's attempts to rescue them or the elephants being resentful because they don't think jungle animals should speak human. I love Tezuka's expressive artwork, which isn't flash but draws you into its humorous world. I'm talking this up to being a 4* work ...
June 18, 2024
This volume ends with a remark that work may appear racist but Osamu Tezuka intention were not.
Maybe you can justify the blackface and all that by this but I feel the need to mention that I feel that more the art the very themes of kimba the white lion is racist. It about a white lion who civilizes the animals the africa animal to become more like humans. And from human it means european.
Maybe you can justify the blackface and all that by this but I feel the need to mention that I feel that more the art the very themes of kimba the white lion is racist. It about a white lion who civilizes the animals the africa animal to become more like humans. And from human it means european.
February 22, 2019
Toch wel een beetje racistisch met die stereotype afgebeelde Afrikanen...
En ik snap de connectie met The Lion King, maar dit gaat wel ergens anders over natuurlijk.
En ik snap de connectie met The Lion King, maar dit gaat wel ergens anders over natuurlijk.
September 11, 2019
Conoscevo la storia a grandi linee. Molto triste ma assolutamente da leggere, un manga che ha fatto la storia.
November 21, 2019
Carina la storia anche se molto lineare e generale, aspetto di leggere tutti e 3 i volumi
February 9, 2025
Fumetto che ha fatto la storia, ed il suo valore è innegabile. Sono cresciuta guardando il cartone, e forse dal fumetto originale non mi aspettavo parti di humor così caricaturale.
May 26, 2025
Đọc cũng vui vui.
September 9, 2015
La vita e la morte appaiono in una nuova vita così come nella realtà, cruda e agghiacciante. Kimba si ritrova subito in un mondo crudele, catapultato via dall'amore della madre, nell'oceano immenso delle difficoltà. E poi il richiamo della sua vera natura, la forza delle radici e del senso del dovere. Meraviglioso!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews