Movie Thoughts: Jungle Emperor Leo (1997)

• Released: August 1, 1997
• Directed by: Yoshio Takeuchi
• Running time: 1h 39min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

When Leo's son Lune is separated from his family, he'll have to find a way home. Meanwhile, Leo is trying to protect his home from greedy people who want to destroy and profit off of the nature.

My Thoughts

Full disclaimer: This is the first Kimba-related anything I've ever watched. I've never watched any of the other series or movies, so I'm going in completely blind and without context. 

And yeah, not gonna lie, I'm not too pleased with this movie. It felt just...messy. It's not terrible or anything but it just felt like it didn't really know what it was trying to be.

It does have some positives like very nice visuals, and I do like the characters of Leo and Lune, but like, the rest is just messy and a bit confused.

One major thing that I think annoyed me about this movie is that it doesn't seem to know who its main character is. At first it seemed that this was going to be a story about Lune exploring the human world and wanting to return home. And those elements are present, but then the movie just also completely forgets about Lune's subplot for a very long time, and it suddenly mostly takes place from Leo's point of view, with Lune only returning at the end? I don't mind a movie that has split POVs, of course, but there needs to be a balance between the plots, not the movie almost completely forgetting a subplot for a large portion of its runtime. Either that, or they just should've picked one, either Lune's or Leo's plot, and really focused on one of those.

Another thing that irked me about this movie is that the female characters just straight up aren't well written. Leo's mate pretty much only exists to give birth to the cubs and then die, Lune's sister is just kinda "there" and then needs to be rescued, and the only other female character of note is like, a circus artists who helped out Lune once but is barely in the movie. Meanwhile the male characters get all the focus and development and they are capable, etc. I'm just not impressed with how they wrote the female characters here at all.

By the way, there are a lot of deaths in this movie, but they didn't resonate with me personally at all so I honestly felt no grief when a character on the side of good passed away. Even one of our mains, Leo, ends up dying, and I just felt nothing. So the movie didn't do a very good job of making me care about its characters.

Overall I guess it's not a terrible movie, it's decent enough. But it didn't do anything for me personally. I'm not sure if I'll check out more Kimba media based on this experience, it didn't exactly sell me on the franchise.