Well, other than the crappy animations and music, this movie has a good plot and has a lot to teach us. The Lion King is based on Kimba, so that's a cool thing. It shows the impact of human activity in the animal kingdom. It also celebrates the fact that humans have sophisticated community systems which is part of being civilised. Kimba is a nice character. Otherwise, I don't know what more to say.

I suppose everyone has at least one TV series from their youth, be it animated or not, which somehow they just never shook off, and is capable of inducing irrational devotion in them as an adult. I suppose for me, it's 'Kimba'.

I don't know when 'Kimba' first aired in Tasmania, but in any case he was (as far as I can remember) my first hero. The first TV character I wanted to _be_ back when I was 5 years old. He was a young white lion, king of the jungle, could fight like Bruce Lee, and was an inspirational thinker and leader to boot.

Yet there were any number of other shows and characters I liked as a kid, but I'm not capable of being emotionally stirred these days by Stingray, Time Tunnel, or The Banana Splits (do you have any idea how old that sentence makes me feel?)

I am going to go out on a limb, and assume that there is more to it. That 'Kimba' was a great show that just happened to arrive on TV at the right time for Kimba to be my childhood hero, and that it therefore deserves a place in this database for more objective reasons.

So I better find some of those reasons. Well, first, on a purely historical level, it is an important show in that it was one of the first three anime ever broadcast, and the first ever made in colour. Not that anyone realised it was made in Japan at the time. In fact it was only through a process of reverse-association that I began to figure out in later years that newer shows were made in Japan too (wait, he opens his mouth and goes "Oh!" the same as in 'Kimba'). It was certainly also the first Japanese-American 'co-production' in the sense of later important series like 'Robotech' ('co-production' meaning they bought the original and then did things to it)

But I don't think that's where the real importance and quality of 'Kimba' lie. Given the very difficult task of trying to assess it from an adult perspective, I'd say it was a great series whenever it was made, or whether it only hit the airwaves in the west last year.

That's a big claim, because there are inevitably 'problems' with it, the most obvious being the very limited animation capablities which existed for TV in 1965. Sometimes you think it might make more sense to talk in terms of 'frames per minute' or 'frames per episode' (though I must say it never reaches the amazingly primitive standard of something like 'Captain America', and when they do animate properly it would probably be no worse than most 80's stuff)

Take that as a minus then, but weigh it against these plusses. Firstly the art direction is often quite breathtaking, and Tezuka had a touch with his direction - a sunset, a waterfall, animals moving across the savannah - which was quite simply poetic. There are moments in most episodes that you just have to admire and say to yourself, 'Dang, that was good! Imagine if he'd had real money/technology to throw at it."

Add to this the fact that the soundtrack is by no less a luminary than Isao Tomita. A complete unknown in the West at the time, but later to acquire God-like status in some musical circles for his series of 1970's synthesizer albums ('Snowflakes are Dancing' and others are still considered classics thirty years on). Here the score is orchestral, but Tomita has the ability to turn a musical phrase the same way Tezuka does a visual one, and when the two coincide, it's magic.

Which leaves me finally with the almost ineffable qualities that really elevate 'Kimba' to classic status, which are probably responsible for its cult following despite not having been broadcast since many of our readers were born.

Kimba opens with an emotionally charged couple of episodes in which he loses both his parents, escapes a shipwreck and returns to Africa to take on his father's role and lead the jungle animals. Except Kimba sees his task as involving the intergration of the animal and human worlds, equality between species - he even introduces a plan to make everyone vegetarians, which doesn't work, so they turn to eating insects (Hakuna Matata, anyone?). Despite the near constant threats and challenges being thrown at him, often by the very animals he is trying to unite, Kimba only resorts to fighting after persuasion and idealism prove insufficient alone, and when he does fight it's with a sort of combination of abandon and regret. This is a lot more sophisticated than just about anything else I can think of offered up to kids in the 60's. If Kimba's an action hero, he's more like a Samurai or David Carradine in 'Kung-Fu', than a G.I Joe or John Wayne.

Ultimately I can't disengage myself emotionally from a show that had such a powerful influence on me, perhaps even on the formation of my thinking and personal ideals. But with my eyes as wide open as possible, I can go back and watch these near 40 year-old episodes and say, 'yeah, we won't see the likes of that again.' Tezuka, that notorious hat of mine is permanently off to you for this great series. There's something magic about it which goes beyond my having been five years old once.