Tezuka In English Discussion Forums

The essay has now been officially posted on the main site. You can get to it through the main page, or the Analysis section. Thanks so much for writing it.

With the posting of the Kimba essay, TezukaInEnglish.com now officially has 300 pages of content! A big thank-you to all our contributors.

I read through about half of it.... well done cmoon.

One thing that did give me pause is that in your synopsis you seem to think that the two african tribes (Donga-the one Hamegg gets the moonlight stone from, and Junga - the one Mary becomes queen of...) are the same. I'd have to re-read my manga, but I'm pretty sure that they're two different tribes - albeit with simialr names.

I think this is a pretty necessary distinction though. Whereas the Donga tribe are more or less willing to embrace their foreign guests, the Junga tribe are hostile towards all outsiders.

I'll have to read through the rest, but great job so far cmoon.

It's funny you say that. In an earlier draft I mentioned my confusion over whether there were one or two tribes, but removed it from this draft since I assumed the mistake was mine. If you can verify (being the translator) that these are indeed two tribes, it would be helpful.

And thanks for the feedback Strobe!

While searching for data on another subject, I found an online preview of , which has an entire chapter some 40 pages in length devoted to this question, & it is available online:



Needless to say, this covers the subject in a depth far greater than T in E's page does. Moreover, it reaches the opposite conclusion.

I just finished Fred Ladd's new book, Astro Boy & Anime..., it has a chapter about Kimba that includes a fairly extensive section about Tezuka's original plan for the series, & how it was changed to suit NBC Enterprises.

It would be interesting to know how substantially different / more in depth that is in comparison to the story we get through the kimba box. I have to admit that my interest in Fred Ladd and Co. is pretty limited so I haven't bothered to investigate it.

Still, it is very clear that the Kimba series is a really amazing (or really botched, depending on your take) fusion of what Tezuka originally had in mind and what NBC wanted.

What's interesting to me is how Tezuka rarely seems to want to redo what he's already done in manga, so I suspect even if he had had his way, we'd still have seen something rather different than the Leo story.

I haven't seen any of that series. I got the impression that beyond the first few episodes it was pretty dreadful (this coinciding with Tezuka's death.) If you've seen that series you know more than I do.