For those who were confused: the Jungle Emperor Leo remake is not a full fledged TV-series of 80 episodes. It’s a TV-special celebrating the 80th birthday of Osamu Tezuka. It’s about one hour and 45 minutes long, and directed by the director of Code Geass of all people. Still, while this show has its flaws it still serves as a very nice family movie that perfectly captures the childish side of Osamu Tezuka, and yet isn’t afraid to become dark and serious.

Jungle Emperor Leo is an environmentalist anime, and with these kinds of stories there always are plenty of obvious pitfalls. A lot of environmentalist stories lack any sort of subtlety, and often contain entire monologues on the creators’ morals. Yes, we get that the earth is in danger. We get that man is evil. Now stop shoving it down our throats!

Typical of Osamu Tezuka, the basic premise of this special is overly idealistic: humans are evil and make animals suffer. However, it brings a lot of twists to the table, and I mean a lot. This isn’t just a matter in which some character you thought to be evil turn out to be good and vice versa, but there’s a very imaginative back-story behind everything that really makes you think about where humanity is going with the pollution of the earth. It criticizes modern technology, but at the same time it also pays homage to it. The main villain, while he’s obviously got a very sick and twisted mind, isn’t pure evil either: if it wasn’t for his actions, the animals would have been even worse off, and his feelings for his son give a surprising human touch to him.

In the lead are two young children: a young lion and a young boy. These two form the back-bone of this special, and while they’re not the most interesting characters, they do their job of keeping the series going without getting boring because the creators put a lot of time in fleshing the two of them out. They’re both charming, yet flawed characters that are nice to watch if you can accept the fact that they’re a couple of little kids and that the boy can talk to animals for no apparent reason. The majority of the rest of the cast also has well backed-up reasons for their actions, which is always a nice thing.

Unfortunately though, the ending is pretty cheesy, and nullifies a lot of development that went into the setting. It’s too idealistic and solves things way too easily. Plus, it’s got this thing in which small animals are able to win fights with fully grown animals… which is pretty lame no matter how you look at it. This special really tries, but in the end it can’t fully shake its stereotypical nature.

This anime reminds me a lot of Miyori no Mori: both involve kids who somehow can talk to beings they’re not supposed to see, and protect them from evil humans. In the end, I like Miyori no Mori better because even though it too was idealistic, it feels more complete and heart-warming, plus it showed a more realistic portrayal of its lead character. Nevertheless, Jungle Emperor Leo really served its job as a homage to Osamu Tezuka, and the creators stuffed a lot of nice elements in it.

Haha, what an awesome episode. With such a huge series with so many different subplots and such a frantic pacing, I was really expecting some sort of trainwreck for the final episodes. And yet the opposite turns out to be true, and instead the finale developed into a thriller to stop Ryouko from trying to destroy the world.

And really: it works. Because the rest of the series fleshed Ryouko out so well compared to most villains out there, she’s far away from those stereotypical evil overlords and really stands out as a huge threat to the lead characters. Her mindset is demented, yes. But at the same time as a villain, she’s very competent: she knew exactly how to place the chess pieces right in order to get her way; so far, she only made one mistake throughout the entire series in terms of her own ideals: she didn’t know that the daggers could be removed from the altar, and she didn’t know that they could cut through any kind of steel. And I admit: you’ve got to think pretty far-fetched in order to have seen that one coming if you didn’t know anything about it.

I also love how she also averts one of the tropes that most villains of her kind strangely get away with. Suppose you were working for an evil overlord, and found out that your master was planning to destroy the world, you included. Would you still support this boss? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Ryouko did well to keep all her plans to herself, right until it wouldn’t matter anymore who would find out. I mean, her plan to hold Kunihito’s parents hostages would never have worked for long, but it did buy her the necessary time to take Mikuni away from Kuniko.

And yeah: this episode finally explains what happened to Karin’s parents: they turn out to have been dead all along. Talk about an awesome plot twist here: all the wealth she attained, everything she gained when she created Medusa: it was all just a case of denial in her case.

Okay, so one episode is left. The set-up for the final episode is fairly straightforward: Ryouko wants Mikuni to destroy the world, Kuniko is here to stop her. What I want to see from this series is an ending which is more than “Kuniko and Ryouko have a fight and Kuniko wins”. I’ve seen too many series who have fallen to this trap, but if there’s any series who is able to evade this, it’s Shangri-La. This series really has exceeded my expectations at this point. These past few episodes took it away from its image of “yet another trainwreck” when it showed that it’s very well capable of writing a solid finale. What more could you want?

And yeah. Who cares that Kuniko descended the tube with her dagger? It’s science fiction. Who knows whether that dagger has magical slowing-down powers?
Rating: *** (Awesome)

At the end of this episode, there’s an insert song. I suspect the lyrics to be gibberish or some other obscure language, and I don’t exactly know who sung it, but whoever she was, she really has an amazing voice. Thumbs up to whoever she was.

Anyway, yet another episode of excellent buildup, and a surprising scene from Sumni who proves once and for all that she’s able to kick ass. Probably the most important part in this episode was Guin (ZOMG) leaving Remus and Linda: for one, he did it because he’s targeted and Remus nearly got killed if it wasn’t for Sumni, and this also allows him to pursue his own goals, now that Remus and Linda have found their place back where they belong. At the same time, Istvan also learns that Naris is planning to marry Linda for his own goals, and quickly ends the alliance he made with him.

Looking back, the weakest part of the Guin Saga was definitely the CG of the Mongol army in the Nosferas arc: while a nice try, the creators just weren’t able to simulate grand grand-scale battles with the limited budget they had. That does sort-of worry me for the finale for this series, as it promises to end with an all-out battle between the armies of Naris, Amnelis, Remus and Scar. Did the creators save up enough budget to make it work, or does the plot have a few more surprises to make up for the flawed battles?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

FFor me, this was the best episode of this series since the move to Marysville. I really expected some emo cheese-fest in this episode, with Noah randomly getting sick and all, but as it turns out the creators had very clear ideas on what this episode was going to be about.

Unlike what I thought at first, this episode really wasn’t about Noah. It’s sad and all that he got sick to the verge of death, but I really don’t care about this kid enough to really call his near-demise engaging. What instead caught my attention was how his accident completely jumbled up the Thomas Family: we suddenly got a complete different image of what everyone was like, and a couple of characters actually got some development out of it.

I mean… when Noah collapsed, it was Anne who took him out of the hands of HIS OWN MOTHER, in order to take care of him, while Johanna was instead following Anne and assisting her. You’ve got to fail pretty badly as a mother if you let a nine-year-old make decisions for you that affect the life of your children.

Horace thus far has been your typical child: always goofing off, however in this episode he slowly began to see that he was the oldest. Of course his attempts to show this failed pretty badly, but I think that he reached the point at which he’s going to start to mature, rather than goof around all of the time. Edward meanwhile kept staying with Harry: he’s starting to become a big brother to him, even though before he was just mimicking Horace. I suspect that from now on, Anne is going to have it much easier to try and take care of the house, simply because with this, the Horace/Edward combo has finally been broken.

But the biggest focus of this episode was of course on Bert. In a way, this guy is actually developed better than Anne. While on one hand that’s a bit wrong in a series called “Konnichiwa ANNE”, but on the other hand it allows a really in-depth look at a type of character who hardly ever gets this much attention in today’s anime which is all about moe and bishies. We hardly ever get to see this much attention to a character who is as flawed as Bert, and in this episode you really could see the fruits of all the mistakes he made in the past: what the doctor’s mother said may have been very blunt, but it was how just about everyone in the village saw him as: a good for nothing drunkard who never works. Because of that, he never gets the chance of another job, keeps drinking and just continues the vicious cycle.

The scenes around Noah recovering were a bit too cheesy, on the other hand. I’m surprised that even though this series really knows how little kids behave, they really only seemed to have focused on their every day behavior. Not what they’d be like during a crisis. But then again, that of course is pretty hard to study, since you can’t just sit by a sick kid and observe what his family is doing.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Hmm, this episode was a bit of a step back for this series. It had a great potential, but in my opinion the creators wanted it to make an emotional impact a bit too hard and so the episode featured a bit too much overacting and clichés.

The fight between Lin and Wrath was great: it really showed yet again that this is a series in which nobody is just going to get himself killed that easily. The fight was inspired and dangerous, without overpowering the characters in your typical shounen-esque series. It really showed that Lin’s performance for the past few episodes was indeed very much an act, and is a force to be reckoned with.

But yeah: then we cut to the fight between Ed, Al and Scar. In order to buy some time for Lin to show up (of course not knowing what happened to them), Ed and Al start talking about philosophy. Ed then mentions Winry’s parents, just at the moment which Winry chose to show up in order to check up on him. So she gets emo, grabs a gun that happened to be lying around, and fails to shoot the guy who killed her parents. I’ve never really been a fan of her, and I really feel that her voice actress was really trying too hard in this episode.

It’s a shame, because Scar was really good in this episode. His background is much like in the first series, but a lot more brutal and realistic. He feels sorry for what he did for Winry, but at the same time his mindset is not idealistic enough to just drop his guard and try to make up for her loss in every way he can.

But yeah, I really do wish that the creators are going to make Winry go back to Resembool soon, because she really doesn’t belong as a main character in this series. Once in a while she does something slightly useful, but the show often gets too angsty with her around, with this episode as the epitome. If I want to see angsty teenagers, there are plenty of other shows I can go to.
Rating: (Enjoyable)