Shounen Kenya

Circa 2024. After watching Kenya Boy I am quite stunned. It uses some standard "boy must survive in Africa tropes" but then had a pacing that only intensifies by the minute. It is one of those movies that most represents what it meant to be an anime in the 80s.

I won't bother with a synopsis, just know a boy gets lost in Africa due to the start of WW2 and must survive nature while looking for his father. This is the basic stuff that would normally make this an average movie, it's how far the writer went from there that truly makes ... this a classic. Explosions, monsters, and a good vibes ending truly is what makes it 80s.

Music feels classic. Animation is very well done, but had some questionable choices where they remove colors and sometimes backgrounds from scenes that makes some parts look a unfinished but thinking back on it, I suspect were completely stylistic.

Africa's natural beauty is in full glorious display, Africa's culture, not so much. Regardless how accurate it is, African tribes are mostly portrayed in a stereotypically offensive or at least tacky way. Luckily by the end of the movie it's easy to overlook since the true enemy of the movie is revealed and the trusted allies were the friends they made along the way.

A truly classic action adventure spectacle, the likes of which we never see today.

There's this concept of a show that is "So Bad It's Good" - as in, it is recognized to be a terrible movie/show, but its terrible-ness is so over the top that it is actually entertaining to watch. In fact, MST3K was founded on this principle.

Kenya Boy is definitely one of those "So Bad It's Good" movies.

As it started, I thought I was in for a standard Coming Of Age story, as a young boy is separated from his father in the heart of Africa at the start of war, and has to fend ... for himself. Well, okay, I can go along with that.

And then, it starts to go off the rails. Just a little bit at first, with things like giant animals and such. But then it just goes absolutely nuts.

I won't go into all details because spoilers, but soon he (along with his father-mentor-figure) are fighting off literally hundreds of swarming tribesmen with nothing but a single spear. Giant frog! Giant snake! Which they ride! Giant lizard! The Lizard King! Blond jungle woman!

By the end of the movie it gets so crazy they add in actual Nazis,fighting dinosaurs and an atomic explosion.

Don't you dare go into this, expecting to take any of this seriously. It's a bad movie, sure, but it is damn entertaining. Especially if you want to watch it with a bunch of friends that like to one-up each other with snarky comments.

An odd film based on a manga by Yamakawa Souji, Shonen Kenya (or, "Kenya Boy"), tells the story of 11-year old Wataru Murakami, who gets separated from his father as they are travelling through Kenya. He must then survive the perils that he encounters, with the help of a few allies he meets along the way.

The story is pretty standard when it comes to adventure films, and it seems to have taken much inspiration from classic black & white jungle adventure films of the 30s and 40s such as King Kong, Gunga Din, or the many others that were released during that era. However, the ... plot here doesn't have much of a structure to it, jumping from one scene to the next without much of any reason or purpose other than to showcase some action or animation. Much of the middle of the film is spent in action scenes that exist for little to no reason, where many of the characters' goals and motivations aren't resolved or moved forward in any way. This tends to make things drag quite a bit. There's also a plothole here and there that will introduce questions that never get resolved, and were seemingly overlooked by the directors. I will say, however, that that main story at both the beginning and the end of the film are well executed, but still aren't anything other than average in terms of content.

The characters tend to be somewhat enjoyable, but also aren't anything special, and the biggest problem I have is with the lead character, Wataru, who tends to change his tone and behavior from scene to scene. In the beginning he starts off as timid and shy, then once he's separated from his father he runs for his life. After a day or two has passed, he suddenly becomes able to do acrobatics and fight off animals as though he's lived in the wilderness all his life. He also occasionally has outbursts of cockiness that seem entirely out of character for him, then he goes back to being kind-hearted. It seems like the writers just didn't really know what to do with him and so they just wrote his character as what it needed to be for the scene without giving things much thought. The odd part is that many of the supporting cast don't suffer from this kind of multiple-personality writing, only the lead.

The animation is a mixed bag. The film opens with some experimental animation using flat colors without any lines, and then switches to a two-tone black & white animation style for the opening credits. After the credits are over, we then switch to the main look of the film, which is fairly standard looking 1980s CEL animation that tends to look only marginally better than TV animation of the era, not being able to stand up to other animated films from that time period in terms of quality.
However, the experimental animation doesn't take a backseat for long, and aside from the other two styles I mentioned, we get a bunch more. For instance, there was a scene where the animation consisted entirely of blue linework on a black background, and you could see the film reel around the edges of the screen. There was another scene where one native tribesman was completely uncolored so you could see the background through him. You might assume this was simply in error, but all of the other tribesmen around him were colored in, and he was uncolored for TWO consecutive shots, which made it seem bizarrely intentional. These different animation styles tend to range from "unique" and "interesting" to "baffling" and "bizarre", but no matter how they come across they really don't tend to add much of anything to the film's overall style, leaving it feeling like the art director just slapped these elements together for no reason at all.

The soundtrack is executed well enough, and sets the tone well. The main theme also sets a nice tone, and was pretty catchy, but nothing that's going to get stuck in my head for hours. The voice actors all played their roles well, and had good delivery on their lines, but there wasn't any breakout performances that would be super memorable. Overall, the audio side of things is well executed, above average, but nothing remarkable.

Overall, Shonen Kenya is an odd film, which seems to try to do too much and, as a result, this ends up being it's downside. There's a decent story buried in here, but all of the stuff around it feels like it was just jumbled together without much thought or care going into any of it, leaving us with a slapdash film that feels bizarre in it's execution and confusing in it's presentation. The main story isn't interesting enough on it's own to warrant such a complicated production, and these bizarre elements only bring it down further and make the bland story more difficult to enjoy... so I'd really only recommend it to people who are simply curious about seeing the bizarre side of the film, anybody else could easily just skip this one.