This is the story of an orphaned baby lion called Buru-buru. Missing his parents he feels terribly lonely. Until a helpful rabbit brings Buru-buru together with Muku-muku, a friendly dog who is mourning the loss of her own puppy. Against all odds, Buru-buru and Muku-muku forge an inseparable bond as the dog raises the lion cub as her own. As the years roll by Buru-buru grows into an enormous lion who dwarfs the doting Muku-muku. One day Buru-buru happens to glance at a puddle where he sees his reflection for the first time. He is shocked to see he looks nothing like his mother. Unfortunately other people notice it too.
Intended as the first in a series of animated musical shorts that never came to be, Yasashii Lion or The Kindly Lion was produced by Japanimation legend Osamu Tezuka. However, the driving force behind the film was Takashi Yanase. A man of many talents, Yanase was a poet, lyricist, illustrator and children's writer. In Japan he is best known as the creator of Anpanman a very popular manga and anime series detailing the adventures of a childlike superhero with an edible head (!) Here Yanase served as writer, director and art designer on this adaptation of his 1969 children's book.
Told via a series of charmingly childlike storybook illustrations, the story unfolds both visually and through two styles of narration. The first being a mother recounting this unusual tale of mother love to her own little child as a bedtime story. Yanase also includes musical narration with key lullabies performed by singer and actress Chiharu Kuri and a sing-along chorus performed by the Bonny Jacks, a quartet that formed in the late Fifties and remain active to this day. Certain sequences where the grownup Buru-buru charges dynamically across the plains to the strains of the stirring male voice choir recall iconic images from Tezuka's own lion saga: Jungle Emperor Leo a.k.a. Kimba the White Lion which one would personally argue remains the finest children's anime ever made.
In terms of story The Kindly Lion shares some interesting themes in common with Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1952), an endearing animated short produced by the Walt Disney studio about a lion raised by a sheep that was nominated for an Oscar. There the treatment was broadly comedic but the Japanese cartoon opts for a somewhat more eloquent mixture of poetry, cuteness and tragedy Yanase was able to amp up even further in a later, thematically similar work: Ringing Bell (1978). Both films centre around orphaned animals being adopted by a different species that then go on to suffer an identity crisis. Yet whereas Ringing Bell spins this into a child-traumatizing quasi-Oedipal nightmare wherein the lamb hero is adopted by the very wolf that ate his mother, The Kindly Lion is more warmhearted. It is an ode to mother love and a parable about learning to accept and embrace our own differences and that families come in different forms even when the world at large does not see things the same way. Indeed the plot takes a left-turn into tragedy that leaves The Kindly Lion among the more challenging children's fare even though adults will admire its lyrical wisdom and emotional honesty. If your kids tear up at the mere thought of the closing shot of Raymond Briggs' The Snowman (1982) or you can't quite bring yourself to tell them how Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid really ends compared to the sanitized Disney version, you might want to tread carefully around this potential sob-fest.
