Kenya Boy-
I suppose there is something that ought to be said here, and I feel like that something should probably just be about the racism in this piece. As something written in the 1950s you really cannot expect that much out of this, I suppose. You’d be hard pressed to find a society that wasn’t racist back then. Granted, the piece came out during the 1980s, and I don’t really feel the rest of the content is entirely worth commenting upon, so one must ask
why someone didn’t really think about it in the 80s. There really isn’t any character in this who isn’t a racist caricature in the piece. The Africans range from the noble savage archetype of Zega, to the just plain savage of the witch doctor, to the outlandishly bizarre of the lizard men. Not a one is really that positive, though, and the fact that there are some who are BLUE only makes it worse. There’s nary a white who isn’t brilliantly blonde, but the real humor here is that the Japanese man is filling a role one normally sees of a white man in Hollywood movies, learning and becoming even better at the natives’ skillsets in a wildly short amount of time. The long story short is that it’s all wildly racist, but as something written just barely after the end of WWII, it’s hard to really be that surprised.
Moving away from that for a moment, there are two other, lesser points worth commenting on in Kenya Boy. The first is that, at its heart, the story is about a young man’s quest to become a man, and to reunite with his parents. In that sense, it’s not that bad. Yoshi definitely grows up over the course of the film, and his efforts to reunite with his father, and his relationship with father figure Zega are appreciable for what they are. It was hardly moving and rarely engaging, but it did what it wanted to do, and I respect that.
The other is that the setting of the story is less “Africa” and more “Batshit insane The Lost World”. At first it SEEMS like Africa, since there are lions and rhinos and hippos oh my! But as time goes on, we discover that there are also giant frogs, giant snakes, giant komodo dragons, and when a nuclear bomb explodes, there are dinosaurs. Like a T-Rex fights the giant snake at the film’s climax. Why this is I have no idea. I suppose the Technicolor atmosphere, black lightning, and draconic battle is meant to demonstrate just how truly horrifying a nuclear explosion is (since Zega comments “this will always happen when humans are possessed by demons.”
, because, you know, nuclear explosions aren’t scary enough on their own.
But that’s Kenya Boy for you.
