A kid fleeing colonial Kenya stumbles into a fever dream that escalates from survival thriller to monster movie to something genuinely unhinged, all in ninety minutes with the aesthetic of pure 1980s anime ambition. The pacing doesn't build, it sprints, cramming so much into the runtime that the seams show, but that's the point; this is what happens when creators refuse to choose between Tarzan, King Kong, and whatever else they wanted to make. You're either magnetized by that refusal to settle or completely alienated by the incoherence. Either way, you're watching something that only existed in this specific decade, in this specific medium, made by people who believed they could do it all.

In 1941, eleven-year-old Murakami Wataru lives in British Kenya with his family, Japanese traders who deal in textiles. Then war breaks out between Japan and the Allied powers, and Wataru flees into the bush. There he tumbles into one fantastic adventure after another. The 1984 film is an adventure story set against the backdrop of wartime East Africa.