The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun arrived in Japanese cinemas in 1968, carrying ambitions that no anime film had openly declared before it. A young boy pulls a rusty sword from the shoulder of a stone giant, and by the time the credits roll, that sword has become a symbol of something much larger than any single hero. The film was the directorial debut of Isao Takahata, and it gathered around him a group of young animators whose collaboration would define Japanese animation for the next five decades. One of those animators was Hayao Miyazaki, credited here for scene design and key animation. Their partnership, born on this production, would outlast every studio they ever worked at together. But in 1968, audiences barely got the chance to see what these two had made. The film's theatrical run lasted only ten days. The questions worth sitting with are these: why did a film that critics would later rank among the greatest anime ever made vanish so quickly from cinemas, and what did it plant in the medium that would eventually flower at Studio Ghibli?

• 2. Origins and Source

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  The story of Horus reaches back beyond Japanese animation entirely. Its roots lie in the Yukar, the oral tradition of the Ainu people, the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Hokkaido. A screenwriter adapted an Ainu epic into a puppet play, and that puppet play became the basis for the film's screenplay. Because depicting the Ainu people directly risked controversy, the production team shifted the setting to Scandinavia, placing the story in an unspecified northern kingdom in ancient Norway.

  The relocation was not merely a diplomatic gesture. It aligned with the film's other ambitions. The story was designed to speak to adult audiences and to reflect the societal tensions of contemporary Japan. The village community at the heart of the film embodies socialist ideals: the protagonists do not simply improve their own lives, they grow in ways that benefit society as a whole. Patrick Drazen, writing in his book Anime Explosion, identified the ending sequences as thinly disguised rallying cries for the union and student movements of the era, and noted the film was warmly received by those same movements. Miyazaki and Takahata were themselves union organizers at Toei at the time, a fact that would have significant consequences for the film's distribution.

• 3. Making the Film

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  Production on Horus began in autumn 1965 and did not conclude until March 1968, a span of roughly two and a half years. Most feature-length anime at Toei Animation were completed in approximately eight to ten months. The extended schedule reflected a deliberate approach to the work. Takahata and animation director Yasuo Otsuka ran their planning and storyboard meetings as open collaborations, inviting contributions from the entire production team rather than issuing instructions from above. This egalitarian method is the reason Hayao Miyazaki's influence on the film runs as deep as it does.

  The core team extended well beyond the two names history most remembers. Yasuji Mori, Reiko Okuyama, and Yoichi Kotabe all contributed key animation. All of them except Takahata, who is not an animator, also contributed to character designs. The budget exceeded what any anime film had spent before. Horus held the record as the most expensive anime film produced until Space Battleship Yamato surpassed it in 1977. Within Toei, however, the company's priorities were shifting away from theatrical animation and toward television production, a shift that left the film without institutional backing at a critical moment.

• 4. Hilda and What She Meant

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  Hilda is not the hero of Horus, Prince of the Sun. She is the sister of the ice devil Grunwald, placed under his evil influence, and she collaborates in attacks against the very village that welcomed her. Yet she is the character critics and scholars kept returning to in the decades after the film's release. Helen McCarthy, writing in Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, singled out Yasuji Mori's character design for Hilda, describing the approach as "clean and simple" in a way that gave the character room for emotional depth and flexibility. McCarthy traced that design sensibility as a continuing influence on the later works of both Takahata and Miyazaki.

  Patrick Drazen went further, arguing that Hilda represents the first in a long line of multidimensional heroines in the work of these two directors. She is not good or evil in fixed terms. She works sometimes for one, sometimes for the other, driven by a fate she did not choose. The Japanese version of the film makes the parallel explicit: Grunwald tells Horus before pushing him from a cliff that he wanted Horus as his brother, and Hilda herself observes to Horus that their situations mirror each other, that they are like twins in their shared captivity to forces outside themselves. Her arc ends not with punishment but with survival. She gives her magical Medal of Life to help Horus and discovers, after the battle is won, that she is still alive without it.

• 5. A Brief Run and a Long Afterlife

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  Ten days. That is how long Horus played in Japanese theaters before Toei pulled it. Patrick Drazen offered two explanations in Anime Explosion: either the studio executives failed to recognize what they had, or the abbreviated run was a deliberate act of retaliation against Miyazaki and Takahata, who were active union organizers. Neither man directed another film for Toei after Horus. Justin Sevakis, writing a retrospective for Anime News Network in March 2014, confirmed that the film was a financial flop, but noted it gained a following among young people almost immediately.

  The critical reassessment came slowly and then decisively. In 2001, the Japanese magazine Animage ranked Horus, Prince of the Sun the third best anime production of all time. In 2017, Mike Toole of Anime News Network placed it first on his 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time list. A reviewer for Hakubunkan's monthly magazine, quoted in Mark Schilling's book The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture, wrote in 1968 that after watching Horus alongside The Jungle Book, a commercial animation now existed that had surpassed Disney. Thomas Lamarre, in The Anime Machine, wrote that the fish-fighting sequence in particular had a profound impact on the animation produced years later at Studio Ghibli, and that understanding Yasuo Otsuka's stylistic approach in this film is essential to understanding Miyazaki's subsequent career.

• 6. Finding the Film on Video

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  Outside Japan, the film circulated for years under the title The Little Norse Prince, the name used by AIP-TV when it released the film straight to American television. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer eventually acquired the AIP library and licensed the English dub to later home video releases.

  The first widely available version with original Japanese audio and English subtitles appeared in 2005, when Optimum Releasing put it out on DVD in the UK and Ireland under its Optimum Asia label. That edition was locked to region 2 and contained no extra features beyond the 1968 Japanese trailer. Its subtitles drew criticism for being incomplete, frequently omitting dialogue and cutting the songs entirely. The video transfer was also faulted for ghosting caused by frame-rate conversion from 60 Hz to 50 Hz for European compatibility. Despite these faults, the release represented a genuine first access point for many viewers. For nearly a decade it was the only way to watch the film with its original audio.

  the 23rd of December 2014 brought a more complete North American release from Discotek Media, titled Horus, Prince of the Sun on DVD. That edition included two audio commentaries, video interviews with Takahata and Yoichi Kotabe, four written essays, and a new subtitle translation judged more accurate and complete than the Optimum version. On the 28th of March 2017, Discotek followed with a Blu-ray release carrying both the original Japanese audio and the AIP English dub, along with commentaries, interviews, and trailers. The AIP dub version has also been available on streaming platforms in North America including Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video as of 2015.