The Spirit of 'Horus'

Welcome! This is a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — all about an underrated film from Japan.

Back in the ‘60s, Isao Takahata was a young, rising talent at Toei Doga, the most renowned animation studio in Tokyo. He worked as an assistant director on its Anju and Zushiomaru (1961) and Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963). With the TV cartoon Wolf Boy Ken, he started to direct himself.

Around ‘65, he moved up in a big way. A senior animator named Yasuo Otsuka wanted to collaborate with him on a feature. The two had grown close; both were active in Toei Doga’s labor union. So, Otsuka battled management until Takahata got his own movie to direct.1

From there, a project took shape through meetings between Takahata and Otsuka, plus a few others. Their source material was a ‘60s novel for children, Taro the Dragon Boy, based on Japanese folklore. Toei Doga had batted around the idea of animating it for a few years. Seemingly, Takahata finished at least part of a screenplay, and figured out some of the characters.2

This Taro project was shelved at an “early” stage, remembered Otsuka. Among other concerns, the story lacked the “scale” they wanted — the novel isn’t an epic. Takahata and his team took a different route and, ultimately, created Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) instead. That film changed animation in Japan for good.

Takahata, Otsuka and many of their friends quit Toei over the next few years. In the ‘70s, they made Lupin the 3rd, Panda! Go, Panda! and Heidi elsewhere. Takahata especially had little choice but to leave. He’d burned bridges at Toei — as a top union member and as the head of Horus, which went over-schedule and initially bombed. “[T]he company saw him as their foe,” Hayao Miyazaki explained.3

But the studio didn’t forget Takahata’s plan for Taro the Dragon Boy. During the late ‘70s, it was revived. Toei Doga’s reputation had faded a bit in the meantime: lots of its best artists were gone, and the remaining team did faster, less polished, less ambitious work. Taro was meant to be a return.4

According to a higher-up at the company, the hope was to make Taro a “culmination of Toei Doga’s 22 years.” There’s an argument