The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun

Based on Wikipedia: The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun

The Film That Changed Everything

In 1968, a young director named Isao Takahata made his first feature film. Working alongside him was an equally young animator named Hayao Miyazaki. Neither man knew it yet, but they had just begun a creative partnership that would last fifty years and reshape animated cinema forever.

The film was called The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun. It was a financial disaster. Toei Animation gave it a theatrical run of just ten days before pulling it from screens. Some historians believe this was punishment—retribution against Takahata and Miyazaki for their roles in organizing the studio's labor union.

But here's the thing about artistic revolutions: they don't need box office receipts. They need believers.

Young Japanese audiences found the film anyway. Critics recognized something unprecedented in its frames. And decades later, when Takahata and Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli and created some of the most beloved animated films in history—My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies—scholars traced a direct line back to this obscure 1968 adventure about a boy with a magic sword.

A Story Born from Indigenous Myth

The tale of Horus didn't spring from Scandinavian mythology, despite what the finished film suggests. Its roots lie thousands of miles away, in the oral traditions of the Ainu people—the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island.

The Ainu have a rich storytelling tradition called Yukar, a form of epic poetry passed down through generations. One of these epics tells the story of Okikurumi, a hero who battles demons. Screenwriter Kazuo Fukazawa adapted this tale into a puppet play called The Sun Above Chikisani, and from there it evolved into the script for Horus.

But here's where things get complicated. In 1960s Japan, depicting the Ainu on screen was politically fraught. The Japanese government had spent decades trying to assimilate Ainu culture out of existence, and any sympathetic portrayal risked controversy. So the production team made a pragmatic choice: they transplanted the entire story to Scandinavia. The hero became a blond Viking-like boy instead of an Ainu warrior. The frozen northern landscapes remained, but now they were supposedly Norway instead of Hokkaido.

The irony is rich. A story about oppressed people fighting for liberation had to disguise its own cultural origins to avoid oppression.

The Plot: Good, Evil, and Everything Between

Horus is a young man living in exile with his father and a pet bear named Koro. One day, while fighting off a pack of supernatural silver wolves, he stumbles upon an ancient stone giant—Mogue, a creature of mountain and earth who has been sleeping for ages. Embedded in Mogue's shoulder is a sword, rusted and broken. Horus pulls it free.

"This is the Sword of the Sun," Mogue tells him. "When it is reforged, return to me. You will be called Prince of the Sun."

It's a classic setup: a chosen one, a magical weapon, a destiny to fulfill. But Takahata and his team were less interested in fantasy clichés than in what happens to communities under stress.

On his deathbed, Horus's father reveals their true history. They came from a fishing village that was destroyed by Grunwald, a devil of ice and cold. Everyone died except them. His final wish: return to your homeland and avenge our people.

So Horus sets out. He encounters Grunwald almost immediately. The ice devil offers him a bargain—serve me, and you'll have power. Horus refuses. Grunwald throws him off a cliff.

He survives. He's rescued by villagers from a nearby community. And here the film takes an interesting turn. Instead of rushing toward confrontation with Grunwald, it pauses to explore village life. Horus proves himself by killing an enormous pike—a monstrous fish that has been threatening the community's livelihood. He becomes a hero to the common people.

But not to everyone. The village chief grows jealous of this newcomer's popularity. His deputy, Drago, sees Horus as a threat to the existing power structure. The villagers aren't united—they're divided by class, by suspicion, by the petty politics that plague every human community.

Hilda: The First Modern Anime Heroine

Then Hilda arrives.

Horus finds her in a deserted village, alone and mysterious. She sings beautifully. The villagers welcome her. But something is wrong. She carries a secret that the audience discovers gradually: she is Grunwald's sister, sent to destroy the community from within.

What makes Hilda remarkable—what made critics in 1968 sit up and take notice—is that she's not a villain. She's also not simply a victim. She's something more complex: a person caught between worlds, genuinely torn between her loyalty to Grunwald and her growing affection for Horus and the villagers.

In the original Japanese version, Grunwald wanted Horus to become his brother before casting him from the cliff. When Hilda later tells Horus that they share the same fate—"like twins," she says—she means it. Both of them are orphans of destruction, shaped by loss. Both have been offered dark bargains. The difference is that Horus refused, while Hilda accepted.

Anime historian Patrick Drazen, in his book Anime Explosion, identifies Hilda as the first in a long line of multidimensional heroines that would appear throughout Takahata and Miyazaki's careers. Think of San from Princess Mononoke, raised by wolves to hate humanity yet capable of compassion. Think of Lady Eboshi from the same film, a villain who genuinely cares for her people. These characters don't fit neatly into boxes labeled "good" and "evil."

Hilda came first. In 1968, in a film that barely anyone saw.

The Giant Fish Sequence

Animation scholars often point to one particular scene as a turning point in the medium's history: Horus's battle with the giant pike.

The sequence was designed by Yasuo Otsuka, the film's animation director, and it demonstrates something that wasn't supposed to be possible in anime at the time. The camera moves fluidly through three-dimensional space. The action feels dynamic rather than staged. Characters move with weight and momentum instead of sliding across static backgrounds.

Thomas Lamarre, in his academic study The Anime Machine, argues that you cannot understand Hayao Miyazaki's later work without understanding what Otsuka achieved in this sequence. The thrilling aerial battles in Castle in the Sky, the chase scenes in Lupin III, the apocalyptic destruction in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind—all of them trace their DNA back to a teenage boy fighting a fish in 1968.

Making Art Through Committee

Here's what made Horus truly unusual: how it was made.

At most animation studios in the 1960s—whether in Japan, the United States, or Europe—the director was king. Artists executed the director's vision. The process flowed in one direction: top to bottom, orders to execution.

Takahata did something different. He and Otsuka opened up the storyboarding and planning process to the entire team. Anyone could contribute ideas. Animators weren't just hands executing someone else's vision—they were collaborators shaping the story itself.

This is how Miyazaki, officially just a scene designer and key animator, ended up contributing significantly to the film's development. He was twenty-seven years old, not yet a director, but his ideas were welcome at the table.

The approach was egalitarian. It was also slow. Production on Horus began in autumn 1965 and didn't wrap until March 1968—nearly three years. Most Toei animated features were finished in eight to ten months. The studio was not pleased.

Worse, Toei was shifting its business model. Television anime was booming. Feature films were expensive and risky. Horus, with its inflated budget (over 100 million yen, about 2.5 million dollars in today's money), represented everything the company was moving away from.

The Politics Hidden in Plain Sight

The late 1960s in Japan were turbulent. Student movements were challenging authority. Labor unions were organizing for better conditions. The generation that would be called the "new left" was questioning the structures of power.

Takahata and Miyazaki were part of this movement. They were union organizers at Toei. And if you know what to look for, you can see their politics throughout Horus.

The villagers in the film aren't just threatened by an external monster—they're divided by internal class conflict. The chief and his deputy represent entrenched power, jealous of anyone who threatens their authority. Drago frames Horus for attempted assassination, and the villagers, manipulated by fear, banish their champion.

But the resolution isn't a lone hero defeating evil through individual strength. When Horus finally confronts Grunwald, he realizes that the Sword of the Sun cannot be reforged through his efforts alone. It requires collective action. The villagers must unite, must contribute their own fires to the forge, must work together to create the weapon that will save them.

The ending scenes, according to Drazen, are "thinly disguised rallying cries for the union and student movements of the time." Contemporary audiences recognized this. The film found its following among young people sympathetic to these causes.

Meanwhile, Toei executives—the bosses that Takahata and Miyazaki had been organizing against—gave the film ten days in theaters and then buried it.

The Moment Critics Noticed

Despite its commercial failure, critical reception was immediate and enthusiastic.

A reviewer for the monthly magazine Taiyō wrote, in 1968: "In one corner of the world there now exists a commercial animation that has surpassed Disney and started to make rapid advances."

This was no small claim. In 1968, Disney was still the unquestioned king of animation. The Jungle Book had just been released. Disney's technical supremacy was taken as given. To suggest that a low-budget Japanese feature had surpassed the American giant was audacious.

But the reviewer wasn't wrong about what they had witnessed. Something new had entered the world.

The Character Design Legacy

Among the key animators on Horus was Yasuji Mori, and his work on Hilda's character design deserves special attention.

Helen McCarthy, in her book Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, notes that Mori's "clean and simple character design" for Hilda "allowed for considerable emotional depth and flexibility." The simplicity was deliberate. With fewer lines to manage, animators could focus on subtle emotional expression—the slight downward cast of eyes, the tension in a gesture, the thousand small movements that communicate inner conflict.

This approach became a foundational principle for Takahata and Miyazaki's later work. Think of how much emotion is communicated through small movements in Ghibli films—Chihiro's trembling hands in Spirited Away, Mei's stubborn pout in Totoro. The philosophy that began with Mori's designs for Hilda echoed through decades of animation.

Lost, Found, and Lost Again

The journey of Horus through home video is a saga of frustration and rediscovery.

In the United States, the film was released straight to television in an English dub titled The Little Norse Prince. This version, distributed by American International Pictures (AIP-TV), was cut and dubbed with varying degrees of accuracy. It aired occasionally on television for years before fading into obscurity.

For decades, if you wanted to see the original Japanese version with English subtitles, you were out of luck. The film wasn't available in that format anywhere in the English-speaking world.

In 2005, a British company called Optimum Releasing finally put out a DVD with the original Japanese audio and English subtitles. But the release was flawed. The subtitles were incomplete—they skipped dialogue and omitted the songs entirely. The video suffered from ghosting artifacts because it had been improperly converted from the American 60 Hz video standard to the European 50 Hz standard. Still, for many Western fans, this was the first opportunity to see the film as Takahata intended.

Japan released a Blu-ray in 2013, but it turned out to be upscaled from an old standard-definition transfer dating back to the LaserDisc era. Not the high-definition restoration fans hoped for.

Finally, in 2014, the American distributor Discotek Media released a proper DVD with new subtitle translations, audio commentaries, video interviews with Takahata and animator Yoichi Kotabe, written essays, and production galleries. For the first time, American audiences could experience the film with proper context. A Blu-ray followed in 2017.

The English dub made for AIP is still floating around streaming services. The rights passed through various hands—AIP was eventually purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—and it has appeared on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video at various times. It's not the ideal way to experience the film, but it exists.

The Rankings

In 2001, the Japanese magazine Animage—one of the most influential anime publications in the world—polled its readers to determine the greatest anime productions of all time.

Horus, Prince of the Sun came in third.

Third. A thirty-three-year-old film that had failed at the box office and been largely forgotten by the general public. Ahead of countless beloved series and films that had been wildly successful. The cult had grown that large.

In 2017, anime journalist Mike Toole of Anime News Network went further. Compiling his personal list of the 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time, he placed Horus at number one. Not Spirited Away. Not Akira. Not Ghost in the Shell. The obscure 1968 feature that launched two careers.

What Remains

Isao Takahata passed away in 2018, exactly fifty years after Horus was released. In those five decades, he directed masterworks including Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. He never directed for Toei again after Horus.

Hayao Miyazaki became arguably the most celebrated animator in history. His films have grossed billions of dollars and won Academy Awards. He too never made another film for the studio that gave him his start.

The core team that made Horus—Takahata, Miyazaki, Otsuka, Mori, Kotabe, Okuyama—scattered to other projects, other studios, other lives. But something of their collective spirit, their willingness to challenge conventions and treat animation as serious art, survived. It survived in the films they made afterward. It survived in the studios they founded and influenced. It survived in the generations of animators who watched their work and thought: this is what's possible.

In the film itself, the Sword of the Sun cannot be reforged by one person alone. It requires a community. It requires many hands contributing to a single purpose. The metaphor was obvious even in 1968, and it remains obvious today.

Horus, Prince of the Sun was made by a team who believed that collaboration could produce something greater than any individual vision. They were right. The film they made together changed an art form. And it all started with a boy, a broken sword, and a stone giant who promised that one day, everything would be made whole.