Takahata Isao’s Artistic Manifesto
The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure (『太陽の王子 ホルスの大冒険』 Taiyô no Ôji: Horusu no Daibôken, 1968) emerged at a moment when Japan was trying to re-write its postwar history and to re-locate itself within the world community. This animation film has turned ever since into a classic masterpiece of animated representation, transcending the boundaries of its Japanese origins. It was released in the year 1968 by Tôei Dôga Animation (later Tôei Animation Studio) and, from current perspective, it is regarded as a groundbreaking milestone in the history and technology of animation as a genre, aesthetics and ideology. Moreover, it is often highlighted as a precursor for subsequent innovations in the art of universal animation as well as the “birth certificate” of the so-called progressive animation trend.
The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure was brought into existence by the members of a young, idealist team under the leadership of the fresh director Takahata Isao; this team intended to deliver something completely new and special, in radical contrast to Disney’s works and to previous “Tôei children’s toys”. Important members of the team involved in bringing out The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure were, among others, the animators Miyazaki Hayao and Ôtsuka Yasuo 大塚康生. On this background, it is important to note that the work on the film was pursued during a huge strike at Tôei Dôga Animation, simultaneously with the students’ movements during late 1960s, locally in Japan and worldwide, more particularly in Europe and the US; the plot and the manufacturing process reflect openly the historical situation of the era. As a result, the film contains many allusions to the workers’ and students’ movements which shattered those years as well as some socialist hints (not to say “communist hints”) and musical elements reminiscent of the ethos penetrating the social structures back then in Japan, echoing international tendencies.
Takahata Isao’s animation film The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure was an absolute flop at the (Japanese) box-offices during the weeks of its original release, but soon thereafter, it achieved a cult-like status among students and young intellectuals, which it has been maintaining until present-day. (Unfortunately, students and young intellectuals are not exactly the cinema-goers with the economic power necessary for attaining financial success of a work being released within the framework of the entertainment industry). Following the financial failure of the film, the greatest part of the production team was disbanded with many employees being immediately fired; Takahata Isao himself was forced to resign.
I have already mentioned that The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure is regarded as a vital milestone in the history and technology of animation, courageously transcending its Japanese origins. It decisively marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of animation as a genre, aesthetics and ideology, by breaking away from the tradition faithfully following the model initiated by Walt Disney and his animation works, which was the hegemonic paradigm at Tôei Dôga Animation at the time. Altogether, The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure was very difficult to work on, to finish and then to sell to distribution agencies and to cinemas, as it was way too long for the studio’s standards and therefore Takahata was compelled to cut 30 minutes before he was allowed to distribute it to Japanese cinemas. In addition, the production costs exceeded by far the initially approved budget, the production process itself took much longer than estimated at the beginning and, thus, led to delays and postponements of release deadlines; lastly, the team was not able to fully finish the film, resulting in two scenes in the final version which are still only sketches. Originally, Takahata had planned a movie on the Emishi, the indigenous population of Japan, which had been long ago persecuted and decimated by Japanese authorities during the first decades of the modernization process started in 1868; Tôei Dôga Animation’s management, though, insisted on the topic of the movie being changed; eventually, Takahata gave in and chose a symbolic population of Northern Europe in ancient times which he employed, stubbornly, on the background of strongly, easily identifiable Ainu cultural patterns. The dynamic plot as well as the explicit violence being flagrantly displayed right from the very first scene of the film is a clear, direct indicator that The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure is no average, kids-friendly, soft-spoken animation work aiming at pure entertainment, but an innovative form of intellectual and artistic expression, erupting in a rainbow-like palette of force, ideas and unusually fiery emotions.
This is to be acknowledged as The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure’s ability to pull the viewer since the very first moment into the incommensurability of human experience as a totalizing explosion, despite its appearance of an inconspicuously small, simultaneously simple and fascinating work of animation. As it is common in animation productions worldwide, of all times, the plot of this film tackles in honest, resolute tones the reality of life and death, therefore opposing warm humanism to cynical realism. A further important aspect in the compositional structure of The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure is the fact that, even for the sake of entertainment, clarity of expression and visual brutality are by no means avoided. When a popular character dies, there is naturally grief and sorrow, but the awareness of the continuity of life prevails. There is death and loss, but there is also the hope of tomorrow – and, possibly, of a better tomorrow – as well as the brave vision of the future.
Plot Overview
The plot of The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure is relatively simple: The main character of the story, with its origins in old North-European folklore, is Horus, the son of a fisherman. While fighting with several hungry wolves, Rockor, a giant made of stone who had been awaken from his centuries-long sleep by the noise of the fight, rescues him. Horus expresses his gratitude towards his new friend and, in return, removes the sword from Rockor’s shoulder; he finds out that this is the sword of the sun, and the man who carries it can defeat the Frozen King Grünwald, according to Rockor’s prophecy. Soon thereafter, Horus’ father dies unexpectedly, but with his last breath, he tells his son about the Northern country which used to be their homeland and about their home-village where he had been a fisherman, before the entire village was destroyed by the evil Frozen King, when Horus was still an infant. The two of them were the only survivors. After his father’s death and in respect of his last wish, Horus embarks on a long journey to find out what has happened with the rest of fishermen’s village in Northern regions. He carries with him his trustworthy ax and his new sword and is accompanied by his beloved pet Coro.
Not long after he starts his journey, Horus is already attacked by Grünwald and almost killed in the deadly encounter, when he falls down into a river from a high, steep rock; the fishermen inhabitants of a neighboring village find him and take care of him during his recovery process. They share with other fishermen’s villages in the area a painful fate, as they are oppressed by Grünwald’s magic evil powers: a huge pike, controlled by Grünwald, swallows all living fish in the rivers, and thus threatens the livelihood of the humans. The villagers fear the giant beast, but Horus challenges it and after a battle of mythological dimensions, he defeats it. On the way back, he is celebrated like the savior that he is; only the village mayor and his chairman Drego, who can easily manipulate the mayor, are not happy with Horus’ arrival, as they feel insecure that his newly earned popularity among the villagers could undermine their own authority. At the same time, Grünwald turns angry as he perceives Horus’ gestures as a challenge towards him, and sets the intention to destroy all life in the entire region through stronger and more relentless attacks. To this purpose, he uses his own sister Hilda, whom he asks to emotionally manipulate Horus. Horus finds Hilda in an empty, foggy, abandoned village. The mysterious and apparently fragile Hilda, who carries a wonderful voice is, at first, welcomed by the small and frightened village community; as time passes by, though, it becomes obvious that unexplainable problems and increasingly destructive attacks from Grünwald have been accumulating since her arrival. Soon enough, Hilda opens up about being Grünwald’s younger sister. The poor villagers, nevertheless, show the same determination and courage as Horus and decide to fight under his leadership against the far more extreme powers displayed by Grünwald: they are driven by their willingness to protect their lives and their families, while Grünwald only wants to destroy humans out of pure evil. The happy ending brings together the main characters – except for the Frozen King – within a musical apotheosis: the continuity of life and the magic of a new beginning are celebrated with explosive joy.
Character Analysis
Very important within the representational framework and the developmental plotline is the construction of the characters, particularly of the three main characters: Horus, Grünwald and Hilda. While Grünwald might still appear as an exception, the unequivoque archetype of evil who employs his power exclusively with the goal to hurt and destroy everyone around him, the other two characters show an unprecedented depth and ambivalent structure, which dialectically combine both positive, beaming features and negative, terrifying traits. Among the three of them, only Horus displays face and personality details reminiscent of classical characters of animation “made in Japan”. The plain son of a fisherman, Horus endures on his way back to the home-land of his deceased parents the destructive power of evil as well as the uplifting, supportive strength of love and solidarity. Horus must fight not only against external evil – such as the stature of the magician Grünwald –, but also against internal evil – such as his own confusion in the ‘forest of delusions’ (迷いの森 mayoi no mori). From the direct contact with the impoverished villagers, Horus learns to overcome loss and sorrow, to forgive his own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others, and to accept life as an interplay of victories and defeats. He also discovers that human community and solidarity (「人間の間、協力の必要性」 ningen no aida, kyôryoku no hitsuyôsei; Takahata Isao, 1991, Eiga wo tsukurinagara kangaeta koto I: 1955-1991 [What I Was Thinking While Creating Movies I: 1955-1991], Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, pp. 26) are much more important than the status of a free, but lonely individual: 「これこそ失ってはならないもの、悪魔の手からどうしても守り抜かねばならない人間の営みであり、生きる喜びなのだ。」 (“This is the joy of life – that human activity which we are not allowed to lose and which we must protect from the devil’s hands.”; Takahata Isao, 1991, Eiga wo tsukurinagara kangaeta koto I: 1955-1991 [What I Was Thinking While Creating Movies I: 1955-1991], Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, pp. 25). Gradually, Horus develops into a positive figure of light who can deliver joy and fulfilment, to himself and to those around him, despite unavoidable hardships and setbacks. In the beginning of the film, he appears as a brave, strong-willed boy; he does possess self-confidence, but he is not over-confident, and manages somehow not to give up his own principles and ideals even in the most difficult situations. His weak point for Hilda had almost killed him and the poverty-stricken villagers, but he finds a way to transform disadvantages into positive elements and to, eventually, defeat the evil. Full of warmth and affection, he rescues Hilda from her own criminal brother and gives her the chance of a good, fulfilled life within the human community. As a result, Horus metamorphoses from a classical hero of standard Japanese animation with romantic accents, into an epic protagonist who can design and command not only himself, but also his environment.
Hilda develops as well, from a classical, feminine character populating the animated world with alienated and alienating facial features, into a prototype of what will come later to be conceptualized as shôjo (少女, commonly translated as “young unmarried woman”) – a symbolical presence which has been dominating the entire landscape of Japanese popular and consumption culture since mid-1970s until present-day. Throughout her progression, Hilda overcomes, however, the status of a model for later feminine characters in animation productions delivered by Studio Ghilbi: She is, indeed, one of the first feminine characters in Japanese animation works, but at the same time, Hilda is one of the most complex characters in the entire history of animation, comparable with other reputable feminine characters in cult television animation series, such as Ayanami Rei from Neo Genesis Evangelion ( 『新世紀エヴァンゲリオン』 Shinseiki Evangerion, 1995), Hoshino Ruri from Mobile Warship Nadesico (『機動戦艦ナデシコ』 Kidô Senkan Nadeshiko, 1996-1997) or Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop (『カウボーイ・ビバップ』 Kaubôi Bibappu, 1998): she is very strong, even though her strength becomes visible at first on her dark side; later on, she demonstrates her magical power for a positive purpose, simultaneously with a gradual display of an inner intense conflict between her love towards her elder brother and her sense of justice. In later animation works released by Studio Ghibli, these complementary dimensions of the human existence are mainly represented by the concatenation of two feminine characters, e.g., Lana and Monsley in Future Boy Conan, Clarisse and Fujiko in Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicäa and Kushana in Nausicäa from the Valley of the Winds, the child Taeko and the grown-up Taeko in Memories like Raindrops, San and Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, Sophie and the Witch of the Waste in Howl’s Moving Castle. Due to her inner complexity and her musically nuanced appearance – her beautiful, very mature voice stands for a precocious adulthood, which still has to attain full completion –, Hilda functions as an avant-la-lettre symbol of late-modern individual, permanently torn back and forth between contradictory, more often than not impossible to balance, emotions.
The Idealization of Community and the Continuity of Life
The ambiguity of the two main characters in Takahata’s debut work hints at the unstoppable transition from community to society: it is precisely the community and the sense of belonging to a community which gives the humans – and the characters in the film – the fortitude to fight against a much greater evil despite tiny chances. Horus discovers the beauty of human warmth in the midst of the impoverished community which still carries plenty of hope and rescues him despite their own hardships and without expecting anything in return. Hilda gradually metamorphoses from a lonely girl with obvious evil tendencies, into a self-confident young lady with positive features, precisely with the help of that very community, which accepts and educates her. Both Horus and Hilda experience the transformative effects of community – the continuity of life despite losses and catastrophes as well as the necessity of human solidarity particularly in times of turmoil –, so that this emerges as a valid alternative in opposition to the rising, increasingly all-encompassing society with its alienating mechanisms. In displaying this artistic vision of community as opposed to the cold, heartless society, Takahata is very strongly influenced by a rather idyllic conceptualization of community, which (consciously or not) ignores the negative aspects of the communitarian existence, e.g., the restriction of individual
freedoms, the control through very tight intra-community observation, the early determination of the individual destiny. In later works, such as The Grave of the Fireflies, Memories like Raindrops and to certain extent in an ironic manner, in Ponpoko: The Heisei Tanuki War, Takahata will come back to this idea of community and work on it with more stratified nuances, so that its negative aspects are revealed, as well. In The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure, community remains the positive alternative to individuality and freedom, in the same interpretation which defines the notion of society as modern over-individual organization.
Lastly, Horus’ and Gilda’s ambivalence underscores the idea that humans are multi-layered, contradictory entities who cannot be grasped by statistical tables with their oversimplified clarity. The complexity provided by such a vision of the human being as a manifold work-in-progress will powerfully influence the entire ideology – and subsequently, the aesthetics – of animation, with gradually numerous directors preferring a refined representation of the world and of life, more closely related to the ineffable incommensurability of reality, and thus distancing themselves from its plain, black-and-white depiction, as promoted by US-American studios.
Takahata Isao’s debut work demonstrates an animation vision of fluid moves and of dynamic, well-balanced scenes, counterpointed by convincing characters with profound inner lives, which would later become synonymous with animation art à la Studio Ghibli. Despite its financial failure, The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure turned throughout the years into a cult-film, which, on the one hand, managed to liberate the animation as a genre from its previous categorization as “children’s entertainment” and, on the other hand, offered a serious alternative – as technology, aesthetics and ideology – in opposition to the live-action film industry. Eventually, The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure functioned at the time of its release as the aesthetic-ideological manifesto of a generation (the 1968s’ generation in Japan) which rejected the identification with its parents’ ideals and efforts for progress and for the attainment of material abundance and continuous prosperity. The Prince of Sun: Horus’ Great Adventure displayed credibly, persuasively, the credo in community cohesion, solidarity and the eternal continuation of life as the most important coordinates of human existence.
