The Film That Was Too Ambitious for 1968
When Horus: Prince of the Sun (太陽の王子 ホルスの大冒険) premiered in the summer of 1968 as part of Toei's Manga Parade program, audiences and critics called it "too dark" and "not for children." The film tanked commercially. Takahata was 32 and making his feature directorial debut. Miyazaki, just 27, held the crucial "scene design" role, building out the architecture, village layouts, and lived-in world that would define his later career.
A Magmix retrospective traces how that initial failure planted the seeds for everything Ghibli would become.
The production ran three years and blew through its budget, costing ¥130 million against a planned ¥70 million. At a time when long-form anime followed Disney's top-down division-of-labor model, Takahata treated his staff as creative collaborators, sharing character relationship charts and emotional arc documents from the planning stage. That collaborative method, unremarkable by today's standards, was radical in 1960s anime.
Why Hilda Still Matters
The film's real distinction is its heroine. Hilda serves the villain Grunwald but finds her conscience stirred through contact with the villagers. She isn't evil. She isn't good. She's trapped between loyalty and morality, unable to resolve either.
That kind of moral complexity was unheard of in children's anime. Audiences in 1968, raised on clear-cut heroes and villains, didn't know what to do with her. But the lineage is unmistakable: Hilda's inner conflict runs directly through to Princess Mononoke's San and Lady Eboshi, characters caught in circumstances that resist easy judgment.
Beyond Hilda, the film's narrative refused the simple adventure formula. The village that takes Horus in doesn't welcome him. Suspicion, fear, and infighting among the villagers drive the story's tension as much as the supernatural villain does. Takahata was more interested in collective human weakness than in a boy swinging a magic sword.
The 1980s Reassessment
The turning point came in the 1980s. By then, Takahata had directed Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Miyazaki had made Future Boy Conan and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Critics and industry figures revisited their early Toei work and realized Horus had been ahead of its time.
Anime magazines and crew interviews from that period also revealed just how experimental the production process had been. Miyazaki's scene design work on Horus already contained the environmental detail and spatial logic that would become hallmarks of his filmography. The building interiors, the texture of village life, the sense of a world that exists beyond the frame were all visible in embryonic form.
The experience wasn't wasted, even if the box office said otherwise. Takahata and Miyazaki carried what they learned at Toei through the following decades of work, ultimately co-founding Studio Ghibli in 1985.
Looking Ahead
Horus: Prince of the Sun is available on home video in Japan through Toei. In North America, Discotek Media has released the film on Blu-ray with both the original Japanese audio and the English dub (titled The Little Norse Prince in its older US broadcast version). It remains the clearest starting point for understanding Ghibli's origins.
The film doesn't stream widely on major international platforms like Crunchyroll or Netflix. Physical media remains the most reliable way to watch it outside Japan.