Special Kaboom Anime Series

The Great Adventure of Horus Prince of the Sun (1968)

Tickets wo 20 mei

wo 20 mei

21:00 EN subs

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Wonderfully energetic adventure story marked the first collaboration between director Isao Takahata and his protégé Hayao Miyazaki – later founders of Studio Ghibli. With its mythological source material (an epic of the indigenous Ainu) and socialist message (well received by 1968’s students), Horus became known as the first ‘grown-up’ anime.

Credits

Regie: Isao Takahata
Genre: anime, drama, adventure
Speelduur: 82 minutes
Land: Japan
Taal: Japanese
Ondertiteling: English

Storyline

Not only is Horus, Prince of the Sun Isao Takahata’s debut film, it also marks the first collaboration between the acclaimed director of Grave of the Fireflies (1988) en The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) and his protégé Hayao Miyazaki, whose role as key animator ballooned into something for which the credit ‘scene design’ had to be invented.

Taiyō no Ōji: Horusu no Daibōken (sometimes translated as Hols or Little Norse Prince Valiant) became known as the first ‘grown-up’ anime, after the medium’s breakthrough with Osamu Tezuka’s TV series Atom Boy (1963). It was based on an epic by the indigenous Ainu, but transplanted to Iron Age Scandinavia (possibly due to sensitivities surrounding that population’s historical mistreatment by the Japanese).

And although the drawings are less detailed than modern audiences might expect, Horus proves that’s much less important than timing and mise-en-scène. Just watch the dynamic opening scene (echoing Takahata’s earlier TV series Wolf Boy Ken), in which young Horus is chased by a pack of wolves, keeping them at bay with an axe on a long rope, until a rock giant comes to his aid.

The socialist message, about villagers who can only defeat their oppressor through communal resistance, was popular with 1968’s students, but not with Studio Toei (with whom the animators were embroiled in a major labour dispute), which pulled the well-received film from cinemas after just ten days. Which led to Takahata and Miyazaki leaving Toei and, some years later, founding Studio Ghibli together. And the rest is anime history.

Other films in this program:

Relationship drama? Demonic massacre? Romcom? Supernatural adventure story? It’s the nineties, so: it’s all of the above! Toei Animation’s adaptation of Yuzo Takada’s manga series has something for everyone: from budding teen romance to bloody dismemberment – luckily, our Yakumo is immortal. Now, he only has to help that kawaii three-eyed demon become human.

The most Miyazakian film by Makoto ‘the new Miyazaki’ Shinkai (Your Name., 2016) is slightly less romantic than usual, instead focussing more on learning to cope with death and solitude. We enter a gorgeous, multicultural underworld, to which our young female protagonist Asuna and her kawaii cat Mimi are irresistibly drawn.

Anthology project with three stories by Katsuhiro Ōtomo (Akira, 1988), who himself directs final short Cannon Fodder (about a world built around cannons), after Tensai Okamura’s comedic Stink Bomb (about someone unknowingly becoming a chemical weapon) and Kōji Morimoto’s highlight Magnetic Rose, combining space adventure with creepy psychological horror – and opera.

Successful coming-of-age story by anime giant Mamoru Hosoda follows nine-year-old runaway Ren and gruff beast Kumatetsu fighting, arguing, and slowly discovering the true meanings of strength, anger, and loneliness. After which, Ren will have to choose between romance in modern-day Tokyo and a beast kingdom rather resembling feudal Japan.

Groundhog Day meets video game. Each time the aliens kill Rita, her day starts over again. As if she wasn’t depressed enough already.

Even though narrator Yuki fears this might get laughed off as a mere fairy tale, director Mamoru Hosoda has given us a grounded and deeply empathetic film, drawn from his own childhood and mother, who raised him as a single parent.