General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (わんぱく王子の大蛇退治)

The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (わんぱく王子の大蛇退治, Wanpaku Ōji no Orochi Taiji, literally "The Naughty Prince's Slaying of the Great Serpent") is a 1963 Japanese feature-length color animated film produced by Toei Doga (now Toei Animation) and directed by Yūgo Serikawa, adapting the myth of the god Susanoo and the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi from the Kojiki.¹^•² It was the studio's sixth feature-length color animated film, runs 86 minutes, and was shot in color widescreen.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release and format	86 minutes, color widescreen (カラーワイド版); Toei's catalog gives March 24, 1963, while the Eiren industry database gives July 24, 1963 (Shōwa 38)¹^•²
Studio position	Sixth feature-length color animated film by Toei Doga (now Toei Animation)²
Source	The Susanoo and Yamata no Orochi story of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, reworked for children²^•³
Key staff	Director Yūgo Serikawa (first film), animation director Yasuji Mori, art by Reiji Koyama, music by Akira Ifukube²^•⁴^•⁵
Signature sequence	Yasuo Ōtsuka and Sadao Tsukioka spent half a year animating the serpent-slaying climax⁴
Awards	Bronze award (Osellella de Bronzo) at the Venice International Film Festival's children's section and the Ofuji Noburō Award at the Mainichi Film Concours; Ministry of Education selection¹^•⁶
Historical standing	Ranked 10th in the 2003 "World and Japan Animation Best 150" survey⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The film adapts the Susanoo myths of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, Japan's oldest chronicles, with the racier details sanded off for children.³ In the heavens, Susanoo lives with his divine parents until his mother, Izanami, falls ill, dies, and is borne away across the sea to the land of the dead. Armed with a wooden sword and his father's grudging blessing, the boy sneaks off in a small boat to find her, refusing to be talked out of anything.

His first companion is Akahana, a wisecracking rabbit who supplies most of the comedy and most of the complaining. Together they cross the land of night, where darkness itself is an obstacle, and the land of fire, where the film stages its first large-scale set pieces. The journey is episodic in the folk-tale manner: a monster here, a trick there, the boy learning that a wooden sword and a hot temper are not a complete toolkit. Along the way he earns real weapons and real allies, including a magical flying horse sent by the sun goddess Amaterasu when the fight that matters approaches.⁹

Susanoo reaches the land of the dead and finds his mother, but reunion is not rescue. She is a spirit now, and she cannot come back with him. Instead she gives him her strength and tells him to grow up and protect the living. He leaves the underworld alone, and the film lets that loss sit without a miracle. The quest has turned from a search into an initiation.

Susanoo and Akahana arrive in Izumo Province, where a village lives under a monstrous tax. Every year the eight-headed dragon Yamata no Orochi descends from the mountains and takes a daughter. Seven daughters are already gone; the last one, Princess Kushinada, is next. Susanoo decides this is a fight he can win, and the village elders, having nothing left to lose, help him prepare.

The battle with Yamata no Orochi is the film's reason for existing, and it is still spoken of as one of the great scenes in Japanese animation. The dragon's arrival is staged for dread: first a coiled shadow rising over the horizon, then the eight heads emerging as silhouettes with pinpoint eyes.¹⁰ Susanoo's blade, empowered by a crystal, turns the dragon's gusts of flame into splashes of water, and the fight becomes a countdown of severed heads, each one dispatched with real physical geography under it: cliffs, water, the boy on horseback against a writhing mass of necks.¹⁰ For the last head, Susanoo's mother's jewel transforms into a dagger, and he leaps aboard the final dragon head to deliver the killing blow.¹⁰ From the serpent's tail comes the sword that will become the legendary Kusanagi blade, so the adventure the audience just watched becomes the founding of a legend. Kushinada is saved, and the boy who left the sky to find his dead mother returns to it as a grown guardian, the loss he could not undo folded into the triumph rather than pasted over.

Characters

Susanoo (Morio Kazama) is the little prince of the title, a barefoot, scowling, genuinely wild child drawn with scrapes and unruly energy rather than mascot polish. His whole character is stubbornness pointed in the right direction: he will not accept his mother's death, and later he will not accept Kushinada's sacrifice.

Akahana is the rabbit sidekick, a complainer and pratfall artist whose mugging is pitched at the youngest viewers and sits awkwardly against the film's grimmer stretches, but who gives the lonely journey a voice.

Princess Kushinada is the daughter chosen as the dragon's next offering, the emotional center of the second half, and the person whose rescue converts Susanoo's grief into purpose.

Izanami, Susanoo's mother, appears briefly but decides the film's shape: her death starts the journey, and her farewell in the underworld ends it.

Interpretations and controversies

The film has no real controversy, but it has a legacy debate. Its bold, simple, geometric modernist style, credited chiefly to chief animator Yasuji Mori, was cited by Genndy Tartakovsky as a direct inspiration for his approach on Samurai Jack, which is how a 1963 children's myth film keeps showing up in conversations about action animation.¹¹ Western viewers split over the pacing and the stiff animation in places, while Japanese industry polls have never stopped ranking it near the top.¹²

Source myth and adaptation

The film retells the central myth of the Kojiki (and the parallel account in the Nihon Shoki): the god Susanoo, expelled from heaven, comes to Izumo, rescues Princess Kushinada from the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, and founds a new land. In the studio's official synopsis, Susanoo, whose mother Izanami has gone to the land of Yomi, travels with the rabbit Akahana to visit his brother Tsukuyomi and sister Amaterasu, works at Takamagahara until repeated failures get him expelled, then meets Kushinada in Izumo, slays the serpent, and begins building a new country.⁷

A scholarly comparison with the Kojiki describes the film's structure as a "kushi-dango" (skewered-dumpling) episodic journey that crosses six boundaries: Onogoro Island, the sea, the Land of Yorunoosu, the Land of Fire, Takamagahara, and Izumo, with crossing devices such as a boat, Wadatsumi's staff, and the Ame-no-Torifune drawn from the original text.⁶ The companion rabbit Akahana is thought to be adapted from the "Inaba no Shirousagi" (White Hare of Inaba) episode of the Kojiki.⁶

Changes for children. Because the target audience was children, many salacious and grotesque details of the original myths were excised, and the story was repackaged as the exploits of a young, mischievous prince rather than the adult god of the sources.³

Production and staff

The film was Yūgo Serikawa's first work as director; he had been an assistant director at Shintoho before joining Toei. Yasuji Mori served as animation director, a role whose purpose is to unify the drawings across the film, and which became established in Japanese animation after this production.⁴ Art director Reiji Koyama proposed flat, planar character design and background art that created a fantastical world of Japanese mythology.⁴ The score was composed by Akira Ifukube, and the credited key animators include Furusawa Hideo, Kumagawa Masao, Yasuo Ōtsuka, Kusube Daikichirō, Nagasawa Jun, Reiko Okuyama, Kita Masatake, and Katsui Chikao.⁴ Anime News Network additionally credits Hiroshi Ōkawa as executive producer, Sanae Yamamoto as animation supervisor, and Isao Takahata and Kimio Yabuki as assistant directors.⁵

The film's most celebrated passage is the serpent-slaying sequence, on which Yasuo Ōtsuka and Sadao Tsukioka spent half a year; it is known for its outstanding camerawork and action.⁴ The film was shot in Toei's anamorphic process Toeiscope (東映スコープ), following Disney's example of widescreen animation.³

Release, awards and distribution

Toei distributed the film in Japan; the Eiren record lists it as produced and distributed by Toei, in color CinemaScope, with Eirin number 12876.² It received a Ministry of Education selection (文部省選定) and a recommendation from the Central Child Welfare Council of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.¹ It won the Osellella de Bronzo (オゼルラ・デ・ブロンド賞), a bronze award in the young children's film section at the 15th Venice International Children's Film Festival, and the Ofuji Noburō Award at the 18th Mainichi Film Concours.¹^•⁶ The Ofuji Award was, according to one specialist account, not given to another feature-length film until Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979).³

Internationally, Anime News Network records a US premiere of January 1, 1964, with the English version distributed by Columbia Pictures.⁵ The Japanese voice cast includes Morio Kazama as Susano'o no Mikoto, Yukiko Okada as Kushinada-Hime, and Chiharu Kuri as Akahana the Rabbit.⁵

By the numbers

1963 release; 86 minutes per Toei's catalog and Eiren, 85 minutes per Anime News Network.¹^•²^•⁵
Sixth feature-length color anime by Toei Doga.²
Six boundary crossings structure the journey, per the Doshisha study.⁶
Half a year of animation work on the Orochi-slaying sequence by two animators.⁴
10th place in the 2003 "World and Japan Animation Best 150" survey.⁶

Legacy and historical assessment

Yasuo Ōtsuka recalled the film as standing at the peak of what he called Japan's "first feature-length animation era," a period in which previously blurred boundaries between direction, art, and animation roles were integrated. A newly formed labor union created unity of style through internal debate, and the sakuga-tōkatsu (animation director) role and flat, simple character designs were introduced with this film.⁶ Isao Takahata argued that the film's episodic struggle structure was inherited by later "battles with successive villains" stories.⁶

Toei itself describes the film as a masterpiece in which the studio took on, with its full staff and technology, a subject "Japanese people would all want to attempt once," achieving a great success and marking the studio's history.⁷

Availability and documentation

Authoritative catalog records exist at Toei Animation's official lineup, the Eiren database of the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, and the NAE-DB web catalog of the History of Japanese Animation Films project.¹^•²^•⁸ The Kobe Planet Film Archive holds a complete 1963 16mm theatrical positive print of the film, in color with optical sound.⁸ In English-language distribution, the film was later licensed by Mill Creek Entertainment, with Anime News Network listing streaming on Tubi TV and YouTube, and a Region 1 DVD release in the Pop Culture Bento Box on February 5, 2019.⁵ The National Film Archive of Japan's 2026 Toei Animation retrospective program documents the film's staff and production history in detail.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026