Panda and the Magic Serpent

jpn Hakujaden, aka Legend of the White Snake. 1958. Movie. 78 min. (English dub: 71 min.) Historical fantasy. dir Taiji Yabushita. scr Taiji Yabushita. -bc

The very first color Japanese animated feature was based on a Chinese folktale about a white snake that transforms into a lovely maiden and falls in love with a scholar. It’s a beautiful, lush, fluid piece of animation that looks and sounds like a splendid animated fairy tale should.

Panda is based on a Chinese folktale about a white snake that transforms into a beautiful young maiden named Bai-Niang. Accompanied by a fish-turned-maid named Xiao-Xin, Bai-Niang plays her lute and attracts the attention of a young scholar named Xu-Xian, who has two devoted pets, a panda named Panda, and a red panda named Mimi. Bai-Niang and Xu-Xian are soon hopelessly in love. An overzealous Taoist monk named Fa Hai senses the presence of spirits in the neighborhood and seeks to drive them out. Bai-Niang and Xiao-Xin manage to get away, but Xu-Xian is arrested and sent into exile, forced to work at hard labor in a distant fishing port.

Panda and Mimi go searching for Xu-Xian and wind up in the same seaport town where he is. They run afoul of the local White Pig mob, an animal gang that steals food from the local markets. With his superior strength, Panda takes over the mob and enlists them in his campaign to bring Xu-Xian and Bai-Niang back together. Xu-Xian dreams of Bai-Niang in the Thunder Peak Pagoda, and endeavors to go there. Fa Hai gets there first and battles in the skies with Bai-Niang. She fights him off, but she turns back into a snake in the process. Xu-Xian shows up, but falls from the rocks while trying to follow Bai-Niang and dies. Bai-Niang flies through space to plead with the Dragon God to restore Xu-Xian’s life. Only if she gives up her immortality and power will he do so, but she must also find the Flower of Life and take it to Xu-Xian, whose body is being held by Fa Hai at his temple on Golden Isle. Soon all parties converge on Golden Isle for one last confrontation with Fa Hai. . . .

When Toei Pictures set up its new animation division in 1956, the aim was to create lavish color Disney-style adaptations of famous folktales from around the world. Hakujaden was its first production, which showed the world that Japanese animators could compete with Disney on the world stage and make enchanting, picturesque, fluidly animated stories with universal appeal. Here the Disney influence was felt mostly in the antics of the animal characters, starting with Panda and Mimi, the red panda, and extending to the White Pig Mob, which includes a pair of pigs, a pair of weasels, a white duck, and a mouse. The design of the human characters and the decor of the settings all took their cues from Chinese art, an appropriate choice given the story’s basis in Chinese legend.

The two main characters Xu-Xian and Bai-Niang are delicately crafted creations, a handsome young scholar and a beautiful, elegant maiden. We don’t get too close to them, nor do they really ever take command of the screen. They’re meant to be beautiful and in love, and to galvanize the other characters into action, either to break them apart, as the monk does, or bring them together as the fish-maid and the animal characters do. The animals tend to be the most detailed of all the characters, and look much closer to their animal origins than, say, their counterparts in a Hollywood cartoon would be. The weasels are particularly interesting, as is the White Pig in a Chinese hat who runs the mob until Panda beats him in a fight. Aside from the two lovers, the other human characters are much more cartoonish, including the character of Xiao-Xin, the fish-maid, whose face is frozen in a perpetual big smile with closed eyes. Fa Hai is depicted as a particular character type from Chinese and Japanese folklore; a fat monk, balding, bearded, and a big eater with a ferocious temperament. But he’s actually the most layered character in the whole piece and not a cartoon villain.

The film has a wide range of settings, some of them quite dramatic, including the Thunder Peak Pagoda high on a cliff overlooking the sea where Bai-Niang hides from the monk, pining for Xu-Xian, and Golden Isle, the rocky island which houses the monk’s imposing temple, where all the climactic action takes place. When Bai-Niang and Fa Hai have their battle in the heavens over Thunder Peak, it is mystical combat set against a surreally black, overcast backdrop. Bai-Niang even journeys into outer space, to a distant star, to find the Dragon God, surely the first time (but certainly not the last), that Japanese animators would journey there. Through it all, the animators expertly capture the look, feel, and tone of a sweeping ancient legend.

The English dub cast for Panda includes three Asian or Asian-American performers then working in Hollywood: Lisa Lu as Bai-Niang (billed as “Girl”), Miiko Taka as Xiao-Xin (billed as “Fish Spirit”), and George Matsui as Xu-Xian (billed as “Boy”). Lisa Lu had just finished a starring role opposite James Stewart in the World War II drama, The Mountain Road (1960), set in China; Miiko Taka had starred opposite Marlon Brando in Sayonara (1957); and George Matsui was a young actor who had appeared in Hell to Eternity (1960), also with Ms. Taka. The dominant voice on the Panda soundtrack is that of ubiquitous Hollywood narrator Marvin Miller, who goes so far as to provide spoken translations of the original Japanese songs left intact on the soundtrack.

Panda and the Magic Serpent is the English-dubbed version of Hakujaden and clocks in at seventy-one minutes, meaning a seven-minute chunk was cut for the U.S. release, either to speed things up or remove offending violent elements. From the evidence of the early Japanese animated features we’ve been able to see in the U.S. (Alakazam the Great, Magic Boy, The Adventures of Sinbad, The Littlest Warrior, Little Prince and Eight-Headed Dragon), Japanese animators didn’t shy away from the harsher, more downbeat aspects of life in their adaptations of ancient stories. Since the original full-length version of Hakujaden has never been available in the U.S., we don’t know whether there were longer scenes featuring the two lovers, who are hardly together at all in the course of the entire film as seen, or if something that might have given the narrative a greater pull has been cut. There seems to be too much action centered around the animals, as if human scenes were cut to justify the singling out of Panda in the title and sell this as a children’s film with funny animals in the U.S.

It’s a pleasant enough film to watch and enjoy, even if it isn’t the best of that special group of early color features from Toei’s animation division. (That would arguably be The Littlest Warrior.) The direction of most future Japanese animation would be signaled by a black-and-white TV series that appeared five years later, Astro Boy. Panda gives us the opportunity to see commercial Japanese animation as it was originally envisioned, with its attempt to compete with Disney, but by tackling Asian subjects and dipping into Chinese folklore, as Japanese animators would frequently do. We can see certain themes developing here that would turn up in so much future anime, including the love of a nonhuman entity for a human (something we see in Devilman and Space Battleship Yamato, among many others). And when Bai-Niang goes to the Dragon God to ask him to revive Xu-Xian, we immediately think ahead to Dragon Ball where Shenlong, the Eternal Dragon, is constantly invoked to bring a character back to life. Japanese animators would frequently turn to American and European literature in the years ahead, while Disney would eventually make an animated film about China’s female folk hero, Mulan.

The English dub retains several original Japanese-language songs on the soundtrack. The Panda song is left untranslated, as if the audience would think it was catchy panda gibberish to be sung while dancing on drums and such. The other songs, sung by Bai-Niang, are left intact, but with translating narration laid over them, though not too intrusively. The songs are meant to have a Chinese flavor, and their presence in the English dub adds to the film’s romantic flavor and lessens the impact of the dubbing process, a far cry from what was done to Saiyuki (Journey to the West, 1960), when it was dubbed into English as Alakazam the Great in 1961 with all new songs, sung by American teen idol Frankie Avalon, added to the soundtrack.

Hakujaden was, for all intents and purposes, the very first Japanese animated commercial feature. There was one animated feature made in Japan and released theatrically before it—a World War II propaganda film entitled Momotaro Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro, Divine Soldiers of the Sea). Momotaro was based on a famous character from Japanese folklore and is depicted as a soldier who leads his animal troops to victory against the Americans and British. It was seventy-four minutes long and first shown in 1945 to bolster the fading homefront morale. An earlier Momotaro animated film, Momotaro no Umiwashi (Momotaro’s Sea Eagles) was thirty-seven minutes long and first shown in 1943. Neither film was designed to make money, but to spur the Japanese citizenry to support the war effort.

The story of Hakujaden had been made as a lavish live-action film, Madame White Snake, one of the earliest color productions in Japan, in 1956, two years before the animated version. While there are striking similarities in Bai-Niang’s design to the live-action portrayal of the character by Shirley Yamaguchi, little else in the earlier film seems to have influenced the animators, who brought their own ideas to the project. The story has also been made several times by Hong Kong filmmakers, including Tsui Hark, who directed Green Snake in 1993, starring Maggie Cheung and Joey Wang.

Panda and the Magic Serpent may have been the first Japanese animated film officially released in the United States, although the actual release date is difficult to confirm, since it was handled by a small company, Globe Pictures, and wasn’t reviewed in the New York Times or any other easily traceable publications. Its release appears to have been roughly simultaneous with Magic Boy and Alakazam the Great, the latter of which was released on July 14, 1961. Of these early works, only Alakazam the Great received significant audience exposure in the U.S. thanks to a full-scale release by American International Pictures, with nationwide distribution, publicity, and a dub cast of celebrity voices.

Among the future animators inspired by this film was a teenage Hayao Miyazaki.

advisory This is a children’s film, but there is fighting in it, mostly between Panda and the White Pig mob. A later fight, involving magical powers, takes place in the heavens between Bai-Niang and Fa Hai.