Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958) Aka: The White Snake Enchantress; The Great White Snake; The Tale of the White Serpent Japanese Title: 白蛇伝 Translation: White Snake Legend
Voice Cast: Hisaya Morishige, Mariko Miyagi
Director: Taiji Yabushita
Okay, our first film to cover for the Year of the White Snake (i.e. 2025) is an animated film, probably the first at this incarnation of the site. This is not the first adaptation ever. Toho had teamed up with the Shaw Brothers two years earlier for Madame White Snake, which featured some effects by Mr. Tokusatsu himself, Eiji Tsuburaya. The year before that, there was The Legend of the White Snake, which appears to have been a filmed opera. A sequel, Shileng Offers Sacrifice to the Leifeng Pagoda, came out the same year. Those two were preceded in 1952 by The Legend of Madame White Snake, which starred the very popular Yu So-Chau in the lead role. The earliest documented—as per my research—adaptation was Chinese production The White Snake (1939), which starred Manchurian actress Chen Yan-Yan in the lead role.
This film, titled Legend of the White Snake in its home country, is a milestone film in that it was a) the first color anime film produced in Japan and b) the first film produced by the new Toei Animation studio. For the record, Toei animation has given us everything from Mazinger Z (or Tranzor Z) to Dragon Ball, from Cutie Honey to Digimon, from The King Kong Show to PreCure. I guess you can say that genre fans and children of most generations have been influenced in some way by Toei Studios. This movie apparently had a staff of over 13,000 animators and artists working on it, whom were able to churn out the film in only eight months. When it was released stateside in the early 60s, it was retitled Panda and the Magic Serpent, but failed to make a dent at the box office.
The story is pretty simple. When Hsu Hsien is a boy, he buys a pet snake from the market. All of the adults around him dislike the notion of a young man in possessions of one of the “five poisons” (my words, not theirs) and he gets ride of the snake. Unbeknownst to Hsu Hsien, the snake can talk and, in a girl’s voice, asks him to never change.
Years later, Hsu Hsien is now a young man. I guess he is a scholar of sorts, but all we see him do is play the flute with his pets, Panda and Mimi (a red panda, whom I thought was a fox). There is a storm near his town and emerging from the waters is a white serpent, who changes into a beautiful young woman named Pai Niang. Joining her is a fish spirit, Hsiao Chang, who takes the form of a young girl. Hsiao Ching is something of a servant to Pai Niang. Pai goes about seducing the young man and is pulling it off quite well at the beginning.
But, we wouldn’t have a movie if there were no opposition. Enter Hokai (or Fahai), a Buddhist monk who has made it his mission in life to expel any and all spirits (yokai in the Japanese version) from this world. The dialog in this movie suggests that he assumes all spirits exist solely to prey on humans, thus he is doing the world a service in fighting them.
He gets his chance to act thanks to Hsiao Ching and Hsu Hsien’s pets. The latter two animals are fiddling with a wooden dragon that adorns the columns of Pai Niang’s magical estate—that looks like an abandoned building whenever she’s not around—when the dragon comes alive and flies through the air. It carries the animals and Hsiao Ching into town, where it crashes through the room of the local treasury building. Hsiao Ching finds a pair of star-shaped jewels that she steals and gives to the two young lovers.
Upon discovering that some of the jewels are missing, the magistrate demands to know where they are. Hokai shows up and snitches on Hsu Hsien, leading to his arrest and exile from the village. He is placed in a boat and taken (presumably) upstream on (what I assume to be) the Yellow River, taking him to Western China. He ends up in a city on the river where he earns his daily bread pulling ships along the shoreline. He hasn’t forgotten Pai Niang, however, and she visits him in his sleep.
This calls the attention of Hokai, who tracks her down to a pagoda where she lives. The two get into a magical battle and Pai Niang loses, which results her having to forfeit her human form. Hsu Hsien chases her spirit up the mountain and practically falls to his death. So, Hokai takes Hsu Hsien’s body to his temple to be buried, while Pai Niang traverses the universe to the planet of spirits to beg the Dragon God for the Flower of Life to resurrect Hsu Hsien. She is even willing to sacrifice her own immortality to that end. She is granted her wish, but that Hokai is a stubborn man…
Like a lot of famous fairy tales—White Snake is considered one of China’s four classic fairy tales—there is a certain evolution to the tale over the centuries. Generally speaking, the story started life with the titular character as the villain and the resident religious figure (originally a Taoist exorcist) to be the hero. As the years passed, other incarnations slowly switched the roles, so that the story was about a forbidden love with that darn Buddhist guy getting in the way.
Panda and the Magic Serpent is essentially a Disney-fied adaptation of the late Ming Dynasty version, “Madam White is Kept Forever Under the Thunder Peak Tower.” This version was found in Feng Menglong’s Stories to Caution the World, published in 1624. I say Disney-fied because much of the film revolves around the antics of the animal characters, including a set of “bandits” living in the Western Chinese city, which includes two hogs, two weasels, a duck, and some mice. The film also substitutes the original tragic ending with something a little more hopeful. In fact, the idea of giving up immortality and/or monster forms for love is something that Western viewers would see years later in Disney fare like The Little Mermaid and Hercules.
The animation is pretty good, I guess. I’m not a huge expert in judging animation. The first sequence is a set of still images set to dialog and singing which reminds me of some of the cartoons that my elementary school teachers at Grant Elementary School showed us on a projector circa 1988. Then it gets into the actual story, where the animation reminds me of…hmm…I’d say something to the effect of a late 1930s MGM cartoon. That especially applies to the animals, which have a “slinky” quality to their movements. Which is fine. But by 1961, American audiences were getting films like Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmations, so animation of that level was probably “old hat.” And toss in folklore that most children would have been unfamiliar with and I can see why people didn’t go for that. But, Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu movies were still doing great business in the States, so I wouldn’t chock it up to full-blown racism. I just think that Disney and Warner Brothers animation was in a better place at the time. Sixty years later, however, and it’s a completely different story.
