The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

“Once upon a time, long long ago, there lived an old bam­boo wood­cut­ter…” Along with the exquis­ite­ly lay­ered and paint­ed parch­ments that we see at the begin­ning of Stu­dio Ghibli’s lat­est fea­ture The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, these open­ing words, deliv­ered by a reas­sur­ing­ly female voice, leave lit­tle doubt that we are enter­ing the world of the fairy tale.

The words also prime Japan­ese view­ers to recog­nise the folk sto­ry known as ​‘The Tale of the Bam­boo Cut­ter’, writ­ten suf­fi­cient­ly ​‘long ago’ to qual­i­fy as Japan’s old­est extant prose nar­ra­tive. Yet even with the ani­mé look­ing back so far, and with accom­pa­ny­ing illus­tra­tions that evoke clas­si­cal water colours more than vogu­ish 3D CGI, direc­tor/­co-writer Isao Taka­ha­ta (Grave of the Fire­flies) is also sly­ly bring­ing his mate­ri­als forward.

The key is in the change of title, and the asso­ci­at­ed focal shift from a male to a female char­ac­ter. For in tak­ing the tra­di­tion­al sto­ry of a mirac­u­lous foundling baby girl raised by a wood­cut­ter and his wife, Taka­ha­ta brings his own fem­i­nist spin to Kaguya’s com­ing of age, show­ing how this child of nature is repeat­ed­ly kept from hap­pi­ness by the forces of patriarchy.

The Woodcutter’s mis­un­der­stand­ing (if it is that) of heav­en-sent lux­u­ries leads him to believe he must ele­vate Kaguya to accep­tance and mar­riage amongst the earth­ly nobil­i­ty — and so, with the best of inten­tions, he takes her away from her beloved coun­try­side to a court­ly urban life offer­ing lit­tle free­dom to women. The caged bird that Kaguya receives as a gift from a suit­or comes with clear sym­bol­ic value.

In Isao Takahata’s ver­sion, the younger Kaguya falls some­where between the curi­ous tod­dler Mei from Miyazaki’s My Neigh­bour Totoro and the wild wood-dwelling hero­ine of 1997’s Princess Mononoke, before she is con­fined to a pala­tial man­sion, con­strained in her dress and man­ners, and offered up to a parade of eli­gi­ble male suit­ors who are var­i­ous­ly exposed as cheats, cow­ards and wom­an­is­ers. This cul­mi­nates in an approach by the Mika­do him­self, who far from the roman­tic lover of the orig­i­nal folk­tale, is here depict­ed as an over-enti­tled would-be rapist.

Kaguya dreams of return­ing to the for­est idyll, and to her one-time play­mate Sutemaru — but the bit­ter­sweet les­son in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is that there is nev­er real­ly any going back, but only an eter­nal return to match the cycles of the sea­sons or the phas­es of the moon. Kaguya’s ear­ly free­dom and lat­er oppres­sion seem like­ly to repeat themselves.

When she first appears, Kaguya grows with unnat­ur­al speed, learn­ing to roll, crawl and walk with­in the space of a few min­utes, and vis­i­bly gain­ing in size and stature before the star­tled eyes of onlook­ers. Yet iron­i­cal­ly, the great­est flaw of Takahata’s film is its exces­sive length and pon­der­ous pac­ing, which will leave view­ers feel­ing that they have almost wit­nessed Kaguya’s rites of pas­sage in real time. The film’s immense visu­al beau­ty, how­ev­er, is unde­ni­able — and irresistible.