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Review: The Tale of Princess Kaguya

★★★★★

Five Stars

I was surprised by how little known and averagely-rated The Tale of Princess Kaguya, which netted Studio Ghibli’s first Academy Award nomination since Howl’s Moving Castle, was in the run-up to its release. It received some surprisingly mixed reviews based on what seemed to me fairly shallow criticism: that it was too slow-paced to keep the attention of its younger audience.

There wasn’t a single child watching when I went to see it at the cinema, and the subtlety of its themes was by far suited to a more mature audience. If reviewers were expecting one of Studio Ghibli’s usual charming adventure fantasies, they would obviously be disappointed. The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a troubling mix of dark folk-tale and harsh reality behind incredibly beautiful aesthetics.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a fairy tale which unravels fairy tales. Its beginning places magical occurrences in the realm of the possible, whereas later scenes seem to question a simple acceptance of these events. In one of the strongest echoes of folk-tale, the princess’s five suitors each go on a quest to find a seemingly unobtainable object in a bid to win her hand. In the end, they pay craftsmen to create these objects for them or are swindled by traders purporting to sell such things, inventing incredible stories of their quests in the process, to add credibility to their tale. The film allows us not to take these ‘magical’ happenings at face value, so that the events of the film can be interpreted in ways relevant to ordinary human experience.

These interpretations, although gently implied, can lead to conclusions dark enough to not seem out of place in the work of Isao Takahata, creator of Grave of the Fireflies. The contrast between earth’s chaotic cycles of life, of joy alternating with sorrow, are rendered in gorgeous watercolour. This is contrasted against the cold, quiet black-and-white precision of eternal life on the moon, Princess Kaguya’s true home. The effect is to suggest that the ‘life’ she momentarily wants to return to in her deepest anguish can only be death; she forgets all her experiences on earth when she returns.

The film creates other contrasts which are hardly straightforward. The life she lived in the woods as a child was one of companionship and closeness to nature, but also of near-starvation and hard work. Despite her certainty that she could have been happy in that life, and the way in which she is made to deny all emotion when living as a subjugated female aristocrat, I felt as if she was merely telling herself a story which she found comforting from her present perspective.

Her aristocratic life is, distressingly, one which can only be escaped by death or by dreams, and two of the most moving scenes of the film are only revealed as dream-sequences after they have occurred. As she imagines breaking out of her confinement, shedding her stifling layers of luxurious robes to race through a landscape that becomes increasingly abstract with dark scribbles of charcoal, it is as if her mental distress unravels the art of the film.

A flying sequence between her and her only real love interest Sutemaru recalls Chirio and Haku’s flight from Spirited Away and perhaps deliberately so, in a film that is suited to self-conscious evocations of other films and other stories. Or perhaps it’s merely drawing on Studio Ghibli’s general use of flight as representative of thwarted love.

Its radical difference to Takahata’s other films suggests his great flexibility as a director who bravely but rightly trusted in the suggestive power of folk stories and beautiful, cleverly-deployed imagery to carry the film.

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