REVIEW: Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (2013)

by Dustin Kramer

I’m conflicted about folktales. What began as bits and pieces of oral literature, before someone had the good sense to put them to paper, are owed some amount of respect for being among the first stories that humans told. However, so many of the principles that we consider essential to the telling of a “good story” were developed — and are still developing — many generations after the birth of these yarns. Ancient storytellers didn’t have the benefit of thousands of years of literature to lend them a detailed understanding of structure, character development, conflict, or how to make these elements compelling. I don’t mean to be so hard on the awkward adolescence of modern literature, but folktales tend to be pretty bad stories. The process of adaptation can inject modern storytelling sensibilities into an otherwise crappy narrative, but in the case of the 2013 Studio Ghibli film Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Story of Princess Kaguya) filmmaker Isao Takahata was unable to give this fable the contemporary touch it needs.

Kaguya-hime no Monogatari is based on the oldest known Japanese narrative, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” believed to be written in the 10th century. It tells the story of a poor man who finds a tiny girl in a stalk of bamboo. He takes the girl home to his wife, and they decide to raise her as their own and name her Kaguya. As she grows, Kaguya’s otherworldly beauty becomes more apparent, and suitors begin to ask for her hand in marriage. She turns all of them down, rejecting the concept of marriage outright. At the end of the story, Kaguya must return to where she came from — the moon.

As is clear from the premise of the tale and the opening scene of the movie when she is found, the titular character is not your average girl. Aside from her unusual discovery, we are first made aware of this in the scene where her adoptive father brings her home. She suddenly grows from a well-proportioned little person like Thumbelina or one of the Borrowers to something like a human infant. Considering that Takahata has always been the teller of more realistic stories compared Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli cofounder and legendary animator) and his flights of boundless imagination, this moment is one of the first instances in the movie that showcases Takahata’s unique ability to blend the fantasy of this tale with the realism he is more experienced with crafting. It’s so understated that it borders on unsettling.

The first act of the movie is top-tier coming-of-age type stuff. The main character makes fast friends with some local boys and begins exploring the world around her home. Her father wishes to refer to her as hime, or “princess,” but her new pals dub her takenoko, or “bamboo,” to his chagrin. Her micro adventures cement one of the central themes within the film — the Buddhist ideal that a simple life is a good life. Once her father begins discovering piles of gold inside his bamboo harvests, it is only a matter of time before he whisks his little family away to an expensive palace where Takenoko will get the grooming she needs to become the princess the bamboo cutter intends for her to be. It is here that Takenoko — now referred to as Kaguya — begins to really develop as a character. At first, she openly basks in the luxuries of an affluent life but quickly begins to reject the expectations of one at her station — that is, etiquette, physical alterations, and eventually marriage.

The story arc with the suitors is what I have the most problems with. They show up and boast all of the treasures they could lay at Kaguya’s feet, but each boldly proclaims that Kaguya would be the most prized possession were she his. The princess rejects the notion of being objectified like a rare gemstone or precious metal and sends the suitors away. A few of them return later to prove their love through deception, but the young girl sees through their lies and sends them away once more, even refusing the proposal of the emperor of Japan. All of this is important to Kaguya’s growth as a character. It proves that she is still the self-reliant tomboy she was as a poor bamboo cutter’s daughter, despite all her pampering. The problem is that it lacks any of the understated magic that’s so pervasive throughout the rest of the film and quickly begins to feel like a stuffy period piece instead of the fantastical folktale that it is. In a scene where the princess is doing something as uncomplicated as learning to play music, there is a mysticism surrounding her affinity for the instrument. All of this mystery and intrigue disappears as soon as these hopeful husbands show up. It bogs down the film to the point that by the time it’s over, the audience has already been checking their watches for almost half an hour.

This pacing issue isn’t exclusive to this portion of the narrative, however. The central conflict of the story — the fact that Kaguya must return to the moon — appears much too late in the runtime. So late, in fact, that the lack of any real conflict in the film up to that point suddenly feels like a huge void. The central characters barely have enough time to contemplate, much less resolve, the impending problem before it’s right upon them. The film ends somewhat abruptly when the princess is collected by the people from the moon and their leader, who appears to be the Buddha. The scene itself is emotionally conflicting and uncomfortable to watch. The lively, celebratory music that grows as the company of moon men descend on a cloud is brash and heart-wrenching in contrast to the weeping and begging from Kaguya and her parents. Kaguya’s resistance ends when she is wrapped in a cloak brought by her native people. She calmly takes her place next to the Buddha figure, her face void of emotion. The happy music begins again and slowly fades as she is carried away forever. Pretty brutal, right?

Thematically, I think Takahata and cowriter Riko Sakaguchi have missed a few beats. The aforementioned ideology of “a simple life is a good life” is somewhat lost on Kaguya as the main character. The story is told from her perspective, so she should ostensibly be at the center of the narrative’s themes. However, when her father takes her away to live in the palace, she is perfectly happy with her life as a peasant. She loves her friends and is learning through new experiences everyday. It lacks the key element of a fable with this message — a character unhappy with his or her place in life who receives a windfall of good fortune only to discover that the happiness it brings is fleeting. Kaguya is content with her simple life, then initially happy with her wealthy life, then eventually tired of her wealthy life, then distraught when she has to leave everything behind. It honestly feels more like a tragedy than the moralistic fables or explanatory myths that we often find in ancient literature. However, the late reveal of the conflict combined with the absence of even an ounce of foreshadowing — an element integral to a successful tragedy — leaves us with an uneven, boring affair. Ironically, had the story focused on Kaguya’s father, the titular character of the original folktale, most of these problems could have easily been resolved. After all, it is his fault that Kaguya begins to hate her life, and when she is taken away it should feel like his punishment. I’m all for painting the fairy tale princess as a person, not a prize (which is something the folktale does anyway), but perhaps changing the perspective would have coalesced the narrative and its themes in a much more meaningful way.

Studio Ghibli’s effort here is one of the most gorgeous things ever put to celluloid. The textured, single-stroke line-work that defines each character and background exists somewhere between Takahata’s 1999 movie My Neighbors the Yamadas and various artistic movements throughout Japanese history, specifically those of sumi-e ink wash and sansuiga landscapes. The sparse moments of action are rendered with a keen sense of movement and speed, as if the bleeding colors are being pushed clear off the edges of the page like a wet painting under a high velocity fan. The characters themselves are even animated differently when under emotional duress, their loss of composure illustrated in jittering, over-animated line-art of crumpled, weeping faces. The art is simple, the colors are all subdued hues and pastels, and the mise en scene is always totally rendered to all four sides of a frame, unlike the also beautiful but much more minimalistic Yamadas. I would be proud to take any one of the almost two hundred thousand frames that comprise this piece to hang on a wall in my home.

Joe Hisaishi’s frequent collaboration with Miyazaki has produced some of the most memorable film scores of all time. With Kaguya-hime, his first outing with Takahata, Hisaishi has summoned the quaint sounds of antiquity and infused them with the sweeping orchestration synonymous with cinematic music of today. It reminds me of his work on 1997’s Princess Mononoke and is a testament to his unwavering talent. But Hisaishi’s contribution isn’t the only notable thing in the movie’s soundtrack. The foley in Kaguya-hime represents some of the most tasteful, subtle sound effects I’ve ever experienced in a motion picture. The evocative rhythms of bare and shoed feet traversing various surfaces and the lonely whispers of moving fabric are quiet master classes in the art of sensory fabrication.

I think it’s clear that Isao Takahata has an aesthetic masterpiece on his hands with Kaguya-hime no Monogatari, but his devotion to the source material and reluctance to truly adapt the “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” for the film medium proves to be damaging on a storytelling level. Although it has a lot going for it, I can’t help but feel disappointed. Earlier this year, I was let down by Miyazaki’s newest film The Wind Rises. Strangely, after seeing both movies, I think the filmmakers on these two projects probably should have switched roles. I love what Takahata did with the fantasy elements in Kaguya-hime, but his eye for realism could have shaped Jiro Horikoshi’s pseudo-biography into something with a bit more bite — much like he did with 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies, a film that bites hard enough to draw blood (or at least a lot of tears). The far more prolific Miyazaki is an old veteran with the fantasy genre, and while his version of Japan’s oldest story would likely be a bit more conventional, in this case, I think that’s what Kaguya-hime needs. After all, convention is just learned and time-tested methodology, and a bit of that could have gone a long way with the outdated narrative that Takahata ultimately committed to film.