The Tale Of Princess Kaguya looks and feels like few other animated films around, including those also playing in the current Studio Ghibli mini-showcase that it’s a part of.
It’s been gestating long enough that a feature-length documentary charting its eight-year making is playing concurrently in the showcase (along with director Isao Takahata’s classic Grave Of The Fireflies), though it never feels like the product of painstaking labour so much as passion and freedom of imagination.
The title refers to a Tinkerbell-esque young girl found – in full princess garb – by a bamboo cutter in a stalk in the woods, before evolving into a human infant. Taken in and raised by the cutter and his wife in the countryside, the young Kaguya ages at a rate that outpaces the local village’s children, and quickly assumes the regal role from her unusual birth circumstances.
What’s striking about the film is how Kaguya’s evolution is rendered in a manner that feels at once mythic and subjective, befitting both the story and the point of view of this beyond-time central character. The backdrops and characters are animated to effortlessly resemble dreamy wisps of charcoal sketching and hues of watercolour, with more concrete drawings used to represent her eventual induction into a life of stifling formality, as she vies for the role of wife to five different suitors.
It’s all so beguiling and beautiful that it’s easy to forgive patches of its admittedly bloated runtime (nearly two-and-a-half hours) where you’re just staring at it rather than properly engaging – the high points, including two startling expressionist dream sequences, are frankly some of the best animated cinema, ever, full stop. Cumulatively, it’s genuinely otherworldly and transporting enough to make ‘too long’ seem like an especially banal objection.
4/5 stars
The Tale Of Princess Kaguya is palying at Dendy Newtown until Wednesday October 22.
