The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
2013 · Isao Takahata
When you want beauty and a good cry in the same evening — a film to watch when you're ready to feel something large about parents, childhood, and time passing. More meditative than cozy.
What it's about
An old bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl glowing inside a bamboo stalk and raises her as his own. She grows with unnatural speed into a young woman who enchants everyone she meets, and her father — convinced her destiny is nobility — moves the family to the capital to make her a princess. But the life being built for her is not the life she wants, and her mysterious origins wait at the edge of everything.
The experience
Serene for long stretches, then suddenly overwhelming — it drifts like a scroll painting until a rush of feeling breaks through, and the ending lands with a weight few animated films ever attempt. It leaves you quiet.
The craft
Takahata spent eight years building the film from watercolor washes and sketchy charcoal lines that tremble and fray with emotion — in one famous sequence the drawing itself seems to break apart in rage. Joe Hisaishi's score matches that restraint and release; on a big screen the hand-made texture is astonishing.
Why it matters
Isao Takahata's final film and one of the most expensive Japanese productions of its era, it proved animation could look like a living ink painting — a capstone to the career of Studio Ghibli's other master.
Reception & legacy: how The Tale of The Princess Kaguya was received, argued over, and remembered →
Isao Takahata's final film, eight years in the making and among the most expensive Japanese productions of its time, adapts the tenth-century Tale of the Bamboo Cutter — the oldest surviving Japanese prose narrative — into something that looks like no other animated feature. Working against the polished cel tradition of his own Studio Ghibli, Takahata built the film from watercolor washes and sketched charcoal lines that thin, tremble, and fray with feeling; in the celebrated sequence where the princess flees a banquet, the drawing itself seems to break apart in rage. Beneath the folktale — a girl found in a bamboo stalk, raised toward a destiny she never chose — runs a devastating meditation on parents who mistake status for love, and on how much living gets traded away for the sake of an image. Joe Hisaishi, scoring for Takahata for the first time, matches the restraint. Oscar-nominated, and released the same season as Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, it stands as the quieter, stranger half of Ghibli's great farewell — a career closed on a pencil line.
Lines of influence
- My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) — Takahata's first fully digital watercolor-and-sketch feature, where figures float in unpainted white negative space with deliberately unfinished linework — the exact aesthetic Kaguya refines into a whole film.
- Only Yesterday (1991) — Establishes the soft pastel-washed countryside and edge-dissolving pastoral backgrounds, plus the muted adult restraint in performance that Kaguya carries into its rural interludes.
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988) — Takahata's unsentimental, observational realism — emotion conveyed through small everyday gesture rather than melodrama — is the restraint discipline underpinning Kaguya's quiet tragedy.
- Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968) — Takahata's foundational folktale feature, built on collective peasant-village detail and mythic structure, prefigures Kaguya's folktale-adaptation architecture.
- The King and the Mockingbird (1980) — The European poetic-animation model Takahata openly cited as founding Ghibli's ethos — literate, painterly, unhurried — a direct lineage to Kaguya's hand-drawn lyricism.
- The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) — Back's impressionist crayon-and-pastel imagery, whose contours melt into blank paper, is the technical model for Kaguya's lines that trail off into unpainted margins; Takahata championed and wrote about Back.
- Tale of Tales (1979) — Norstein's hand-drawn, texturally impermanent poetic animation — which Takahata translated and promoted in Japan — models the sketch-as-final-image ephemerality Kaguya adopts.
- Pom Poko (1994) — Draws on Japanese folk-painting and scroll traditions, shifting drawing styles mid-scene for emotional register — a precedent for Kaguya's stylistic rupture during the flight sequence.
- The Wind Rises (2013) — The twin 2013 Ghibli 'farewell' feature, sharing Joe Hisaishi's score and a valedictory register — the two co-founders' parallel final statements on hand-drawn animation.
- The Red Turtle (2016) — Ghibli-produced and Takahata-blessed, it extends Kaguya's minimalism into charcoal-and-watercolor restraint with near-total absence of dialogue, emotion carried by line and pause.
- Song of the Sea (2014) — A folktale (selkie) adaptation rendered in flat watercolor washes and visible hand-drawn contour, prioritizing decorative surface and line over cel-realism, exactly as Kaguya does.
- The Secret of Kells (2009) — Treats the animation frame as an illuminated-manuscript page — ornamental line and hand-drawn calligraphic mark as the medium itself — kin to Kaguya's brush-line-as-image approach.
- Wolfwalkers (2020) — Leaves rough pencil and charcoal underdrawing visibly un-inked, and ruptures into scratchy chaotic linework at moments of fear — the same 'drawing-disintegration' device as Kaguya's flight.
- Ernest & Celestine (2012) — Built on translucent watercolor washes and deliberately incomplete sketch edges bleeding into white paper, a European contemporary of Kaguya's anti-cel, unfinished-drawing aesthetic.
- The Breadwinner (2017) — Cartoon Saloon folktale-within-a-story structure using flat, illustrative hand-drawn planes and restraint over spectacle, extending the storybook-as-animation lineage Kaguya crystallized.
- Princess Arete (2001) — A folktale of a maiden who resists being an object of possession, told with muted palette and quiet, anti-spectacle staging that parallels Kaguya's 'living traded for image' restraint.