Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
2013 · Isao Takahata · The Tale of The Princess Kaguya on Sightlines
Look at the edge of the frame in the country scenes. A charcoal line runs up over a ridge, thins, hesitates, and stops. Past it there is paper. Not sky, not haze, not a background someone forgot to fill in — paper, the white the drawing came out of.
Takahata left that white in the finished film. At feature length, after eight years, on one of the most expensive Japanese productions of its era. Everything else in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya follows from that decision, so it is worth being exact about what it does. Most films stop at the frame line, and past the edge there is simply more world: a corridor, a street, the next shot. Deleuze called that the relative out-of-field. But he also described something stranger — an outside that isn't anywhere, that can't be walked to, that presses on the image without occupying any space in it. The absolute out-of-field. In Kaguya that outside has a name, and it comes for her. The moon is not a place in this film. It is the blank of the page, which was there all along, under and around every line.
Once you see it that way the folktale reorganizes itself. The tenth-century Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the oldest surviving Japanese prose narrative, is built as a machine for action: a child found in a shining stalk, sudden wealth, everyone who encounters her enthralled, a fate arranged from above. Deleuze's name for the cinema of that machine is the movement-image — a character sees a situation and acts, and the acting works. Takahata keeps the plot points and drains them of consequence. The enthralment produces nothing. Her father's love expresses itself as promotion, and the promotion costs him the daughter. What is left when action stops resolving anything is a person who can only look and endure. Deleuze's word for that person is the seer, the voyant, and the reason the concept earns its place here is that it explains a thing the film is otherwise easy to mistake for slowness: Kaguya is not passive. She is stranded in a story whose events belong to other people.
Between those events the film holds the ordinary. A season in the hills. A child learning to crawl and falling over. Deleuze calls these stretches dead time — not wasted time, but time in which nothing is being decided, which is most of any life. Takahata had been building the instrument for decades. Grave of the Fireflies carries grief almost entirely in small practical gestures instead of speeches, and Only Yesterday keeps the adult performances so low that a pastel countryside with dissolving edges does the feeling for them. Joe Hisaishi, scoring for Takahata for the first time, plays like a man who has been told not to help.
Then the capital, and watch what gets done to her body. She is trained into postures, and the postures are the argument. Deleuze's term is the gest: a bearing or attitude that makes a social relation visible without anyone having to state it. A woman held in a shape she did not choose, in a house that purchased the right to hold her in it. The film's real subject — how much living gets traded away for the sake of an image — arrives as physical instruction rather than as theme. And because she grows at an impossible rate, her body doubles as the film's clock. Childhood comes and goes at the speed of a plant.
Then the banquet, and the running. This is the sequence everyone remembers, and it is where the invention pays out. She breaks from the party and runs, and the drawing cannot hold her. The line goes black and violent, the watercolor world scours away, shapes stop being things and become strokes. Nothing in the story changes. She runs, and the running is the entire event. Deleuze has a concept for a feeling presented at full strength for its own sake, never discharged into an act that would use it up: quality-power, intensity offered raw. Cinema usually gets this from a face in close-up. Kaguya gets it from a hand. The rage is not on the character, it is in the pressure of the pencil. Almost no animated feature had dared it, because it means letting the audience see the film being made at the exact moment they are meant to be furthest inside it. The opposite happens. The visible hand is what makes it unbearable.
Deleuze wrote almost nothing about animation, but the one remark he did make is useful. A cartoon, he said, does not give you a figure caught at a single privileged moment; it gives you the continuous movement by which the figure is described. Drawing as a verb. He meant it as a limitation. Takahata took it as a licence, and he came to it as a critic as much as a director — he championed Frédéric Back and wrote about him, and The Man Who Planted Trees, with its crayon contours melting into bare paper, is the direct technical model for a line that trails into the margin. The King and the Mockingbird, the European poetic-animation tradition he openly named as Ghibli's founding ethos, is where the permission to be literate, painterly and unhurried comes from. Horus, Prince of the Sun supplies the folktale architecture and the village detail. And My Neighbors the Yamadas is where the actual method was born: unfinished linework, figures floating in unpainted white, done digitally. Yamadas is a comic strip. Kaguya is the same instrument tuned to tragedy.
What it seeded is harder to point at than what it inherited, and the price tag is part of why. Eight years and a budget like that is not a method a studio picks up casually. What the film handed forward is a permission: that a feature can be carried by a line that fails, that incompleteness is an emotional instrument and not a stage before the real work, that blank paper is an image and can act. It relocates feeling out of performance and into facture, into the mark itself. Released the same season as The Wind Rises, it is the quieter and stranger half of Ghibli's farewell, a career closed on a pencil line.
One thing it will not settle for you. Kaguya is destroyed by being made into an image — admired, exquisite, unfree — and the film that says so is one of the most beautiful ever drawn. Takahata knew that. So watch the edges on a second viewing, and watch when the line gives out and where, because the film is telling you continuously how much of her is left. Whether its loveliness is her defence or one more way of keeping her is the question he declines to answer.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-absolute — Lines that thin and stop, leaving unpainted margin; the moon is never a location in the film's space but an outside that presses on every image — the blank of the page itself.
- any-space-whatever: emptiness — Figures floating in unpainted white negative space, the aesthetic Takahata invented in My Neighbors the Yamadas and refined into a whole film here.
- the seer (voyant) — She enthrals everyone who encounters her and none of it alters anything; she watches a fate she never chose being arranged by others.
- pure optical and sound situations — The folktale's task machinery is kept but drained of consequence — what remains is a girl with nothing available to do but look and listen.
- qualité-puissance (quality-power) — The flight from the banquet, where the drawing itself breaks apart in rage: intensity presented raw, discharging into no action and changing nothing in the plot.
- the gest — The capital's trained postures — a body held in a shape it did not choose, in a household that mistakes status for love; the theme delivered as physical instruction.
- temps mort — The rural interludes carried by small everyday gesture, in the observational discipline of Grave of the Fireflies and the muted restraint of Only Yesterday, with Hisaishi's score held back.
- attitudes and postures — The tiny girl grows rapidly into a young lady, so the body becomes the film's clock — childhood arriving and departing at the speed of a plant.
- lyrical abstraction — The shining bamboo stalk and the watercolor washes played against bare white paper: light alternating with white as the film's spiritual register.