Columnist Andrew Osmond examines the recent fantasy comedy epic on Netflix (and also playing in Japanese cinemas), with tangents on Hatsune Miku, yuri anime and whether this film’s secretly making fun of Ghibli.
Okay, so I’m late to this party. The anime feature Cosmic Princess Kaguya! was released on Netflix back on January 22. For anyone wondering if it’s linked to Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the answer’s yes but in an indirect way that’s open to interpretation. You don’t need to have seen Ghibli’s film first.
When Cosmic Princess Kaguya! first came out, I had other things to cover. Moreover, I didn’t want to cover an anime just because it was backed by a mighty corporation, and in honesty, my first impression of the film didn’t entice me. It seemed to be a musical comedy, including covers of J-pop songs I liked in their original form, thank you very much… and somehow it was all stretched out to 142 minutes. I thought I’d pass.
I’ve been tempted back for two reasons. One is that that after the film dropped onto Netflix worldwide, Netflix gave Cosmic Princess Kaguya! a limited cinema release in Japan from February 20, in 19 locations. According to Anime News Network, these screenings sold out fast, with some venues running the film more than 10 times a day. From March 13, the film was playing in more than a hundred Japanese cinemas, earning more than $12 million by mid-April – and this was a film you could readily stream at home.
It echoes the rise of KPop Demon Hunters, even if Kaguya! hasn’t gone that big. Both films’ successes caught Netflix on the hop, but the matches are obvious. They’re both cheerful you-can-do-anything fantasies, driven by pop music and female leads. That’s even more true in Kaguya!, which looks as if it’s going to introduce a male love-interest like KPop’s troubled demon Jinu, but swings away from that. This has topical interest given Hollywood animation news – more on that later.
The other reason why I decided to cover Kaguya! is personal. My good Japanese friend Carlos Nakajima mentioned he and his family all enjoyed the film, and his preteen daughter has been watching it repeatedly. It was a recommend I couldn’t ignore.
I liked Kaguya! very much, with the big caveat that it’s just too darn long for a film – it should have been broken into a miniseries, at least on Netflix. I grant it may work as a big-screen wallow in a cinema – I couldn’t find any English-subtitled screenings to test that. But it’s a film full of good things, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The film was directed by Shingo Yamashita, long celebrated by fans as an animator - the sakugabooru website gives a snapshot of where he was eight years ago. Two animation studios have equal billing for the production, Studio Colorido and Studio Chromato.
An updated legend
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! might find trouble connecting to Western audiences, for a similar reason why Shrek didn’t do so well in Japan. (According to Box Office Mojo, the first Shrek took about $18 million in Japan, whereas Pixar’s Monsters Inc. took $74 million.)
Shrek riffed on European fairy tale tropes that just weren’t so familiar in Japan. Kaguya!, meanwhile, is based on a millennium-old story that most Japanese know from infancy. It’s summarized in the film’s early minutes, which is handy for foreigners, but that’s not the same as growing up with it. The humor comes from how Japanese audiences know it without prompting, the same way most people reading this will unthinkingly know the response to “What big teeth you have, Grandma!”
The story’s called “Kaguya-hime” (“hime” means princess) or “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.” Long ago, a farmer finds a miracle in a bamboo stalk; a baby girl the size of Thumbelina. Named Kaguya, she’s adopted by the bamboo-cutter and his wife. In weeks, Kaguya grows into an impossibly lovely woman, and is pursued by many suitors, eventually including the Emperor.
From there the story’s a downer, though it rises to the heavens. Kaguya reveals she’s from the moon, and while she’s grown to love this world, her people will take her back. The Emperor’s forces resist the lunar host, but it’s futile. Kaguya can only bid a sorrowful goodbye, before shedding her Earthly memories and emotions as she’s swept up to a chilly immortality, to the grief of those who love her.
The film Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is a humorous modern update – actually, a near-future one, set in 2030. Instead of a bamboo-cutter, there’s a harassed schoolgirl called Iroha, struggling to live an independent life in a flat away from her estranged mother. It’s anime tradition to have teenagers in their own homes, often for amusingly contrived reasons, but Iroha’s circumstances are more plot-relevant than most.
Rather than a bamboo stalk, Iroha finds this story’s baby in a telephone pole. She makes every effort to refuse the call to adventure, trying to force the pole shut again and walk away, but destiny won’t be cheated. So, Iroha takes the child in; within a day, it’s grown into a noisy, infuriating, demanding girl, a little sis from hell.
This girl doesn’t know the Kaguya legend until Iroha grumpily rattles it off, and she’s shocked by the ending. “She goes back to the moon, that’s it? That’s totally the bad ending!” So, the girl, now named Kaguya too, resolves to make her own happy ending, and the film takes another turn.
It turns out technology has advanced in this near-future. There are fully-immersive virtual worlds, as in Ready Player One, and even the impoverished Iroha can enjoy them by just donning a couple of contact lenses. She takes Kaguya to her favorite VR hang-out, the realm of Tsukuyomi, named for the Japanese god of the moon. Here, fans worship the smiling, benign idol singer Yachiyo, a beloved pop star and AI. Her name can be read in Japanese as “eight thousand years,” for reasons explained much later.
Yachiyo announces a contest in which online streamers can compete for followers. The winners will perform with Yachiyo herself and become global stars. Eagerly, Kaguya enters the contest, dragging Iroha in tow… and by now the story seems have abandoned any connection to the original tale. It’ll come back into play eventually, but there’ll be twists to the end.
Fighting the story
Subversive takes on folktales are legion, from Shrek to Sondheim (Into the Woods). However, Cosmic Princess Kaguya!’s set-up seems rooted in a more recent Japanese trend, the “villainess” anime. In these meta-fantasies, the protagonists realize they’re in an artificial story – often a videogame – and are saddled with the role of a doomed villainess; of course they rebel. (I discussed that genre a few weeks ago.)
In much the same way, Kaguya realizes she’s been effectively doomed by narrative and vows to change the story. Gamers will have already spotted the joke in the line, “That’s totally the bad ending!” Although Kaguya’s talking about a thousand-year-old folktale, the phrase “bad ending” refers to videogames. Specifically, it refers to games where there are multiple possible ends to a story, depending on the choices you make.
There are many such games around the world, but they’re especially big in Japan, where story-based Visual Novels offer endings from wretched to perfect. I’ll minimize spoilers, but this idea underpins Kaguya’s last half hour, where a character must see through more than one “fake” ending.
It’s like the joke in Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck when Daffy fights off an iris that’s trying to end the cartoon. It’s also analogous to the last scenes in the anime blockbuster Your Name, which play with two possible endings, one lifted from the Japanese author Haruki Murakami; I wrote about that here. (Your Name’s director Makoto Shinkai provided animation for Visual Novels early in his career.)
The Miku factor
Cosmic Princess Kaguaya! assumes familiarity with game culture. It also assumes its audience is acquainted with Hatsune Miku. I’m guessing many of you know Miku too, but I’ll give a quick precis. She was introduced in 2007, as a mascot for synthesized voice software (“Vocaloid”), developed by Japan’s Crypton Future Media. From the start, she crossed between media, from videogames to her own anime feature.
Miku is best-known, though, for her live music concerts where she appears as an animated projection, usually on a transparent screen. This concert Miku is often referred to as a hologram, but she’s nearer a 2D projection. She guested on Late Show With David Letterman in 2014, and I reviewed her British concert debut in 2018. Some recent concerts had her on black screens, as in this US concert, drawing howls of fan protest for betraying the illusion. Her concerts also feature other virtual singers, called “Vocaloids.”
Miku’s name isn’t mentioned in Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, but the film includes a cover of one of her most iconic anthems, “World is Mine,” created by the band Supercell. Here’s how it looked in 2010. Incidentally, I think the “old” Miku in this clip has a sharper personality than her later incarnations, analogous to the silent-era Mickey Mouse.
Another Miku cover, “Ray,” plays over Kaguya!’s end credits. Here’s the original, as performed between Miku and the rock band Bump of Chicken (which itself contributed themes to anime including March Comes in Like a Lion, Delicious in Dungeon and Spy x Family.)
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! doesn’t just associate itself with Miku. The film’s story, of two ordinary girls rising to fame in a virtual world, reflects the online cultures Miku has shaped since “World is Mine.” Those cultures include the amateur online singers (utaite) in Japan, some of whom have become mainstream stars. An example is the singer Ado, whose voice was showcased in the blockbuster One Piece Film: Red. Until a music video this February, she didn’t even need to show her face.
That aligns her with the VTubers, online presenters who use animated avatars and can be considered Miku’s children. Today there are VTuber agencies such as Hololive, presenting their own live concerts in the Miku tradition. The video below gives a good overview of the subculture as it stands.
Not your parents’ Kaguya!
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! embraces the multiple realities of today’s youth: videogames, VTubers and Vocaloids. The film is further immersed in the tropes of 21st century anime. Without an anime grounding, I suspect some viewers might be thrown when the story brings in virtual worlds. But they’ve long been a staple of anime, such as Sword Art Online or the film Belle.
The same goes for the knotty story revelations at Kaguya!’s end. Well, I say they’re knotty, but they’re no more confusing than the ones in numerous anime, and more coherent than many. Kaguya!’s twist specifically reminded me of a story idea in Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron. But it also echoes a cartoon outside anime – one of the vintage sci-fi films by the French auteur René Laloux. (I won’t say which one, as that’d give the game away.)
I mentioned Ghibli a moment ago, which made its own version of the Kaguya story, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, directed by Isao Takahata in 2013. Thanks to the strength of the Ghibli brand, and an Oscar nomination, the film became the most prominent screen Kaguya in Japan – till now, at least.
The ethos of Takahata’s film, and of Ghibli films in general, is absurdly far from that of Cosmic Princess Kaguya! I mean, could you imagine Ghibli making a film with online streamers, and videogame tournaments, and AI realms which teens visit from their bedrooms? Ghibli commented on that kind of world back in Spirited Away. In it, an overgrown baby is cossetted in a nursery with fairy-tale scenery on the walls, and must be forced outdoors for its own good. That was Ghibli’s message to the online generation.
Conversely, it’s easy to see Cosmic Princess Kaguya! as a noisy Bronx cheer to Ghibli (or for British readers, a raspberry). Think how American cartoons like A Corny Concerto and Red Hot Riding Hood – and much later, Shrek – spoofed the Disney hegemony. Even if such thoughts never crossed the minds of Kaguya!’s creators, once you start seeing it that way, it’s hard to stop.
Extending that, I’m inclined to compare Cosmic Princess Kaguya! to the irreverent advert above. It’s another de facto reboot of a property linked to Ghibli – in this case, Kiki’s Delivery Service – reclaiming the property for a new generation that Ghibli just wouldn’t recognize. (The commercial’s soundtrack is by Bump of Chicken again.)
Then again, I spotted at least two shots in Cosmic Princess Kaguya! that feel like homages to Ghibli rather than spoofs of it. One involves a train, the other has oversized tears.
Yuri or not Yuri?
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is about two girls. There are male characters in it, but none are terribly crucial, and they aren’t in the central sequences. The story centers on the relationship between Kaguya and Itori, and to some degree Yachiyo.
That’s very interesting given two recent bits of news about Hollywood animation. The first was DreamWorks releasing its first trailer for the upcoming film Forgotten Island, above. This also focuses emphatically on two girls and their mutual bond. Even Frozen and Turning Red piled on multiple male distractions from their female stories (Kristoff, 4*Town). Judging by the trailer, Forgotten Island could be a Hollywood first in paring things down to a girl couple, like Kaguya!
Around the same time, we also learned details of Pixar’s cancelled Be Fri, scrapped in 2023 after years in development. That would have been about another pair of teen girls, whose friendship is tested when they must save humanity. According to one source, “Disney just didn’t feel like little boys could see themselves in the film enough. Basically, Disney reps were like ‘We can’t have a girl power movie.’” This was less than two years before KPop Demon Hunters.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! comes from an industry with different presumptions. Look at anime like Totoro, Sailor Moon and A Place Further Than The Universe. One more tradition the film draws on is the “inconvenient anime girlfriend” comedy, which was established in the 1980s by Urusei Yatsura. Like that show’s Lum, Kaguya barges into the life of an unsuspecting “ordinary” mortal and disrupts her days thoroughly and hilariously.
On my first viewing, I took Iroha and Kaguya to be sisters in spirit, not so far from Disney’s Nani and Lilo or Totoro’s Satsuki and Mei. Kaguya was the infuriating kid sister; Iroha was the long-suffering elder. It was only after my first watch of the film that I learned that Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is widely seen as a yuri anime, a girls’ love story. Even the film’s English-language Wikipedia page classes the film as yuri in the first sentence.
It was this seeming consensus which made me rewatch the film… and I “see” it now, provisionally. Certainly there are moments that can be read as yuri, practically all in the film’s second half. There’s certainly a scene which suggests strongly that the girls’ acquaintances think Iroha and Kaguya are a couple, or are destined to be one.
Maybe there are nuances in the Japanese dialogue that prove the case conclusively. But going by the English subs, I think the film can still be taken as a story of sisterly rather than romantic love, and I lean that way myself. One key scene takes place at a summer fireworks festival, where dating couples often go, but then there’s nothing to stop two close-bonded siblings going there too, or holding hands. The second song under the end credits (“Melt”) is a love song, but it could be taken more broadly as reflecting Kaguya!’s joie de vivre. (It’s also another long-established Hatsune Miku standard, so it fits for that reason too.)
Is it enough that a film can be taken as gay? Not for many queer fans and allies. Frozen’s Elsa isn’t “officially” gay, for instance, but we all know what the reaction would be if next year’s sequel dared to give her a boyfriend. I’ve said before that Japanese creators don’t always give the answers activist fans want on these matters. For instance, the 2018 anime film Liz and the Blue Bird is widely celebrated as yuri; yet its director Naoko Yamada told me she saw her film as a representation of the intensified feelings of adolescence, not “one sexual orientation.”
Conclusion
What is unambiguous is that Iroha’s and Kaguya’s relationship has the beats of a boisterous romcom, a warm, hilarious heart for the film. I said above that Kaguya! is ridiculously overlong and unwieldy as a film. (Anyone who’s not forgiven The Return of the King for its multiple ends will find Kaguya!’s last-act tricks a torture.) But then other good, or great, anime have similar issues, including In This Corner of the World and Ghibli’s own Kaguya.
As someone who’s watched a lot of anime, I’m drawn to grouch about parts of the film feeling familiar – specifically the virtual world and the concerts within it, which strongly evoke Belle and other titles. Though Kaguya!’s VR world has its own delightful features; it was only on my rewatch that I registered how its fire and water are overtly pixelated.
The film’s songs feel safely commercial beside the mature and sensual offerings of a much older virtual singer, Sharon Apple in the 1995 anime Macross Plus. And yet on rewatch, I thought that it hardly mattered. The songs suit the film they’re in; their truest pleasure comes from how they serve it.
As for Kaguya!’s drawing, it’s often vibrant. That’s true throughout the picture, though the first minutes are especially intense, a dizzy mélange of high-speed styles from videogames to cut-outs. Kaguya, predictably, gets many of the best bits of cartoon hysteria, but there are terrific moments elsewhere, almost thrown away. Among them, there’s a crazily rotating shot when Kaguya disrupts Iroha making supper; a time lapsed portrait of one of the girls after heartbreak; and a shot that’s just their two hands, touching and entwining with supreme tenderness.
It’s not a great film, but its abundant great moments earn the cheeky exclamation mark in the film’s title. In that spirit: Bravo!
