The Tale of the Princess Kaguya Review

Every other Ghibli film is painted inside a hard ink line. This one throws the line away. Takahata and his art director Kazuo Oga build the picture out of charcoal, brush and thin washes of watercolour, leaving paper visible at the edges of every shot, and the result is the most beautiful Japanese animation of the century so far. It is also the most functional: the looseness is the argument. When Kaguya bolts from the banquet where noblemen have been laughing at her, the drawing tears itself apart, the colour drops away, the figure becomes six or seven charcoal slashes running through blank space, and you understand what is happening to her without a word of dialogue.

Nothing else animated in the last twenty years has done that. The story underneath is a quiet horror about being loved into a cage. Her father is not cruel. He sells the gold the bamboo gives him, buys a mansion, hires a tutor, imports a name, and every kindness shrinks her, because what he wants is the daughter he has decided she must become. The five suitors and their impossible treasures play as comedy and land as indictment.

Then the moon comes for her, and Takahata scores the procession as a bright festival march, cheerful, unbearable, refusing to grieve at the exact moment the film needs someone to. It was one of the most expensive films Japan has produced and it looks like a sketchbook. That is the achievement.