By KAITLYN HENSON
Staff Writer
Studio Ghibli is known for its famous artstyle and animation, however the movie The Tale of Princess Kaguya takes a very different approach for its story in it’s gorgeous watercolor style. Based on the original folktale, the story is about a princess who’s sent from the moon down to Earth, to experience the life of mortals. She is found inside a bamboo stalk and is raised by an old couple in the country.
I found this movie to be very fascinating to watch, especially since the visuals are unlike any animated film you’ve ever seen before. It’s heavily inspired by watercolor tapestries that were popular in that time period of Japan. There is so much cultural significance to the artstyle and the old folktale that together fabricates the story The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and knowing all of those aspects made the movie a much more engaging experience.
The character Kaguya has a very child-like wonder to her, and is intrigued by this new world that she’s not familiar with. The old couple who raise her are very sweet and want her to experience the best life she possibly can, which is when the father goes to the extremes and buys her a large house to live in. He believed that Kaguya should be treated like royalty, so he tried to treat her as such. But even though Kaguya created many fond memories of living in the countryside, when she was taken to the rich home to live in she slowly started to grow depressed and lonely as her humanity began to be stripped away from her. She no longer smiled, her face became plastered with heavy makeup, and all the large robes she wore further weighed her down. Kaguya’s life was no longer filled with the happy memories she once had.
This can be tied into maturity, when kids grow into being adults and suddenly their lives become painstakingly harder to live in. Things become bigger and more serious as life hits them like a brick, that this is the new reality that they have to live in for the rest of their lives. It can be a depressing stage of life, when the time of being a child is no longer there, and because Kaguya’s time as one was so short, she regrets not being able to say goodbye to her old friends. There’s even a moment in time when she comes to the realization of what her life had become, and she tried to run away from it. All the pain that she’d endured piled up until she could no longer take it, but even so she couldn’t be able to escape. This was Kaguya’s new reality and she had to accept it.
As time went on and Kaguya started envisioning the life she’d always wanted, her time on Earth was almost up. The people of the moon came back down to retrieve their daughter, despite her cries and pleas. When the old couple tried running to her begging her to not leave, Kaguya’s memories were finally erased; she was no longer the Kaguya on Earth. At the end of the film we see her and her people fly back to the moon as the story concludes.
I find this story intriguing because of how simple the story is, yet the complexity of it makes it all the more great to analyze and think about. Life goes by really fast and experiencing it day by day can feel as though your time is running out. This story’s message is to embrace the life you were given, before it goes away. Live your life to the fullest, and don’t let the societal standards and status of the world bring you down, because it can be exhausting going through it. I highly recommend this movie to watch for it’s fascinating premise and the history behind the folktale that brings it to life. It reveals the reality of living, so live it to the fullest before it slips through your fingers.