Ani-May: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Dir Isao Takahata, 2h 17m, 2013)

It would be remiss to have a month of anime with no appearance by Studio Ghibli; over the last 35 years, perhaps no single studio in cinema, let alone animation has had such a track record, save for England's Aardmann, in making films that transport their audiences to other worlds. It's easy, however, to credit their output to one man, the beneficient smiling patron saint of Japanese animation that is Hayao Miyazaki, a man whose films have essentially become anime for many western audiences, without acknowledging that Ghibli is more than one man, and that Miyazaki's constant returns from retirement, grouchy dismissal of modern anime as a format, and withering putdowns of anyone from his would-be successors to his own son threaten, on occasion to undermine his legacy and that of his studio.

For Ghibli was never really a one man show, even before its formal founding; until his death in April 2018, Isao Takahata, the director of today's film, a stark but beautiful rendition of the famous Japanese fable was not only the co-founder of Studio Ghibli alongside Miyazaki, but his colleague and friend for nearly five decades, with a filmography to rival the godfather of animation himself. These range from Grave of the Fireflies (1988), in which Takahata adapted the autobiographical short story by Akiyuki Nosaka, but also drew upon his own experiences of being a child in the Second World War, in a film that is as harrowing as it is emotionally driven, to Only Yesterday (1991) and Pom Poko (1994), films that respectively play with memory and childhood and a staunchly environmental film from the point of view of a troop of tanuki (Japanese racoon dogs).

Like Miyazaki, many of his films take flights of fancy-much of Pom Poko concerns itself with the transformative powers of the tanuki as they infiltrate human society, and My Neighbours the Yamadas plays with the very language and fluidity of anime, in a film that wonderfully matches the mundane and the fantastical. Where he and Takahata differ, perhaps, with the exception of Miyazaki's biographical The Wind Rises (2013), is in more grounded narratives; Only Yesterday and Grave of the Fireflies are essentially (auto)biographical films about childhood, with Only Yesterday being groundbreaking in its depiction of something more typically focused on in live action dramas rather than animation.

Where they differ most strongly, though, is in their storytelling-whilst Miyazaki's style of narratives tend to end somewhere south of the overtly Western/Disney happy ending-some of his films end on upbeat notes, other on a resolution that feels earned if not openly triumphant and a couple seem to just...end, Takahata's films are far more grounded, far less upbeat. Takahata's films invariably end in failure, in heartbreak, in death, his protagonists either struggling on through life or, in perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in anime history, dying unnoticed in a Japanese railway station. And yet, his films are things of beauty, of joy, of moments as uplifting and astonishing as his great contemporary, just as capable of carrying an audience along for the ride, even if the ending is a sudden twist into sorrow or loss.

No film in Takahata's filmography captures this as perfectly, as effortlessly as The Tale Of Princess Kaguya. His final film, it retells the traditional Japanese tale of a princess arriving to a woodcutter and his wife as a baby in a bamboo stalk, growing into a fine young woman who is eventually revealled to be a princess, and who, after turning away suitors with an impossible task and meeting the Emperor of Japan, eventually reveals her celestial origins and reluctantly returns to the moon. Around this familiar story, (even, by the standards of Japanese folktales, to western audiences), Takahata's film adds depth, pathos, a defiant anti-materialist message, and, most importantly to Takahata, having previously aborted an adaption in the 1960s, a strong emphasis on its protagonist's feelings and life. This, together with at points peerless animation makes this not only the high point of Takahata's career, but just the fourth anime film (all, at this point, from Studio Ghibli) ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.

We begin with the story teller, (Nobuko Miyamoto/Mary Steenburger, who in a nice piece of doublecasting also voices the beloved mother of Princess Kaguya), and the bamboo cutter (the late Takeo Chii/James Caan), and his discovery of an infant within a mysteriously glowing bamboo plant. It's here that the most immediate, most apparent difference between this and the rest of Ghibli's filmography becomes apparent. Where the rest of Ghibli's films match superbly detailed backgrounds with bold character designs, in Kaguya, this has given way to a, at points, starkly minimalist style. The backgrounds are provided in watercolour, previously used in Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea, but here used to depict stunningly life-like renditions of locations, of birds, of the countryside that the young Kaguya grows up in, before giving way to greys and monochrome interiors as Kaguya and her parents travel to the capital and take up lodgings in a grand house.

This though, is nothing compared to the character animation, where digitally drawn character take on the motion, the feel, the weight of pencil sketches; Takahata's films never feel like Miyazaki's films, and this, at least in part, draws from his experimentalism with the way that characters look in Japanese animation, from the look of the newspaper comic in My Neighbours the Yamadas to the simplification of character designs to an more nostaligic animation style in Only Yesterday. None of these are as bold, yet take influence from traditional Japanese art as much as Kaguya and there are moments where this film captures something centuries old in its depictions of court life in 10th century Japan, only to, in the very next scene do with a few lines what master animators elsewhere in cinema would struggle to do with a photorealistic model. In a word, it like like watching sketches come alive.

From her discovery in the bamboo stalk, the unnamed child enters the lives of the woodcutter and his wife, who begin to raise her as their own child, a number of gifts, from nuggets of gold to fine cloth discovered as the couple begin to realise that the child they have brought into their house is not only special but divine, as the child, daubed Takenoko (or as the dub and subtitles name her, "Little Bamboo") grows from a baby to a toddler, to a young woman in a matter of years. It is here that we see her interact with a group of fellow children, including Sutemaru (Kengo Kora/Darren Criss), who takes her under his wing and protects her when a childish raiding of the local fields for melons goes awry, and here that we see the film begin to set out one of its key themes, the idea of Kaguya being a princess, of being special, against that of her leading a normal childhood and being happy.

Or, to put it another way, as the film expands upon it as she and her family uproot and travel to the capital, it is the struggle between the place of women in society, the role that her parents and their hangers-on expect her to play, and her bid to be free, to live a normal life, and to break free from the restrictions of her gender and role. We see, over a short montage, her tuteldge by the haughty and uber-traditional Lady Sagami (Atsuko Takahata/Lucy Liu), who trains her in court ettiquete. Even to Japanese audiences, there is something profoundly alien in the depiction of Japanese medieval court life, in the complex cage of rules that Kaguya eventually finds herself trying to live with, to live up to her parents' wishes of being the model princess, despite the way she rails against Sagami's rules.

But it is following this, when she is unveiled and given the name of Kaguya, with the young princess still yearning for her simple life in the countryside, that Takahata pulls off a moment of absolute, stunning, perfection. It is, without a doubt, one of the single greatest sequences in anime, so perfect indeed that I link it below in its barely half minute entirety; it is, alongside one or two sequences from Ghibli themselves that really show how astonishing, how singular animation can be as a medium.

With her father mocked by some of the party guests, out of his earshot, but with Kaguya's own, for his attempts to make her a princess through money, not lineage, the young woman's pride in her father and her despair at the gilded cage burst forth. We begin with a facial closeup, the camera pulling out to reveal her on a stylised black background. Her hand snap the sake cup in her hand, and she bursts forth, the lines becoming, wild, sketchy, a visual echo of the turmoil running through Kaguya, the finery of her outfit flowing behind her, through tapestries, breaking the screen door down even as her robes flow behind her. Sweeps through shot, a blur that still, sublimely, perfectly tracks through shot, as the party continues in the background, bursts through another two doors, and, as she runs away through the gate, into the moonlit monochrome night, Kaguya leaves the finery of her life in the capital in her wake. We finally see her face, and it is desperate, and sad, and broken. And she flees into the night, to return home. It is a scene of pure emotion, with not a line spoken and Joe Hiasashi's score sparse and melacholic.

What she finds, though, is nothing; the mountain of her birth and childhood stripped bare, her friends gone, and she walks wraithlike, broken, and fragile, to collapse in the snow, and find herself back home When she returns home, her beauty only grows, and it is here, in short, brutal strokes that Isao Takahata brings 2013 sensibilties, at least below the surface to bear on a 10th century tale; these are powerful, intelligent men, and at points Takahata hints at the powerlessness of his heroine, especially potent given Ghibli's usual penchant for strong resourceful women, even as she sends them off in quioxtic, and for one of the five, fatal quests. 

This not only leads to the Emperor making advances on Kaguya, but also her crossing paths with Sutemaru, who is now reduced to thievery, and his subsequent beating, leaving her bereft and losing hope, a sequence only temperered by the sudden appearance of a cherry tree, a moment that sparks, beautifully, her love for nature once more. But by this time, the film's final act comes into view, Kaguya's connections to the moon that begins to haunt the second half of the film becoming clear with her lineage brought to bear, and, save but for a single fantastical sequence, the closest the film comes to happiness, to the flights of fantasy beloved of the Miyazaki films, the stage is set for its final, astonishing spectacle, the arrival of a party from the moon, who eventually take her home, a moment that makes us, and her parents, bereft, as Kaguya, tears in her eyes, takes one final look at the Earth, her life but a dream passing out of view

Isao Takahata never made another film, and, together with the final, to date, Hayao Miyazaki film, The Wind Rises, intended as a doublebill with Kaguya, it marks, essentially, the end of Studio Ghibli. The label, the style, lives on, through the offshoot, Studio Ponoc, helmed by Yoshiaki Nishimura, previously the director of the final Ghibli film to date, the equally melancholic When Marnie Was There, the work of Goro Miyazaki, the oft-lambasted scion of Hayao Miyazaki, just off directing Ghibli's first (and hopefully last) CGI film, Earwig and the Witch, but there's something missing now, at the heart of the greatest animation studio on earth, following the loss of Miyazaki's friend and colleague for much of his life. Hayao, at time of writing, is busy at work with How Do You Live, estimated for a 2023 release and at 81, but for a sudden Indian Summer for this towering figure of animation, it will surely be his last

We are left, thus, with two films from these cinematic master craftsmen that, in essence, deal with heartbreak and failure and loss; Miyazaki's love of flight, of airplanes finally coming home to roost in the tale of the creation of the Mitsubushi Zero, a weapon of war and death and destruction, and his disintegrating relationships with other people. For Takahata, Kaguya is the ending, the epitaph of perhaps the other greatest director in animation, the ending of a six decade journey to adapt perhaps the most ancient and famous text his nation has. It is the pinacle, the zenith of what anime, what animation itself can do. He could end his career in no more fitting a way.

There's a moment in the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, the nigh obiturial hagiographic documentary on Ghibli, on the making of both Miyazaki and Takahata's films, that has stuck with me. Hayao Miyazaki stands alone in the garden of Ghibli's studio, talking to the interviewer, on the studio's future. "It's going to fall apart." He stares off into the distance, shrugs, turns back to camera "What's the point in worrying? It's inevitable. "Ghibli" is just a random name that I got from an airplane." He starts to walk off into the distance. "It's only a name". And then he is gone, off into his own ruminations of the nature around him.

Takahata has passed, and, inevitably, we know Hayao Miyazaki must pass too. But, for a few hours, their films are doorways opened into worlds of magic, of fantasy, of aircraft and transforming tanuki and childhoods passed. Anime is many things, but above all, it is at its edges, at its cutting edge, that it truly shines, where it pushes the animated medium to its most creative, its most outlandish, its wildest dreams of past, present, future, and worlds beyond. And at that very point, at the pinacle of it all stands Ghibli, eternal, and at the point of that point is The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, not just one of the finest films in Ghibli's illustrious career, nor in anime as a whole, but at the very apex of what animated cinema can be, a fleeting dream that, like Kaguya, brings tears to our eyes, for it felt so real. It is perhaps, in a word, the greatest animated film ever made, and brings Ghibli, and Ani-May to a perfect conclusion. 

Rating: Must See: Personal Recommendation

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