“… be born, grow up, and die. Still the wind blows, the rain falls, the waterwheel goes round. Lifetimes come and go in turn.”
The swan song of a seventy-nine-year-old, Helmer Isao Takahata, draws the final curtain on both his career and his journey with Studio Ghibli. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya ends with a simple folk melody that vibrates inside, hours after the curtain closes. The tale is one of a Japanese princess from a tenth-century legend who keeps trying to get back to the forests and hillsides of her salt-of-the-earth upbringing.
This rich depiction of a Japanese folk-piece, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (popularly dated to the Tokugawa period) begins when a gruff bamboo-cutter yields a palm-length princess from a glowing bamboo shoot, who turns into a human baby growing at an accelerated rate. She soon becomes a part of a pack of local kids who call her “L’il Bamboo.” The name annoys the bamboo-cutter who thinks of her as a gift from heaven and calls her princess. She shares great chemistry with the leader of the boys, Sutemaru, and often starts singing a song she can’t remember having learnt. According to the legend she belonged to the moon and her venture to the world was destined to be for a very short time. The bamboo-cutter, who is now her adoptive father also received a lot of gold and shining clothes as stipends to bring her up. This, he thought, was a sign to “reward” his princess a regal life, which eventually snatched away all the things that made her happy. A series of ridiculous high-born suitors made a toy out of her, the way royalty does to “femininity.” She tried to overthrow the norms and anomalies several times and finally gave in to wait for the moon to take her back. Suddenly, she learns that she loved her foster parents way too much to leave them and be happy. Her father set up hundreds of men to prevent her from going back but destiny always wins.
Viewers who are used to Hollywood’s cartoons stuffed with neat-catchy set pieces and crowd-appealing gags might not be impressed by the film’s graceful rhythms and bashful narration, but that must not keep them from being amazed at the sheer prowess of its artwork. It was drawn over almost nine painstaking years in an unfinished manner so it looks like the artists were rushing after the princess in person. They were desperately trying to capture the essence of each moment as it flew past. In many instances, the characters fill in or fall apart into flurries of water-colour and charcoal as if ancient scroll-paintings are coming back to life. “Kaguya” means “shining” in Japanese, and fittingly, rich contrasts of light and darkness in each scene does sweet justice to the name of the princess in every scene.