Slow on the draw: Takahata Isao’s long road to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Nor was this news to anyone; years after the financial failure of his debut, Takahata’s name was cursed by its producers. With The Little Norse Prince, wrote Miyazaki in Starting Point, “Paku-san really proved that animation has the power to depict the inner mind of humans in depth. However, he also showed how risky and scary it was for a corporation to make him the director of a feature-length film. A production that was supposed to take one year was delayed once, then delayed again – by the time it was finally completed I had gotten married, had my first son, and my son had already celebrated his first birthday.” (Happily, Kaguya was underwritten by Nippon Television Network at the behest of its late chair Ujiie Seiichiro, a Takahata fan, to the tune of some five billion yen, or $40 million.) If Takahata is a sloth, then, he’s one who has sympathies with the happy-go-lucky, shapeshifting tanuki (raccoon dogs) of his wonderful conservationist fantasy Pom Poko, the film you’d get if you crossed The Wombles with Watership Down, and a story about metamorphosis that found him mixing multiple styles of animation.

For her part, when she’s not sending away her suitors Kaguya knuckles down to the rules of the game in her gilded cage; her girlish defiance of Sagami’s ladyship drill subsides, she shows herself preternaturally capable of the appropriate comportment, her koto playing is clearly sublime and she hides her emotional hand. As in The Wind Rises, Miyazaki’s greatest breach with the hero’s-journey standard, Kaguya becomes a portrait of a protagonist caught in time’s tide, curtailed in her desires, defeatist in her inability to approach happiness.

Also like Jiro in The Wind Rises, Kaguya elopes in her dreams. Once, pent up during her coming-of-age ceremony, she tears out of her tent on her way back to her old village, the backgrounds falling away in her rush, Tanabe’s pencil strokes cutting to the quick, only to find the fields in winter, used and fallow, her friends departed.

Another time – and here we have reached the film’s final act – she flies in a rhapsodic extramarital embrace over the land and sea with Sutemaru, the peasant farmer-boy of her heart. Such flights of fancy are a minor Takahata motif: girls find their bodies soaring with their spirits in 1979’s Anne of Green Gables (another of Takahata’s ‘World Masterpiece Theatre’ series of TV adaptations) and Only Yesterday, while in Yamadas marriage is imagined as a metaphysical bobsleigh ride which takes to the air, collecting one baby from a floating peach and another from a bamboo cane.

It’s a testament to Takahata and his team’s painstaking artistry that all this time we’ve been layering human psychology on an enigma plucked from the long grass. This will come as a spoiler only for those, like me, previously unfamiliar with the sci-fi element of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, but it transpires that Kaguya was not of this earth and soon must take her leave; her tribe come for her in the night like Buddhist bounty hunters or the spellbound feline press gang of Ghibli’s The Cat Returns (2002), eerily beatific envoys from lands without conflict, passion – or, in this case, memory, with Kaguya another in the movies’ line of alien emissaries come to sample human drama. Helped by Nikaido Kazumi’s plaintive closing song, she leaves clinging to nostalgia and hope. “People will still be wondering exactly what’s going on” here, predicts Takahata – but that’s life too.