(originally seen at http://goo.gl/UNpKrF)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is an animated film based on what is widely believed to be the first canonical story in Japanese folklore, which is a lofty goal. It's generally a good sign to see the name of Studio Ghibli in the title cards, but even with the legendary abilities of Ghibli-trained animators rendering a story in a hand-drawn, highly emotive style, it ultimately fell quite flat for me.
The problem comes solely down to the direction of Isao Takahata. His style is a vast departure from the work of Miyazaki, and while I'm certainly not a purist as far as how a film should look, Takahata-san has missed several very important lessons from the studio's legendary founder, and those lessons cover all the ways in which Kaguya failed for me.
G Kids also distributed one of my favorites films of all time this last year: Song of the Sea. Tomm Moore knows, as Miyazaki knows, that your art—while stylized—must have a consistent focus and theme to it. Kaguya is unfettered, blending art and animation styles between artists with no theme. Characters are drawn vastly different from each other, looking like caricatures of trolls more than people at times, with no central idea or motif to make the world seem like anything but a mash-up. If you pay attention to Song of the Sea or, say, The Wind Rises (one of my favorites of Miyazaki's catalog), you see the art style carried through every character, every setting, and every detail. That's the kind of direction that a story needs, one where the details are crafted, not left to whims and crumpled together in the edit.
While the story is a sad and heartfelt one, its presentation suffers greatly as Takahata really foregoes centuries of storytelling know-how, ensuring that audiences will have to expend a great deal of effort to engage with the plot. Kaguya (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz in the English dub), is a goddess descended from the moon to live with a poor unnamed bamboo cutter and his wife (James Cann and Mary Steenburgen, respectively). For reasons left unexplained, the child grows from an infant to an adolescent in a matter of weeks (if that), and is blessed with a gift of gold and silks from the stalks of bamboo plants, which sends her father into an apoplectic fit of narcissism, self-absorbed negligence, and social-climbing ambition. He pulls Kaguya into the city to be raised as royalty in an effort to try to feel fulfilled on his own, and Kaguya is miserable until she's eventually called back to the moon due to reasons we never get the time to know, because she's off the screen and the movie's over in less than ten minutes after we first hear of it.
This plot, disjointed as it is, sets up a lot of dissonance. It's hard to understand why she's so reluctant to return to the moon (much less how she knows of her destiny) when her father was such a miserable person to her for pretty much her entire life, using her to gain some semblance of self-worth. I never got any time to try to relate to her, or to glean any sense of her relationship with others. The plot skips when it should walk and crawls when it should run. At over two hours long, it both rushes and drags in ways I haven't seen in cinema for many years now. Stories like this are the reason so many storytelling tropes have been invented and accepted over the years. The standard Three-Act Plot, the classic Show, Don't Tell rule, pacing curves—most of the rules of fiction are shown here rather conspicuously by their absence.
Sadly, there's not much else to save it. The music is fitting, and not overbearing. It's nothing I'd rush to find the OST for, but it's well-done. The voice acting for the three main characters is worth applauding, but outside of that, we're again stuck with the traditional Disney-style parade of A-list celebrities who really have no ability to voice act at all. The performances are characteristically stilted and flat, which might fit the Disney-imported trend, but it's hardly required.
Kaguya is a film that people have been lining up to throw perfect scores at like so many roses to a bullfighter, so I realize that I'm certainly not setting myself up for a popular review here. There's probably not many ways to make more enemies online than harshly criticizing a Studio Ghibli film, but here we are. I'm afraid that Kaguya is a rare miss from this studio, perhaps the exception that proves the rule of Miyazaki-san's excellence as a traditional—yet culture-spanning—storyteller.
Scores (out of 10) Acting: 6 Story: 3 Visuals: 6 Sound: 5 Enjoyment: 3 Overall Score: 4/10
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is an animated film based on what is widely believed to be the first canonical story in Japanese folklore, which is a lofty goal. It's generally a good sign to see the name of Studio Ghibli in the title cards, but even with the legendary abilities of Ghibli-trained animators rendering a story in a hand-drawn, highly emotive style, it ultimately fell quite flat for me.
The problem comes solely down to the direction of Isao Takahata. His style is a vast departure from the work of Miyazaki, and while I'm certainly not a purist as far as how a film should look, Takahata-san has missed several very important lessons from the studio's legendary founder, and those lessons cover all the ways in which Kaguya failed for me.
G Kids also distributed one of my favorites films of all time this last year: Song of the Sea. Tomm Moore knows, as Miyazaki knows, that your art—while stylized—must have a consistent focus and theme to it. Kaguya is unfettered, blending art and animation styles between artists with no theme. Characters are drawn vastly different from each other, looking like caricatures of trolls more than people at times, with no central idea or motif to make the world seem like anything but a mash-up. If you pay attention to Song of the Sea or, say, The Wind Rises (one of my favorites of Miyazaki's catalog), you see the art style carried through every character, every setting, and every detail. That's the kind of direction that a story needs, one where the details are crafted, not left to whims and crumpled together in the edit.
While the story is a sad and heartfelt one, its presentation suffers greatly as Takahata really foregoes centuries of storytelling know-how, ensuring that audiences will have to expend a great deal of effort to engage with the plot. Kaguya (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz in the English dub), is a goddess descended from the moon to live with a poor unnamed bamboo cutter and his wife (James Cann and Mary Steenburgen, respectively). For reasons left unexplained, the child grows from an infant to an adolescent in a matter of weeks (if that), and is blessed with a gift of gold and silks from the stalks of bamboo plants, which sends her father into an apoplectic fit of narcissism, self-absorbed negligence, and social-climbing ambition. He pulls Kaguya into the city to be raised as royalty in an effort to try to feel fulfilled on his own, and Kaguya is miserable until she's eventually called back to the moon due to reasons we never get the time to know, because she's off the screen and the movie's over in less than ten minutes after we first hear of it.
This plot, disjointed as it is, sets up a lot of dissonance. It's hard to understand why she's so reluctant to return to the moon (much less how she knows of her destiny) when her father was such a miserable person to her for pretty much her entire life, using her to gain some semblance of self-worth. I never got any time to try to relate to her, or to glean any sense of her relationship with others. The plot skips when it should walk and crawls when it should run. At over two hours long, it both rushes and drags in ways I haven't seen in cinema for many years now. Stories like this are the reason so many storytelling tropes have been invented and accepted over the years. The standard Three-Act Plot, the classic Show, Don't Tell rule, pacing curves—most of the rules of fiction are shown here rather conspicuously by their absence.
Sadly, there's not much else to save it. The music is fitting, and not overbearing. It's nothing I'd rush to find the OST for, but it's well-done. The voice acting for the three main characters is worth applauding, but outside of that, we're again stuck with the traditional Disney-style parade of A-list celebrities who really have no ability to voice act at all. The performances are characteristically stilted and flat, which might fit the Disney-imported trend, but it's hardly required.
Kaguya is a film that people have been lining up to throw perfect scores at like so many roses to a bullfighter, so I realize that I'm certainly not setting myself up for a popular review here. There's probably not many ways to make more enemies online than harshly criticizing a Studio Ghibli film, but here we are. I'm afraid that Kaguya is a rare miss from this studio, perhaps the exception that proves the rule of Miyazaki-san's excellence as a traditional—yet culture-spanning—storyteller.
Scores (out of 10) Acting: 6 Story: 3 Visuals: 6 Sound: 5 Enjoyment: 3 Overall Score: 4/10