An Ancient Fairytale Reimagined Through Streaming Culture and Modern Youth

It’s difficult to fully pin down Cosmic Princess Kaguya!’s intentions. This adaptation of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter fairytale into a shojo-action anime comes with it a representation of young people’s relationships to the internet and digital third spaces. Whether the film attempts to comment on them or simply depict them is up for interpretation, but it nonetheless adds an interesting slant to what could have been a crass and corny adaptation of an ancient tale for a new age. As it stands, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is a beautiful-looking, charming and exciting film that doesn’t neglect the core moral of the original story.

Western audiences may be familiar with the Bamboo Cutter fairytale through the Studio Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, in which a farmer cuts into a stalk of bamboo, revealing an angelic infant who has escaped domesticity on the moon in order to experience human life. Following up the work of great Ghibli director Isao Takahata is a fool’s errand, one Cosmic Princess Kaguya! Director Shingo Yamashita avoids it by pivoting to a modern setting.

We follow Iroha, a schoolgirl living alone, balancing studying with working without the support of much family or friends. A baby Princess Kaguya appears before her in a telephone pole outside her apartment, and suddenly she is stuck with the responsibility of raising it. In a couple of days, Kaguya reaches a similar age to Iroha and learns of the ancient myth that she’s expected to play out. Rejecting it outright, Kaguya decides to make her own story, which takes the form of becoming a Twitch streamer and entering a competition to collab with the world’s most famous streamer, Yachiyo.

It’s a bit of a cheap trick to turn Princess Kaguya into a streamer in order to appeal to a teenage audience, the kind of thing you’d imagine an out-of-touch film exec to pitch for the next Minions movie. Cosmic Princess Kaguya! overcomes this by being a very honest and detailed look into how integrated the internet is into young people’s lives and how normalised parasocial relationships with idols and streamers are.

A large chunk of the film takes place in a VR world where streamers do battle or hold events, and Iroha finds more companionship in this world than she does in reality. As Kaguya’s viewership grows, we see her be the subject of marriage proposals from men in her chat. None of this is derided or celebrated; it’s simply depicted as a part of these young people’s lives.

Another interesting inversion of the fairytale is how Kaguya informs Iroha’s journey, rather than going through an arc herself. Originally, Kaguya gets to experience the full range of human experience, from joy and innocence to pain and restriction, and when she inevitably returns to her home on the moon, she can do so knowing that she truly lived. In Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, she rarely has a moment of reflection, loss, or anguish; she’s a perfect foil to the super-serious Iroha, a constant ball of energy bouncing off the walls in every scene, unable to see anything but bliss in life. She serves as a reminder to Iroha to live for living’s sake, and that her purpose as a person should not be boiled down to getting the best grades and making rent every month. The film’s digital setting also makes more sense through Iroha’s arc. This meaningful connection that changed her outlook on life was not formed in the digital world by becoming an idol, but by someone she spent time with in real life.

For as much as it changes, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! maintains the message of the original story – it’s part of the human condition that relationships are all fleeting, that we understand that nothing lasts forever, yet we mourn them when we lose them anyway, because the time spent around a loved one will never be enough. Positioning Iroha so close to Kaguya allows her to feel the full force of this message, and we truly believe her as a fully changed person by the end of the film.

The narrative is not without its flaws, and the film’s pacing can get in the way of some of the characters really feeling like actual people rather than pawns in a story. There’s a reveal about Iroha’s long-lost brother entering the narrative, and her two best friends are largely inconsequential to the plot, stopping this from feeling like a fully cohesive film.

The visuals are never a problem in the film, but don’t reinvent the wheel in any significant way. It’s a classic 2D anime with some CGI enhancements in a few action scenes. This means it’s a very pretty movie and that its action is super entertaining. There’s a reason why this formula is repeated, but the very obvious and potatoey CGI still makes for an awkward watch. It would be great if we could find a way for that not be so jarring.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya! as a whole leans on a few classic formulas, from the dynamic between the two main characters, to the fairytale framework to the visual style, it all feels comfortable and cosy without being too challenging. The one arena where it could have said something subversive, that being its depiction of internet culture, it instead backs away, favouring crowd-pleasing over commentary. Still, a movie being pleasant isn’t always a bad thing, and Cosmic Princess Kaguya! will win a lot of fans for being just that.