The Tale of The Princess Kaguya

The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語, 2013) is a Studio Ghibli animated film you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Isao Takahata, it draws on a tenth-century Japanese folktale — a bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl hidden inside a glowing stalk and raises her as his own.

She grows at an impossible speed into a young woman of extraordinary grace. Her father, convinced she carries a heavenly destiny, moves the family from forest village to the capital and starts arranging a life of silks and suitors. Kaguya (voiced by Aki Asakura) remembers the smell of fields and a boy named Sutemaru — but that world shrinks fast behind palace walls. Five noblemen compete for her hand, the court runs on rigid ceremony, and the grander the arrangements become, the more she understands they are a cage.

Takahata spent over twelve years on the project. The film's deliberately loose watercolour line and unfinished-looking backgrounds echo classical Japanese picture scrolls, and some sequences break the frame entirely in sudden rushes of motion. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2015. Watch The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013) in full online on iFILM.