Cosmic Princess Kaguya!

The Neon Bamboo Cutter

I’m not sure when the internet started standing in for folklore, but Shingo Yamashita makes a pretty persuasive case for the swap. For years he’s been the kinetic force behind some of anime’s most unforgettable opening sequences, those wild, elastic intros for *Jujutsu Kaisen* and *Chainsaw Man*. With *Cosmic Princess Kaguya!*, his first feature, he takes *The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter*, Japan’s oldest recorded story, and hauls it straight into the age of VTubers, livestreams, and creator metrics. The result is messy, bright, overstuffed, and weirdly heartfelt. On paper it sounds like an algorithmic boardroom nightmare. In practice, there’s real feeling under all the pastel avatar skins.



The film opens in that uncomfortable gap between physical burnout and digital escape. Iroha, voiced by Anna Nagase, is seventeen, academically gifted, and worn thin by work just to stay afloat alone. Yamashita makes sure you feel that exhaustion in her body before anything fantastical happens. Then the old myth drops into the city in the strangest possible form: a glowing, iridescent telephone pole in place of the bamboo stalk. Inside is a baby who quickly becomes Kaguya, an unruly, blindingly energetic teenager voiced by Yuko Natsuyoshi. She doesn’t care about returning to the moon. She wants to win a streaming contest and sing with the AI idol Yachiyo Runami. So the movie becomes a collision between fairy tale logic and platform-era ambition.

Yamashita directs almost entirely through contrast. The real world has to feel heavy for the virtual one to feel weightless. When Kaguya drags Iroha into their first live-stream performance inside Tsukuyomi, the laws of space go out the window. The camera spirals and unravels around them, color leaking into the frame like watercolor bleeding through paper. Kaguya all but rejects gravity; every limb seems to fire off in a different direction. Iroha is tight, inhibited, still carrying the rules of ordinary life in her shoulders. Nagase’s performance sells that tension beautifully. After sounding so assertive in *Summer Time Rendering*, she gives Iroha a voice full of restraint, all tight breathing and careful customer-service politeness until exhilaration finally starts to crack through.



What stayed with me most wasn’t even the visual blast, though Studio Colorido and Studio Chromato absolutely deliver on that front. It was the way the movie thinks about being watched. Kaguya lives through attention; Iroha recoils from it. Their partnership has that slippery edge where collaboration starts to look a little like emotional need. Allyson Johnson, writing at Rotten Tomatoes, said the film is "tremendous for the first 90 minutes," thanks to its "frenetic, electrified visuals and heartfelt emotional beats." I think that’s fair. That first stretch is electric. The last act, though, does get tangled in extra sci-fi mechanics and looping complications that muddy the central relationship. At a certain point I wanted the universe to stop exploding so the girls could just speak.



Still, even when it overreaches, I couldn’t stop watching. There’s a loneliness humming underneath all the spectacle. Beneath the Vocaloid pop and the glowing tiger bikes, this is really about two girls trying to make a home in a space made of code and servers. Whether that feels hopeful or a little heartbreaking probably depends on how you feel about the modern world. Yamashita doesn’t push you one way or the other. He just lets the neon burn and asks if it’s enough.