Cosmic Princess Kaguya! Review: A Trippy Anime Dive into Virtual Reality Popworld

Never has a film been more deserving of an exclamation mark at the end of the title than this animation from Japan. Cosmic Princess Kaguya! is an adaptation of a Japanese folk tale, the story of a princess from the moon discovered inside a bamboo stalk in a poor rural village. A decade ago, Studio Ghibli adapted the tale into a gorgeously animated movie with a traditional, lovingly hand-painted feel. This film could not be more different, a trippy, high-energy, techno anime set in the near future, half of it in a virtual reality world – and TikTok-ifed with emojis and stickers exploding all over the screen. It begins when a 17-year-old high school student called Iroha finds a baby girl inside a glowing lamppost (rather than the bamboo stalk of the original). Iroha (voiced by Dawn M Bennett in the English dub) is a sensible kid, a talented musician and grade-A student who has already moved out of the family home and is living alone, working all hours to pay the rent of her tiny studio flat. In any free time she does have, Iroha follows her idol, AI musical megastar Yachiyo, in a crazy, chaotic virtual reality world called Tsukuyomi. Iroha takes the baby home. But overnight, the tiny newborn grows into a crawling toddler. Within days she is a pre-teen, a pale ethereal beauty called Kaguya, who, it transpires, is a runaway from the moon. This girl who fell to Earth is an impulsive ball of energy; she persuades Iroha to collaborate with her on songs to win a competition to perform with superstar Yachiyo, none of them remotely catchy. The plot pings about hyperactively, so dizzying that Cosmic Princess Kaguya! may leave audiences over 15 years old feeling more ancient than the original tale.