Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I recently received a request to write some sort of “sakuga article,” meaning an article relevant in some way to the exemplary individual cuts of animation we anime stalwarts refer to as “sakuga.” This has been a source of some consternation to me, as I don’t generally consider myself particularly studied or well-informed when it comes to the specific craft of animation in the abstract. I know enough to describe why a cut feels evocative or impactful to me, but my specialties are first and foremost writing-related, followed by filmic technique, with animation following behind.
Tag Archives: The Tale of Princess Kaguya
Summer 2021 – Week 1 in Review
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. According to the anime season-based schedule that I’m still pointlessly employing, this is technically the first week of the summer, which greeted us with a scorching heat wave followed by an inexplicable cold front. This was also the week that saw me getting sick as a dog for the first time since quarantine began, and thus unable to power through quite as many films as I’d have liked. I still ended up with a pretty diverse selection of features though, from films to live-action series to the inexorable procession of One Piece. I hope you’re all enjoying these meteorological harbingers of doom as best as you can, and if not, perhaps my rambling can at least distract you for a moment or two. Let’s storm on through another Week in Review!
Memories of Home in Princess Kaguya
Isao Takahata boasts a catalog so laudable that it seems strange to see him as any kind of “unsung” director, but given he spent so much of his career working alongside Hayao Miyazaki, it makes sense that he’d end up coming off as the quiet genius of Studio Ghibli. In contrast with Miyazaki’s universally appealing and often family-friendly films, Takahata directs stranger, more idiosyncratic productions, from the devastating Grave of the Fireflies to the nostalgic Only Yesterday, and even a passion project about a series of rural canals. So it remains with his final film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which was released close enough to Miyazaki’s own The Wind Rises to again be dwarfed in public consciousness. And yet, like so much of his work, Kaguya possesses an incredibly distinct beauty, and in its own way speaks to the rustic, nostalgic sensibilities that seem to unite Takahata and Miyazaki.