Ghibli's Takahata Reveals His Next Anime Film

For some time now, we've known about studio Ghibli's plans to make 2 new feature-length anime films over the next 3 years. One of them is said to be directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro (Tales from Earthsea), and the other one by another Ghibli veteran and co-founder - Isao Takahata - upon whom we turn our attention now, as he recently revealed a bit about his next anime film.



Takahata hasn's been directing a movie since My Neighbors the Yamadas some 10 years ago, and prior to that he gained fame as the director of Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday. For his next feature-length project, Ghibli World reports (via ANN) that Takahata will adapt the classic Japanese folktale Taketori Monogatari. The story is also known under various other names - The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Kaguya Hime no Monogatari, Tale of Princess Kaguya... But you can just call it Loli-in-a-bamboo.

"Taketori Monogatari is considered to be Japan's oldest extant narrative and tells the story about the life of a mysterious girl called Kaguya-hime. Discovered as a baby inside the stalk of a glowing bamboo plant (note: a similar scene interestingly also appears in Takahata's My Neighbors the Yamadas), she is said to be from Tsuki-no-Miyako (The Capital of the Moon) and has unusual hair that "shines like gold"."

Takahata only briefly mentioned this inspiration of his during a recent public appearance, but Ghibli World speculates that the film will stray away from the original story, "with some assuming he will make a kind of sequel in which Kaguya comes from the moon back to the Earth again". Well, who knows. There's still plenty of time left for us to just wait and see.