Princess From the Moon is a 1987 feature film from Japan, directed by Kon Ichikawa.
It is based on the 10th-century Japanese folk tale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Taketori (Toshiro Mifune) lives in a shack in the forest, cutting down bamboo trees and making bamboo knick-knacks. He and his wife Tayoshime are mourning the death of their only child, a late-in-life daughter they named Kaya.
One day the couple sees a very bright object flying past their house at tremendous speed, then feels and hears an explosion deep in the woods. Taketori goes out to investigate and finds to his relief that the bamboo forest is intact. He then stops at his daughter's grave—and is surprised to find, just a few feet away, a large egg. He's even more surprised when it hatches, revealing a human infant, and he's even more surprised than that when the infant crawls out of the egg and, in a matter of seconds, grows into a girl child aged about eight. A girl child with spooky, inhuman blue eyes.
Taketori takes the child home. His wife is not at all troubled by the fact that the girl fell from the sky, never talks, and looks like an extra from Village of the Damned. She names the child Kaya and adopts her as a replacement for her lost child.
Sometime later Kaya has another instantaneous growth spurt and becomes a grown woman, and a very good-looking one to boot. She loses the creepy eyes and the robotic manner and learns how to speak Japanese and essentially does a much better job of impersonating a human being. She begins to attract attention from local noblemen looking for a wife. However, there remains the question of just what she is and where she came from.
The folk tale that this film was adapted from is sometimes called the first-ever science fiction story. Compare animated feature The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which also was an adaptation of the same folk tale.
Princess From the Moon provides examples of:
- Conversation Cut: The scene where Kaya rejects the emperor's advances, and the emperor reacts with outrage, is shown as a series of conversations between Kaya and her father, her father and the emperor's courtier, and the courtier and the emperor, all clipped together to make one smooth exchange.
- Creepy Blue Eyes: Kaya as a child has creepy blue eyes—blue eyes would be creepy enough in medieval Japan, but she has unnatural aquamarine eyes with huge pupils and tiny irises.
- Creepy Child: Kaya as a child, with her Creepy Blue Eyes, complete silence, unblinking stare, and Healing Hands. When she fast-forwards to adult form she loses the weird eyes and the creepy affect and becomes more like a normal human.
- Crystal Ball: Kaya has a crystal orb the size of a tennis ball that lights up. It is a communication device from the lunarians; the ball is how she knows that she will be taken back home at the next full moon. Additionally she seems to be linked to the ball. When her Earth mother drops the ball in the lake Kaya goes into a catatonic state, and they have to fish it back out.
- Death of a Child: The opening has Taketori and Tayoshime mourning the death of their daughter, Kaya, from unspecified causes.
- Dramatic Alien VTOL: The very, very Spielbergian has your standard Christmas tree ornament spacecraft descend, whereupon Kaya is taken up in a beam of light.
- Healing Hands: A particular superpower of Kaya's. As a child, she revives a bird that a villager shot out of the sky with an arrow. Then she heals herself after another kid throws a rock at her and gives her a cut on the forehead. Later, as she's leaving with the lunarians, she sends an energy ball from the spaceship that gives Akena the blind servant girl her sight.
- Impossible Task: Kaya gives her suitors some difficult tasks. Abe has to find the Treasure Tree, a tree of silver and gold with diamonds for fruit. He tries to pass off a cheap fake as the real thing. Abe has to find the Fire Rat Fleece, a magical, uh, rat fur that is impervious to fire—his servant winds up getting fooled by a cheap fake. Otomo, the only one she really likes, is given the task of plucking a jewel from the crown of a sea dragon. He tries his best, but fails when the monster sinks his ship.
- Kraken and Leviathan: The huge-ass sea dragon that Otomo has an unfortunate encounter with. It sinks his boat.
- Lunarians: What Kaya really is, a lunarian that was ejected from a Lunarian spacecraft in an escape pod just before the spacecraft crashed and exploded. If the beings that surround Kaya as she ascends are supposed to be the real Lunarians, then they are translucent and the size and shape of a child's doll.
- Meet Cute: Kaya meets Otomo, the one suitor who really loves her, when her carriage cuts his off on a mountain road and then gets stuck in the mud, leaving him stuck behind her, much to his servants' irritation.
- Replacement Goldfish: Tayoshime is asking no questions when her husband comes out of the forest with a weird child that has freaky eyes. She christens the child Kaya and assumes that she was sent from the heavens to replace her daughter.
- Rule of Three: Kaya has three suitors she sends off on Impossible Tasks: Chamberlain Abe, Prince Kuramochi, both of whom are shallow douchebags, and Chamberlain Otomo, the only one who really loves her.
- Time Skip: Taketori finds out that the egg Kaya crawled out of is solid gold. In the next scene, he and his family are rich and living in a fancy house.
- Weird Moon: The full moon suddenly burns bright as the sun when the ship arrives to retrieve Kaya.
