Cosmic Princess Kaguya Builds a Japanese Franchise While English Coverage Stalls
A Colorido feature that English outlets treated as one more streaming title is, in Japan, being read as the seed of a franchise, which says more about how Netflix-era anime films get buried abroad than about the film itself.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime Herald.
Studio Colorido and Studio Chromato's Cosmic Princess Kaguya, a musical sci-fi retelling of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, drew favorable English reviews after its January release but little sustained coverage, with 10 Rotten Tomatoes reviews as of the article. In Japan, the film has become one of the year's bigger hits and is generating talk of a larger media franchise. Anime Herald's recap covers what English-speaking audiences missed across roughly six months.
The film comes out of the three-movie deal Studio Colorido signed with Netflix in 2022, after Drifting Home and My Oni Girl. Colorido kept the merchandising rights under that arrangement, unlike the lump-sum model that left Sony Pictures Animation without a cut of later animated hits.
Colorido formed in 2011 under the TWIN ENGINE umbrella and built its output on features, starting with Penguin Highway and continuing through Burn the Witch and A Whisker Away, both disrupted by the pandemic in 2020.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Anime Herald Cosmic Princess Kaguya’s Unexpected Explosion