Hirotoshi Takaya’s The
Puppet Princess
Having recently seen Brave,
I can’t help but view The Puppet Princess
through that Disney picture. Both movies are concerned with young princesses
wielding a weapon and fighting to establish their autonomy by magic,
competition, and stabbing. While Brave,
as is its right, features blameless parents indulging in extraordinary brawls
before their children and generally being thuggish, barbaric redheaded parodies
of Scotland long ago, The Puppet Princess
rarely misses an autocritic moment, exploring straightaway the effects on
children of growing up in a household filled with violence and the high and
restrictive standards of being young and female in a royal household.
Director (and character designer) Hirotoshi Takaya’s movie
is considerably more violent, though it swings to the more directly comedic as
well, featuring slapstick for its own sake, and running gags (including one of
the few rape jokes that actually works for me). Not a children’s film, but
probably made for the twelve to fifteen year old, but enjoyable earlier or
later, a la Predator; a juvenile
movie.
Once you’ve got your juvenile head on, this tight little
action horror comedy drama about a young lady seeking revenge against the
tyrant who displaced (and murdered) her family by way of a scruffy ronin and
some magnificent fighting puppets clicks. It’s a movie of fire and blood,
vengeances, child abuse, and people falling. The visuals of the most extreme
violence is kept offscreen or rendered abstractly, and the short runtime
prevents the cruelty from marinating in your thoughts as you experience the
movie, but the intellectual and emotional violence cannot be calmed so easily,
and will likely outlast the brisk action or pretty flowers also in The Puppet Princess.
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