Princess Kaguya’s Oscar nod – in an animation field missing The Lego Movie – actually proves less instructive than 2013’s inside-Ghibli doc The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, where a beleaguered Hayao Miyazaki pushed through The Wind Rises while stablemate Isao Takahata skulked off-screen, mired in production delays. The latter’s decade-in-the-planning take on a Japanese folk legend has a bounteous opening – a woodsman discovers a child in a bamboo shoot and raises her as a princess – before a flat midsection that sees Kaguya wait around her palace for treasure-hunting suitors. Here, Takahata appears to press his own passivity and indecision on to his character; for a narrative about life’s transitory nature, it doesn’t half start to drag. Lush, hand-painted images offer plentiful consolation, but its beauty forms a gilded cage: until the undeniably moving final movements, it just feels several shades too constrained to fully honour its heroine’s restless, questing spirit.