— or a love letter to that summer I never got to live
It was around 2017 or 2018 for me to started listening Vocaloid.
By then, Niconico‘s golden age was already long over. I caught up through reposted videos on Bilibili and those “legendary songs” compilation playlists — ryo’s “Melt,” “Happy Synthesizer,” “Senbonzakura.” For me, these were stories belong to someone else, summers that lived in other people’s memories. But even watching through the screen, I could still recognize the shape of that Utopia: one song, one amateur, one cable connecting, and then hundreds of thousands of people crying and screaming together in the danmaku and comment. That energy must’ve been insane.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya! opens with a cyberpunk-ish RGB utility pole, and Kaguya is born from the pole.
I actually paused for a second, then it clicked — oh, right, that’s exactly the point. That RGB pole is the physical form of that whole thing: the infrastructure where anyone could upload, and anyone could be seen. The movie puts the key right in front of you before it even starts.
The setlist is pretty telling once you know what to look for. “World is Mine,” “Melt,” “Happy Synthesizer” — these aren’t just live performance songs. They’re a timeline. If you recognize these titles, you know what year each one belongs to and what it meant when it came out, even if, like me, you only ever inherited them as artifacts and never lived through the moment itself. Director Shingo Yamashita is probably about a decade older than me, but he’s using this setlist to reach across generations — saying “you people who came later, you can be part of this story too.”
I believed him. I really did.
Quick plot summary. The story runs in roughly 30-minute chapters, and honestly it could’ve made as a 4-episode OVA format — but watching it as a feature film gives it both a strong sense of contrast between chapters and a kind of cohesion that keeps everything from falling apart. It felt genuinely fresh.
Iroha Sakayori is a high school student living alone in Tokyo. One day she finds a baby inside an RGB utility pole. A few days later the baby has grown into a girl like her age — Kaguya, a mysterious presence who is absolutely floored by both pancakes and VR. The two of them partner up to stream in a virtual idol space called Tsukuyomi, Kaguya blows up fast, and they eventually win the Yachiyo Cup. Right when the three-person collab concert wraps up and everything seems to be heading toward a happy ending, a lunar envoy shows up, and Iroha can’t stop what happens next — Kaguya says “I love you most, Iroha,” and gets taken away.
The story seems to end there. Then the end credits roll.
The timing is very deliberate. The film offers the audience a “mature” option here: accept the loss, let Iroha walk into law school, let the story close neatly — something quiet, mono no aware, grown-up. The film is literally asking: can you live with this?
Iroha can’t. She finishes her late father’s incomplete song, “Reply,” sends it out while holding Kaguya’s bracelet, and follows Yachiyo’s pet Fushi until the truth finally surfaces: AI idol Yachiyo is Kaguya. Stranded in her bamboo-shoot spacecraft after a meteor impact 8,000 years ago, she waited until the internet existed — and then came back to find Iroha in the form of a digital idol.
“Yachiyo” isn’t a random name. In Japanese, it literally means “eight thousand years.”
Knowing the truth, Iroha refuses to accept “hugging a consciousness is enough” as an answer. She drops law school, pivots to robotics engineering, and spends ten full years building Kaguya an android body.
(I’m going with my own reading here since the plot does have some contested bits, but honestly I think you don’t need to overthink it — just let yourself enjoy it.)
I have to be honest for this: the script has real problems.
A lot of anime critics have been frustrated with Cosmic Princess Kaguya!’s story structure. Some in the comment section of the movie in Bangumi said the rhythm of the structure starts falling apart from the Black Onyx BO3 match part — the information density goes up fast, and by the time the truth is revealed, the part-story feels rushed, like the film got cut. I think that’s a fair and reasonable criticism. Director Yamashita, in interview, said that the production company and studio wanted 90 minutes for whole movie and he made 140 minutes, because he “had too much he wanted to say.” And yeah. As he said.
But there’s something interesting about that too. What Yamashita was doing in production, and what Iroha does inside the story, are actually the same thing — both of them refusing to be compressed into a container that adults decided was the “reasonable” size. There’s a fake ending mid-film where Netflix-style credits roll the moment Iroha accepts her loss, suggesting the story could stop here: tidy, melancholy, adult. The film is asking you: can you take this?
Yamashita couldn’t. So he shot fifty more minutes.
The way this film handles virtual space is where I think it goes deeper than most things in this genre.
It doesn’t frame Tsukuyomi (the virtual / Pure Land) and reality (the defiled world) as escape versus the thing being escaped from. Instead it shows them needing each other. Tsukuyomi has no taste, no smell — it’s a digital Pure Land, free from the weight of having a body. But Kaguya and Yachiyo are exactly the ones longing for Iroha’s homemade pancakes and the smell of fireworks. The VR contact lens design — open your eyes and you’re in reality, close them and you’re in the virtual — makes this “parallel, not opposed” relationship visible in a really elegant way.
This method of framing really touches me in 2026. I’ve spent an age in Hololive and Nijisanji virtual streamer projects, also in many indie VTuber stream rooms. That was never a kind of escape — it was an outlet and released. And everytime I went back to real life with something from it. This film actually shows that clearly.
The moment that hit me hardest is when Iroha pushes open that door.
Yachiyo who’s been so bright and energetic on screen — her physical form is a tangle of cold cables and loudly humming machines. It’s no need to have dialogue. That single scene was enough to say everything. The story doesn’t stop there. Through a long night of talking, Yachiyo laughs and tells the story of 8,000 years like it’s a funny anecdote, while Fushi stays nearby and quietly expresses along all the loneliness Yachiyo hided behind. Only in that moment do you understand why Yachiyo keeps smiling — it wasn’t performance. That smile supports her through 8,000 years, because she knew Iroha was waiting somewhere ahead. The memory kept aging like wine, sweet enough to survive every long, dark night.
The logic that “a smile can be certainty rather than performance” actually works in this film. (Also — I don’t care what anyone says, Yachiyo is extremely shippable and I need everyone to know that.) (The memes: Can’t smile yet. Victory in 10 seconds.jpg)
Let me talk about the moment that actually wrecked me a little: Kaguya announcing her graduation.
I suddenly thought of so many VTubers I’ve seen off. You always say something like “everyone’s got their own path,” and you see them out one by one. I don’t usually feel much. But this one got to me. That identity just disappears — they smile and say goodbye to the audience, and then they’re never seen again.
Good thing the movie ends with an announced comeback concert, otherwise I honestly might’ve given it a bad rating. I was this close. But Yamashita clearly understood what was missing, and he filled it in. So we’re okay.
The ending is “childish,” if you want to call it that. Iroha refuses to accept loss, spends ten years learning robotics, and builds Kaguya a body. That final pancake — finally something Kaguya can eat, but still has no taste — carries the weight of eight thousand and ten years.
On my first watch I was a little uncertain. Is building an android really a happy ending? But by the second watch I’d changed my mind. This HE isn’t cheap, because the cost is right there in the open: Iroha used adult-level skill and effort to make an “immature” decision. That’s not running away. That’s a stance.
This is already the best Happy Ending possible.
One last thing I can’t leave unaddressed: this film was born with an expiration date.
Its core energy comes from emotional resonance with Vocaloid culture and the early-internet utopia, and that layer of resonance has a limited half-life. Niconico’s golden age is history now — it was already inherited material by the time I even got to it. Maybe after ten years, when someone new to this sits down to watch the movie, they might need old people like me around to explain at length to understand why “Melt” kicks matters in that moment.
But that doesn’t mean it is less real right now.
Just like Yachiyo brings 8,000-year memory all the way to today she found Iroha again, something past its expiration date can still be the thing that keeps ones moving forward. The production animators, the editor and director knew what they were doing, and they knew where their had limits. Within that framework, they did the best.
I didn’t catch up that summer. But I think I understood that letter.
Actually I have a lot more to talk about, while it has already exceeded the required amount by double… That’s not the end, I have deep love within this work.
Recommended BGM: ray (Cosmic Princess Kaguya! Version)
The copyright of all the screenshots in the article belongs to 超かぐや姫！ / スタジオコロリド・スタジオクロマト制作 / ©コロリド・ツインエンジンパートナーズ\
Special Acknowledgement: KitaujiSub, Bangumi Comment Group, Bangumi, 泛式FunShiki/Yves.
Shoujie Wang 
Yinan Zhou 
SUN Yinchen