Topic on User talk:Les

Princess Kaguya, a 1934 film that is currently the talk of Japan's movie news, found in England by the British Film Institute, will soon be released to the Japanese public, is it allowed on wikizilla? it uses classical toku judging from this video.

It can be mentioned on his page, but I don't see the case for it having its own page. Of course there's special effects, it's Tsuburaya.

Nothing I have seen calls it a special effects movie. From the clips, the most I saw was compositing. And either way, Tsuburaya did not do the special effects; he was just the drama cameraman.

We have Kwaidan and that's not toku and the film has been talked about by lots of toku fans (eg. J.L. Carrozza) and this 1999 blog post calls it toku. It also says the special effect puppets where created by Mofu Asano.

We planned to delete Kwaidan.

I don't really care what other people are "talking about." Any lost media with Tsuburaya's name attached being found is going to be news. The fact remains that he didn't do the movie's special effects (if there's even enough in it to be called special effects).

Yeah I know this chat concluded two years ago but, it turns out Ragone even says Tsuburaya directed its effects and its a significant film in Tokusatsu history, as it is possibly the first Japanese film to use special effects , miniatures, and puppets

What scope rule would it fall under? I don't see any myself.

Under Toho (as it was produced by a predecessor of the company I guess): "Be science fiction and share a director, screenwriter, director of special effects, or equivalent position with at least two feature-length Godzilla films or two feature-length Gamera films." Like the 1980s one, it has sci-fi elements including aliens (I could argue that it has as much place here as The Killing Bottle [1967]) and shares a effects director with the Godzilla series (Tsuburaya).

Huh, I had always assumed Princess from the Moon put a science-fiction spin on the story, but it turns out the original story had aliens in it too. However, we need to confirm the same is true of this telling - the blurbs on various Japanese film databases don't mention them, and the story sounds significantly altered. From the footage below, there seem to be some supernatural/sci-fi elements, but I'd like to know more.

The film also gets hung up on technicalities, at least with how the rules are currently written. The Toho rules don't mention the company's precursors, although I can't imagine including them would be a problem. The simplified credits in Ragone's book also don't clarify whether Tsuburaya/Kenzo Masaoka were actually credited as directors of special effects, but we've stretched the rules before for older films we don't have as much information about.

Also, I see that the video you linked to in your initial post has been deleted - has it been reuploaded anywhere? I did find this excerpt.

That links pretty much the same video anyway

I would argue Princess from the Moon did put a sci-fi spin on it, which was the same response I had when K14 was trying to convince me of this yesterday. Explicitly making Kaguya an alien who crash-landed in a flying saucer is much more scientific than the original story, where her kind is more heavenly than extraterrestrial. Japanese Wikipedia even talks about the “introduction of sci-fi elements” being the idea of one of the screenwriters, and that prior to that, Tanaka felt it would be too traditional a movie. In my mind, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is far closer to fairytales than to space operas. Unless Princess Kaguya also intentionally plays up the sci-fi (which it doesn’t seem to from what I’ve seen), my vote is no.

I'm thinking we could detail its production on Tsuburaya's page instead then, if we are going to do a full biography on his life and film career