Make Believe Mailer #163: Virtual World Is Mine

Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, Internet Culture And Vocaloid

Note: Spoilers for Netflix’s Cosmic Princess Kaguya! (and the centuries-old story it is based on) follow

In the climax of Heian-era folk story The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a team of guards commanded by the Emperor of Japan attempt to fight off moon people. These celestial beings have come down to retrieve Princess Kaguya, a lunar beauty sent to Earth as kind of punishment.

What she did we never know, but it’s revealed Kaguya went to our planet to experience the joy of interpersonal connection…and the pain of having that ripped away. At this point in the story the moon folk have come to bring her back and, despite the efforts of the warriors trying to keep her in ancient Japan, succeed, with Kaguya herself accepting the transience of it all.

The general beats of this showdown play out in Netflix’s Cosmic Princess Kaguya! In the film’s most dazzling animated sequence, the moon denizens appear as almost psychedelic interpretations of ancient Japanese culture. Kaguya’s friends try to fight them off, but it’s no use.

Yet all of this spectacle plays out amidst Kaguya’s own graduation concert, a time-and-space-bending battle happening while she runs through zippy idol pop. It’s, somehow, the one detail that makes all of this even more head spinning.

The latest adaptation of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter — available to stream worldwide — is a doozy. At nearly two-and-a-half-hours length, the directorial debut of Shingo Yamashita packs a lot in to a story set in 2030. The major points are familiar — high schooler Iroha Sakayori, who seems to have deep issues with her mom and lives alone in some corner of Western Tokyo’s Tachikawa neighborhood, one day finds a weird glowing door in a telephone pole near her shitty apartment. Inside is a baby. Reluctantly, Sakayori attempts to take care of her but, like in the original, mystery infant quickly grows bigger, eventually reaching the same point as Sakayori herself. Named Kaguya after the myth, the film follows the two bonding and learning from one another, until the moment Kaguya’s people in the sky come to collect her.

That’s just kind of the framework of it all, though, because there’s so much more happening within Kaguya! The bulk of the movie happens in a digital world called Tsukuyomi, a virtual paradise where everyone is a creator and some become e-celebrities, though none bigger than an AI idol/moderator named Yachiyo Runami. Within this VR space we explore livestreaming, virtual YouTubers, professional gaming, idols, oshikatsu, in-service-purchases and so much more.

This is all before moon people crash the party, too.

It’s near impossible to watch Kaguya! and its online escapades without thinking of Mamoru Hosada’s Belle, a 2021 film also set in a virtual world offering escape from our own and updating a classical story (in its case, Beauty And The Beast). It revolves around avatar-utilizing teens becoming stars and how all of this intersects with the physical Earth. Big marine animals float in the sky and musical numbers pepper the narrative.

Yet a lot has changed in just half a decade, and the “online” depicted in both feels radically different from one another. In Belle, it feels akin to Second Life or, to go off of a buzzword so many English writers busted out when this one premiered in the West, a “metaverse.” By the time Kaguya! went into production that whole concept lost steam as AI charmed the tech world.

Instead, Yamashita’s VR realm is a more hyperactive take on what we know today. It’s YouTube, it’s Twitch, it’s Fortnite, it’s a ReGLOSS concert. Every reflection of the modern online entertainment ecosystem Belle touched on was by accident. Every one in Kaguya! is intentional.

It also ends up being much twistier. Despite taking place primarily in a virtual realm, Belle’s most important stretches happen IRL and opt for realism over fantasy in order to drive home a message that sure, being beloved by millions as an avatar is neat, but positively impacting one person’s physical existence is 100 percent more fulfilling.

Kaguya! meanwhile triples down on ridiculousness. After a fake-out ending¹, the movie’s final 30 minutes mutate from “what if I could live in Robolox” to a rollercoaster of space travel, time warping and robotics. It’s a lot to process and sometimes feels a little too hectic, but I also really appreciated something approaching subversion of expectations of both The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Japanese art’s fascination with transience in general. Kaguya! says “take your mono no aware and fuck right off, we are building androids for a happy ending.”

That’s a nice modern twist…but Kaguya! overflows with a peculiar type of nostalgia. Memories of the late Aughts internet.

The biggest similarity between Belle and Kaguya! is an optimistic tone about the social internet. For the prior, that was a result largely of Hosada not being online much, allowing him a rosier view of a space that, in the early 2020s could feel like a viper pit. The latter, though, comes about because the people involved in this movie seem very online, and most likely grew up as such.

What gives that away is the music. Kaguya’s! near-future setting helps out a lot here, jumping ahead only four years but that being enough time for all sorts of technological leaps (our super-immersive VR game) and new patterns for nostalgia. Seeing as we are just now maybe possibly moving on from “Y2K aesthetics” and “frutiger aero” as a dominant source of “oh I wish I could have lived back then” — and because the realities of 2016 aren’t actually all that much to long for — it totally makes sense to me that by 2030 people in Japan would be like “you know what I wish I could have experienced? Early Vocaloid.”

The bulk of the soundtrack here is Vocaloid, specifically songs from that world’s heyday of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Hatsune Miku doesn’t appear but she might as well be cradling the entirety of Tsukuyomi in her hands. There’s new songs, including by PAS TASTA member and solo dynamo yuigot², but also a lot of covers. “World Is Mine” gets updated (above), as does “Happy Synthesizer” and “Melt,” here given even more oomph by the fact the remix is done by ryo (supercell), and it is the first time they’ve done something with Miku in years. Even artists can’t resist the call of nostalgia.

I mean hell, there’s a Bump Of Chicken cover too…but it’s the song THEY did with Hatsune Miku back in 2014.

It’s a clever choice to lean on one of the most-online genres of music for a film all about being in the digital realm, but it’s worth noting that the actual ethos of Vocaloid is absent from this embrace. Sure, avatars and 3-D pop stars were a heavy draw to the first wave of Miku-inspired media, but what felt genuinely epoch-shifting was the creative freedom allowed by this instrument. That’s kind of the central thesis of Why Did Hatsune Miku Change The World?, and it’s the core of the community that built up around this software in the decades after. The characters in Kaguya! do end up creating but it feels closer to a pre-web approach playing out while logged in. Virtual YouTubers seem more relevant to this, and it’s more like utaite within the context of Vocaloid.

To me it felt like nostalgia for a very specific time in Vocaloid history, when it was new and novel and very different sounding. These are also, notably, songs that have mostly become mainstream in the decade-plus since they’ve come out. I think if you played them the Kaguya! cover of “World is Mine,” most Japanese people 50 and under would recognize it, even if it was just “that thing a cartoon lady sang, right?” Kaguya! is ultimately too upbeat about the current state of the internet to be pining for the Aughts, so this is purely longing for a different time in a style’s history. It’s not so much different than, say, getting Miku to turn another of her defining songs into a tune about fry flavorings.³

What all this looking back (via an imagined future) accidentally did, though, was make me turn to the now.

What’s incredible about Vocaloid is that it hasn’t turned into a museum piece. Since it’s built around specific instruments rather than sounds or “vibes,” there’s no “remember chillwave?,” just constant mutations. Over the past five-ish years, Vocaloid’s general sound has turned more oddball and chaotic — the last era of Kenshi Yonezu, Ayase, Ado and so on are creating top-level J-pop, so now this digi-space has gotten weirder. It’s also become more international, with Americans such as the group FLAVOR FOLEY and South Korean producer TAK (above) offering up recent hits in the style.

Even better…it’s a space prompting debate, because people take it seriously. Modern Vocaloid has its own era-shifting moments, most recently being the madcap “Mesmerizer,” to me one an exhilarating example of what’s possible with this sound. Yet it also inspired a lot of copycats, “lore building” exercises and maybe a little too much Kasane Teto obsession. But that’s a discussion playing out among creators and fans online, with compilations like KAOMOZI’s POST DAISY BELL directly challenging the character-centric approach many go for.

That’s just one lane, though, and there’s so many ideas flourishing from this community in 2026. How about a song about baseball, which has inspired particularly diehard fans of Vocaloid and the sport trying to figure out who inspired this? Or what about a frantic examination of generative AI and how it compares to Vocaloid, courtesy of always brain-frying producer SatapanP?

Or, best of all, how about some depressive and existential synthesized singing?

The year is young, but two months in I find producer irukanotane’s pensive fraud to be the best Japanese album I’ve heard so far in 2026. Part of that is owing to expectations flipped — whereas dominant synthesized art right now leans towards the uptempo, noisy and silly, fraud is spacious and mournful. The beat skitters ahead, but it sounds closer to Radiohead’s Brainfeeder-indebted experiments on “closer” or glitch-gone-footwork of “wrong.” irukanotane opts to use the voice bank of Nurse Robot_Type T, an utau (referring to a shareware synthesizer) featuring a more whisper-y delivery fitting for an album featuring a song called “dying alone.”

It’s a welcome detour from dominant Vocaloid sounds, reminding me a lot of mus.hiba’s White Girl from just over a decade ago. Just like that one, though, I don’t think you need to care at all about “is Kasane Teto overused” debates to be absorbed into what irukanotane accomplishes here. They’ve created a captivating album connecting several disparate corners of music — singing-synthesizer tunes, somber club fare, ennui-sprinkled rock — to create a heavy affair shaped by loneliness but eager to explore that via percussion experiments. Nurse Robot_Type T is just another sonic layer to this…one used perfectly to accent the mood.

A synthesized-voice at its center isn’t why fraud stands out. It’s simply a great album, one experimenting with familiar forms and adding a hard-to-pin-down melancholy over it. But fraud definitely shows why singing-synthesizer music, Vocaloid or otherwise, remains so relevant. Eras of it might be able to be turned into signifiers of new century retro in a movie like Kaguya!, but it’s something never sitting still and always changing. Above all, it prompts creation, and as long as someone creates with it, they’ll keep unlocking new perspectives on it.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Check out the Best Of 2026 Spotify Playlist here!

1. A TOO LONG SIDE DIP INTO THIS, AS IT LEFT ME CHARMED AND HORRIFIED: A common issue afflicting Japanese animation is “anime fidgetiness,” wherein a series or movie can never sit still without trying out a new cut-away animation gag or cramming in a dumb joke. It’s widespread but isn’t an instant death sentence. Done well, it can actually prove funny or offer some levity. Done too much though, and it becomes exhausting.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya! moves at a breakneck pace and flirts with the fidgety frequently, but it’s nimble enough to never feel too tiring with plenty of more quiet moments of reflection to balance it out. It also helps a ton that this movie just looks gorgeous, with even the gag bits utilizing new styles being gorgeous (the moon shots of Kaguya being a wonderfully weird blur of lo-res gaming and abstract art). The streamer bucks behind this really come through. At times watching this I thought, “man, this would be wonderful at a theater.”

Which…it probably was, because this film was brought to cinemas in Japan for a limited-time run (although a few places are still showing it). Classic Netflix, but I’m glad they did because 99 percent of Kaguya! screams for the big screen.

But in the days after I got around to watching this I’ve kept thinking…what did they do for the little fake ending joke? Which, if you’ve come this far you clearly saw this or don’t care about spoilers, involves the film suddenly cutting to a pretty realistic looking Netflix “up next” screen, complete with options to jump ahead to the next program which here involves the fake e-sports boys serving as a minor foil to our protagonists.

It’s clearly not real, but also looks real enough where there’s a split second of “huh, what?” to it. It’s a well done fidget and I’m quite used to cartoons breaking the fourth wall, so I wasn’t aghast at it while sitting in my living room. Yet…did they do this in the theatrical version? Because that would suck, with streaming aesthetics spilling over to a separate experience. Maybe they didn’t! But it made me realize just what could happen as the way art is delivered keeps splintering.

2. Which is the reason I wanted to check this out in the first place.

3. I had the “pizza potato” offering yesterday and…it was incredible, maybe a top three Shaka Shaka seasoning.