Cosmic Princess Kaguya Blu-ray storms the Oricon chart

The special limited edition of Cosmic Princess Kaguya sold 27,000 copies in its first week to top Oricon's weekly Blu-ray Disc chart, with the standard edition taking third place on 9,000 copies. The chart, published on 17 September, counts discs sold between 7 and 13 September, which adds up to 36,000 copies for a film that has been sitting on Netflix since January.

The publisher is claiming a bigger number still. INCS toenter, the music company that handled the packaged release, says cumulative shipments of the limited edition have reached 108,000 copies, a figure that includes sales through the film's own store and the additional preorder round opened after the first allocation closed.

What is *Cosmic Princess Kaguya*?

It is the first feature-length film directed by Shingo Yamashita, whose opening sequences for the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man and Urusei Yatsura made him one of the most imitated animators working. The animation was split between Studio Colorido, the studio behind Penguin Highway and A Whisker Away, and Studio Chromat, the new outfit Yamashita leads. This was Chromat's first production.

The film takes The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the oldest surviving Japanese narrative, and drops it into Tsukuyomi, a virtual world where hope and dreams pile up like data and where the girls at the centre of the story are held together by song. The score reads like a Vocaloid roll call: ryo of supercell, kz of livetune, HoneyWorks, 40mP, yuigot and Aqu3ra all contributed music.

A Netflix debut, then four months in cinemas

Netflix released the film worldwide on 22 January and it topped the service's Japanese film chart the following day. Cinemas followed on 20 February, and the run refused to end. Twin Engine says the film had passed one million admissions and 2bn yen at the box office by 20 April, and Oricon puts the final tally above 2.7bn yen after about four months on screens.

What is actually on the discs

The limited edition is where the money went. It costs 16,800 yen for three discs: the 140-minute theatrical cut and the five welcome-announcement shorts that ran before screenings, then a second disc carrying a 142-minute version with deleted scenes restored, a 31-minute commentary in character from Kaguya, Ayaha and Yachiyo, and the music video for the duet version of Reply. A bonus CD holds the film's 11 vocal tracks and that duet, and there is a booklet and a box, wrapped in new art by Hechima, who designed the Tsukuyomi cast. The standard edition is 6,800 yen for the theatrical cut and the shorts.

Our opinion

The 27,000 discs are the headline, but the 108,000 shipments are the story. Japan's physical market has spent a decade being told that streaming would finish it, and what has actually happened is that the collector's edition has become a product in its own right: a 16,800 yen boxset that cleared its first allocation for a film every buyer could already watch for the price of a subscription. Nothing on that second disc is essential viewing. That is exactly why people paid for it.

The music is doing much of the work, and it is worth being clear about why. This is a film built by Vocaloid producers, sold in a package assembled by a music company, and the soundtrack had already topped Oricon's digital album chart back in May. Bundling the record and the movie into one box is a sharper piece of product design than most film distributors manage, and it explains a chart position the animation alone would not have delivered. The lesson is not that discs are back. It is that Japanese rights holders treat a hit film as a catalogue rather than a single event.