Talking anime | Licca-chan to Yamaneko: Hoshi no Tabi
You can (not) sell a mountain.
I didn't grow up near mountains. For a long time the geography of my life was defined by flatness, by openness, by space and by air. For me, a hill might as well have been the same as Everest, a gentle slope a towering feat of nature.
You can imagine, then, what it felt like moving to Japan. In all but an instant my life, once made up of rolling plains and infinite horizons (for the Americans in the audience, I’m a Kansas kid) was now filled with the earth casting away its once passive image to come towards the sky in behemoths larger than anything we humans can make ourselves. And you know, a lot of cultures saw and continue to see mountains as godly things. Once I came here, I finally understood why. Mountains feel like exist beyond our earthly considerations, beyond our beliefs and inventions. You can’t sell a mountain, after all.
In 1967, toy company Takara (now part of Takara Tomy) revealed a fashion doll designed by shoujo mangaka Miyako Maki. You can’t sell a mountain, but you sure as hell can sell a doll. And sell Licca-chan did. For sixty years now, Licca-chan has dominated the market, managing to shut down Barbie’s attempted invasion to establish herself as the fashion doll in Japan, equipped with her own lovingly detailed personality and history and unending variations.
All of this brings us to Licca-chan to Yamaneko: Hoshi no Tabi, the fourth in a series of OVAs — and originally intended as a theatrical film before pulled back last minute — developed over the first half of the ‘90s around the point of Licca-chan’s thirtieth anniversary.
A movie for a fashion doll denied its own movieness by executive decision and unceremoniously dumped to VHS (a nice reminder that movies being thrown to the streaming wolves today isn’t anything new) with a garish cover doesn’t exactly raise expectations of quality. So I want to make it very clear when I say:
Licca-chan to Yamaneko: Hoshi no Tabi is a complete triumph.
A keenly observed, patient children’s film that is as subtly, finely drawn as it is confidently constructed, Hoshi no Tabi feels close to revelatory, a few steps and a proper release away from being a classic in the medium.
The story itself is near as simple as they come. Licca-chan, eleven years old, goes with her father to a small mountainous village over the summer. There, she makes some friends and decides to partake in the village’s festival, an ancient celebration centered around cats. That is, ultimately, kind of it. Okay, so she also travels to the celestial dimension and witnesses the collective memories of the universe human instrumentality style as two immortal dragons do eternal battle, but like, it’s basically just about doing a festival with friends.
The stakes here are small, but the film’s last act explosion into that larger and active celestial mythology suggests that maybe there couldn’t be anything bigger than the small ones. Look at the aforementioned dragons: if the good dragon loses the upper hand, the world won’t end, people won’t die, no catastrophic event will occur. It’ll simply rain on the day of the village festival and they’ll have to postpone it. In an age and a medium defined by a certain one-upsmanship of scale, it seems so quaint, so inconsequential.
But isn’t the weather important? Doesn’t the date of a festival matter in a very real, profound way?
This is also wrapped up in similarly small and large interpersonal drama, Licca-chan getting in a minor fight with her new friend—the kind of fight that feels impossibly big to a kid—that reflects itself in the same supernatural happenings. They are themselves those two dragons in some way, just like they are the cat and the man who fought hundreds of years ago and gave birth to the whole festival in the first place.
Sure, in Licca-chan’s case it’s the type of fight you know as an adult won’t last and probably won’t even be remembered before too long, but those small fights matter, too.
What you end up getting, then, is a story of childhood and tradition, myth and nature and the connections that run between us via what we tell and do and believe. The festival and its ceremony are ultimately just that: events that can be rescheduled anytime, that can be carried out by anyone at all. But they also hold weight and importance and history whether you believe in their stated purpose or not. They are, beyond expressions of faith, tools that build community. Community with others, community with the past, community with nature.
All those connections are deftly captured here by the team, notably director Tsutomu Shibayama and writers Tatsuo Sato (!) and Tomomi Mochizuki, who provide a firm, patient, largely unshowy base that can only come from storytellers who deeply know what they’re doing. Silence is welcomed, long scenes of Licca-chan walking around or sitting alone and bored; music stays out of the way to allow for the busy quiet of the natural world; and dialogue delights in warm back-and-forths that refuse to get bogged down in self-seriousness.
In the same way, all of the more supernatural, magical realist moments of the film are treated with a wonderful matter-of-factness, an open armed acceptance of a world beyond our own. A cat starts talking and Licca-chan’s reaction is to simply talk right back; a friend is tasked with shooting a giant dragon but he oversleeps; all of them have a conversation with the sun and the moon and react with an appropriate “weird guy, huh”. There’s little separation between the fantastic and the mundane because what’s really the difference when you get down to it? The everyday is already full of the fantastic, it says. What’s meeting some cat gods really change?
Unfortunately art and reality are so often beholden on some level to the concept of money, and likely given its commercial ties, Hoshi no Tabi remains trapped on VHS, a rough transfer with hardcoded subtitles floating around online the only realistic way to see it.
It represents an unquestionable disservice to the movie, this work filled with little moments of surprising editing and plenty of virtuosic animation, both subtle and loud. But that’s the way of art, this unimaginably powerful method of expression that’s lived for thousands of years pushing and pulling against the commercial world, wrapped up inexorably from finance and power, propaganda and advertisement. You gotta say something important, but you also gotta sell dolls, and sometimes that means knowing your work will disappear one day once its purpose has been fulfilled.
And look, it’s easy to romanticize mountains like I’ve done, to see them as beyond the commercial, but that’s not strictly true, is it? In our modern world, anything and everything can be sold, even mountains. Just look at Mt. Fuji, a cultural icon, the face of Japan, and at the same time this object understood as a product on shirts and keychains and videos and pictures just as much if not more-so than it is an actual mountain. And sometimes that can be for the worse, sure, but other times you look at a cheap Japanese travel agency’s poster of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and a Mt. Fuji that isn’t really Mt. Fuji and for whatever reason it unlocks something in you and let’s you see that mountain in a whole new way, even if for only a moment.
Is that poster art? Is it product? Is it advertisement? Is it something in between all of them or something entirely new?
I don’t have a clue. All I know for sure is that Mt. Fuji is good and Hokusai is good and I’m glad Hoshi no Tabi had a chance to exist.
Music of the Week | Hiraku yume nado arujanashi by Kan Mikami
While there were some hints of someone like Mikami on the horizon, his arrival onto the Japanese folk scene must have hit like a freight train to the face. From second one on this, one of his earliest albums, with its aggressive, blaring sax, propulsive rhythm, and Mikami’s distinctive rasp yelling out lyrics with an almost rap-like cadence, it feels like he's coming for your immortal soul. It’s an album that feels like it’s on fire, like it was picked up right out of a boiling cauldron in hell. Or maybe it’s more like a grenade, flung into a world increasingly co-opted by major studios for sickly sweet orchestrations and polite lyrics. Whatever it is, it’s alive and it rules.
Book of the Week | Marunouchi Maho Shojo Miraclina by Sayaka Murata
A collection of short stories from the powerhouse author of Convenience Store Woman, Murata provides a handful of tales all about societal expectation, social mores, and perceived deviancy within systems here. From a woman who never stopped pretending to be a magical girl, to a school where gender expression isn’t allowed (but which also, notably, leans subtly into patriarchal ideas), to a world that starts to forget about the concept of anger, she flirts with genre and satire to build remarkably complex, knotted works here. But what really surprised me is how outwardly emotional they are…in a very oddball Murata way. You WILL be moved to tears by the phrase “my gaping wet hole” and I think that’s beautiful.
Movie of the Week | Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island (dir. Kei Oikawa, 2026)
Chiikawa! The latest mascot character to establish itself in the pantheon of cute characters every single young kid in Japan adores that just so happens to also be from a kind of weirdo sub-culture gag manga. We love ‘em! And their first movie here went wild in Japan, not just because of the character, but because of the reaction—that is to say, “wait why is this so heavy?” Mostly a charming comedy adventure (with music from Shugo Tokumaru!), the ending of this fairy tale story lands in a frankly shocking swamp of emotional and moral complexity. You go through an hour of cartoon rabbit rapping only to be met with an ellipses end and a real melancholy as Chiikawa is ripped from the fantasy and forced to confront a very adult kind of dilemma. It’s cool!
Have thoughts about anything covered this week? Got a recommendation you’re dying to share? Want to tell me how handsome and cool I am? Leave a comment below!
oh, and here's a site collecting the train station melodies of Tokyo