Kaguya-hime: Taketori Monogatari

One of Japan's oldest and most beloved folktales is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter — and this 1987 OVA takes that story somewhere considerably less family-friendly. An old bamboo cutter discovers a glowing stalk in the forest and finds a tiny baby girl inside. He and his wife raise her as their own, naming her Kaguya-hime. She grows into a woman of extraordinary beauty, and that beauty draws every powerful man in the land — noblemen, emperors, all of them circling. The original folktale uses this setup to explore longing and the impossible nature of perfection. This version leans hard into the desire side of that equation, reframing the classic story as an adult drama about power, autonomy, and what it means to be an object of obsession in ancient Japan. The animation has a genuine period aesthetic — there's real care put into the historical setting, which gives it a more grounded feel than you might expect. If you've seen La Blue Girl or A Thousand and One Nights and appreciated the blend of mythological source material with explicit content, this sits comfortably in that tradition. It's a single-episode OVA from 1987, so don't go in expecting modern production values — but as a curio that reimagines a genuinely ancient story through an adult lens, it's a more thoughtful artifact than its premise might initially suggest.