Sutemaru...say what now? (Spoilers)

Let's face it, all men are pigs. They'd put their leg over anything that moves if they could.

I too found his apparent willingness to abandon his child disturbing at first. But that wasn't my final feeling. In hindsight he (and we) see "it was a dream" - dreams are often a little out of kilter; also they're not something one can be responsible for. Then just a bit later, when his child comes down the path, the greeting is obviously very warm.

A theme that repeated itself several times throughout the film was doing something because you're obligated to, even though your heart wants to do something else.

You'd feel cocky too if you were full of myself.

OP there are two ways to look at it:

1. It seems suspicious that he would just run off in the middle of the day and just fall asleep and "dream". So if the part where he decided to run off was real then Sutemaru is a scumbag.

2. If the whole thing was indeed a dream then he did nothing wrong. All of us have dreams where we do things we would never do in real life. This is because in dreams we are not in control of our decisions.

I think we need to see the wife and child--to see that Sutemaru has the kind of warm family life that the princess would have liked--in order to make their parting bearable.

His ecstatic life with the princess is not possible, but he still has a life. It's a pretty old sort of plot, but exquisitely presented.

He clearly loved her, and she him. She didn't know he had a wife and children, otherwise I think that scene would have gone very differently. I think in the day, people settled with whoever and raised children as that was expected - still happens now in many parts of the world. The dream of genuinely marrying your soulmate, or even finding them again if you lost touch as children, would just never happen.

There were so many moral messages in this story it was hard to keep up, but perhaps the take-away from this part of the story is seize the opportunity whilst it's there, and tell someone you have feelings for them before they find someone else (or float off to the moon).

It's too cerebral! We're trying to make a movie here, not a film!

Yep, that was indeed awful of him. He was on par with other men who wooed the Princess.

As Caesar said in his dying words: "And you too, Sutemaru?"


Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down and a Wagging Finger of Shame

People can't control what happens when they're dreaming.