SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A spellbinding and complex fantasy with unusual nuance, Princess Mononoke serves as a powerful and timeless allegory about man’s relationship with nature.
If you’re looking for a film to introduce someone to anime, or even to animation in general, then Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke is one of the best films out there for that purpose. Many people have preconceptions about both anime and animation, and often can be wary or even outright negative about a medium of film frequently regarded as the stuff of children’s cartoons. Anime is often seen as the product of a foreign culture, imported for the viewing pleasure of niche groups of hardcore fans and Japanophiles. However, Miyazaki’s fantasy epic delivers on every conceivable level, with its complex and nuanced characters and a rich fantasy world in which it effortlessly captures a fundamental truth about the way the world works. This should be an eye-opener for all, even for fans of Studio Ghibli, who’ll be able to appreciate one of Miyazaki’s most magnificent and personal works.
Set in medieval Japan at the very dawn of industrial civilisation, Mononoke follows Ashitaka, the last prince of the proto-Japanese Emishi people. After fighting a corrupted boar god and saving his village, Ashitaka finds himself cursed to die a painful death from the demon’s corruption. Journeying from his homeland into the distant lands of the west in order to rise and meet his fate by seeing with eyes unclouded by hate, he finds himself embroiled in a new conflict between the people of Irontown, a new industrial settlement led by the powerful Lady Eboshi, a clan of bandit samurai, and the ancient gods of the forest.
At its core, this is an environmentalist film, though to claim that it’s solely about communicating a need to be eco-friendly would do it a huge disservice. It’s about the conflict between our human need to grow and expand, and the necessity of preserving and respecting the world around us, seen through the lens of Japanese mythology and spirituality. But more than that, it’s also about love and the corrupting influence of hatred, and the consequences of human greed and short-sightedness. It’s made all the more powerful by nuance and ambiguity, which are ultimately what sets this movie apart from many of its fellows, with particular respect to its complex characters who refuse to conform to traditional hero and villain roles. We want to root for San, the girl who was raised by the film’s wolf spirits, in her quest to protect her home, but she’s also shown to be willing to hurt innocents to get her way. Similarly, we want to hate Lady Eboshi for disregarding tradition and disrupting the natural order, but she’s shown to be a progressive, modernist leader who treats all her people fairly and offers a new path for marginalised lepers and former prostitutes, all of whom revere her for bringing prosperity to their community. As a result, the audience grows to appreciate the duality and the struggle for a balance between the two sides, and the implication that we’ve never found that balance even hundreds of years later makes this film even timelier.
Mononoke also serves as a true fantasy epic. Its world is rich and beautiful, and as with many of his other films, Miyazaki populates it with a vast array of spirits, from elegant and ferocious white wolf spirits to giant, bellowing boars, and little kodama spirits who cluster in the treetops, heads rattling and waving their tiny arms in the wind as a giant forest spirit passes, causing gusts of wind to rustle the leaves. Its action sequences are wonderfully animated, with scenes like the cursed prince riding a beautiful red elk to save villagers being attacked by samurai, his cursed hand seething with corruption as he fires arrow after arrow, or a masked San riding bareback on a wolf as she charges down a barren hillside towards an Irontown caravan as rain-soaked villagers fire at her with primitive hand cannon. It’s proof that animation can be art in motion, with breath-taking visuals that match its storytelling ambitions. Problems are few; perhaps if you’re not fond of long movies, then this might take a little extra effort, but I think it’s well worth it.
It’s a truly spectacular film that’s bound to make some people reconsider what animation can be. Very few films have this kind of narrative complexity, and you owe it to yourself to see this film in the same way its protagonist Ashitaka strives to see the world he lives in: with eyes unclouded by hate and suspicion.
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