"Princess Mononoke" is Hayao Miyazaki's epic tale of Ashitaka, a young man in a quasi-mythical ancient Japan, who is cursed after he defends his village from a rampaging animal god-turned-demon in the form of a wounded giant boar. Ashitaka sets off to protect his people by finding out the cause of the animal god's rage and hatred and to try to find a cure to the curse which is spreading through his body like an infectious disease. In the course of his search, he discovers a country torn apart by war and a town on the frontier of the human and natural worlds where iron is forged into guns and bullets, one of which was the cause of the boar-god's madness and eventual death. After saving the lives of two of Iron Town's men, Ashitaka meets the workers, soldiers and leader of the town, Lady Iboshi. He also meets the titular princess, a human girl adopted by the wolf-god who has become a fierce warrior sworn to kill Iboshi and protect the animals' lands and the Forest Spirit who rules over all.
Along with "Spirited Away," "Princess Mononoke" is one of Hayao Miyazaki's unqualified masterpieces. These two films are very different in tone, scope and even intended audience, but at the same time both are so filled with Miyazaki's vision, themes and personality that they show his depth and range as an artist. Miyazaki is often called "Japan's Disney," and while this is a useful shorthand to describe the skill, popularity and cultural relevance of each, looking at these two films side-by-side shows where that comparison breaks down.
Miyazaki's films always feel like the product of an artist not afraid to take risks, to tell the stories that speak most to him and to speak to audiences of very different ages with real respect. Disney's films (both the animator's and the studio's) are among the most beautiful, well-crafted and pleasurable ever made - but there is always an air of calculation. Even with my favorites, like "Aladdin" or "Pinnochio" or "The Jungle Book," I feel like I can hear the studio executives asking "Is the sidekick cute enough? Are there enough songs? Will the audience be laughing here and crying there? Is the ending happy enough? Can we sell enough merchandise with these characters?"
I've never felt that Miyazaki was making that kind of calculation and I think that can be seen in the wide range of his films. "Spirited Away" is a film that can be loved by human beings of all ages, while "Princess Mononoke" could well give younger kids nightmares with its explicit violence - violence that is completely appropriate to its subject matter but has some brief gruesome moments of decapitation and loss of limb.
In Disney's films, nature is, by and large, harmonious, joyful and innocent - in Miyazaki's films nature is a necessary force of balance, but not one to be sentimentalized. It's that force that enslaves Chihiro in "Spirited Away" and it often feels capricious in its demands, just like the bathhouse's owner. In "Princess Mononoke" nature is often literally red in tooth and claw - the humans who are deforesting the ancient woods may be obviously destructive, but the response from the wolves, apes and boars led by their own gods are more than willing to kill whoever they need to to protect their homes.
Both films are informed by a distinctly Japanese animism and hundreds, if not thousands, of years of folklore. Both films are concerned with the delicate balance of nature and mankind and the disastrous result of that balance being disrupted by human modernization. However, where "Spirited Away" feels like a fairytale (or, more accurately, a collection of fairytales) brought to life, "Princess Mononoke" is a powerful blend of primal legend and historical reality.
"Spirited Away" is a kind of domestic epic, where the stakes are so high because they are so personal - we follow Chihiro closely in her journey into the spirit world and want her to be reunited with her parents (even as we fall in love with the world she stumbles into). "Princess Mononoke" is an epic in the classical sense, one in which the stakes are life and death, not just for our hero, but for thousands of humans, creatures and spirits.
"Princess Mononoke" is also a kind of companion piece to Studio Ghibli's first film, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind." In both films, the result of human's aggressive effort to conquer nature has driven a massively powerful natural force to attack the hometown of the protagonist, whose people have done nothing to provoke it. Like Nausicaa, Ashitaka fights, negotiates and struggle not for one side or the other (certainly not for good over evil) but for a peaceful balance that allows all creatures to live. Also like Nausicaa, Ashitaka is not only willing to give his life for that balance, but is in fact mortally wounded and healed by that force of nature.
And as in all of his films - and very much in contrast to Disney - Miyazaki does not create villains. Miyazaki's work, in the West at least, is generally thought of as charming and benign, but the cruelty and complexity of war is a common theme in many of his films. In his films, war is tragic and causes suffering to all beings; at the same time every faction, every person, has their reasons to fight and believes that what they are doing is what is necessary.
Lady Iboshi (brilliantly voiced by Minnie Driver), the leader of Iron Town, would be the villainness in a Disney film as she destroys the forest, kills animals and leaves behind her fallen men without checking to see if they're actually dead. But she leaves those men after an ambush on a cliff path in order to keep the rest alive and deliver vital supplies to her town. She is a woman ruling in a man's world and she obviously cares about her people, especially the brothel women and lepers she has taken in, put to work and given real respect to for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, the Forest Spirit, who would be all too easy to paint as an angelic - even Christ-like - being, takes the lives of his fiercest warriors and defenders when it is their time and, when mortally wounded, rains down destruction on everyone and everything around him. Even the cynical mercenary "monk" Jigo (a surprisingly appropriate Billy Bob Thornton), who is quite happy to have others kill and be killed in his pursuit of a mountain of gold, is also a wryly ironic realist about the ridiculousness of the world, even his own ambition, and is impossible not to like.
As complex and interesting as the film's themes and characters are, though, "Princess Mononoke" is also a dazzlingly beautiful film, one that creates real feelings of awe and terror and the visceral excitement of movement and action. I've always loved the way that Miyazaki's animation makes the sense of movement, and especially flight, feel so alive in its two dimensions. There's no flight as such in "Princess Mononoke," but the movement of animals and people (especially the impossible acrobatics of Mononoke herself) is thrilling.
This is a film that I keep coming back to and I always notice something amazing and new (to me) each time. This time I was really taken by the animation of Yakul, the red elk that Ashitaka rides throughout the film and who is his closest companion. Yakul is never anthropomorphized or sentimentalized, but the animation of his posture and movement give a real sense of character that is relatable but true to his animal self.
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