Princess Mononoke
First, find a review by Daniel Thomas:
(Mononoke Hime) (1997)
A Studio Ghibli production.
Written and directed by Hayao Miyazakii.
Running time: 133 minutes.
September 6, 2004
There’s a great opening scene in Princess Mononoke, where a quiet, pastoral village is beset by a thunderous, crazed, giant boar. The creature is covered with a thick skin of blackened tentacles that snarl and snake with wild abandon, and it becomes more than a second skin. It’s monstrous and foreboding, like something Ray Harryhausen would cook up if he had a bad trip while watching The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
Ashitaka, the young chieftain of the village, launches into pursuit, and we’re hurled into a chase sequence. It’s thrilling to watch, and the camera swoops and dives right in the action. There’s an almost desperate momentum at play, as this enormous, mutated thing stampedes on, while the boy vainly tries to calm it down. He is reluctantly forced to bring the creature down with two well-placed arrows, but not before one of the black tentacles latches onto his arm; Ashitaka saved his people but is left burned, scarred.
For those of us in the West, this was our first introduction to Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, and we were instantly hooked. Back home, Japanese audiences who loved his work would flock to theatres, break all box-office records and make Mononoke a phenomenon. They also had an added advantage of knowing the score; knowing that the opening chase is a clever reenactment of an early chase scene in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
In that film (and the graphic novel on which it’s based), the heroine successfully calms down a stampeding Ohmu, a giant, green bug with claws and a dozen eyes. Now, in the new version, the tone is different, and the mood is shockingly bleaker. The setup is the same, but the payoff is tragic; the hero is fatally cursed, and doomed to walk alone in search of answers. The serial adventure has collided into the anti-war picture.
Miyazaki’s earlier works, from Animal Treasure Island and Future Boy Conan to My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, carry a romantic idealism at their core. But now, in middle age, we see the emergence of the serious, somber Miyazaki. Miyazaki, the heartbroken idealist. Miyazaki, the cynic. Mononoke is a much darker picture, wrestling with complex themes and issues, one that clearly has no patience for pat solutions or easy answers.
Mononoke is often referred to as a movie about how man and nature should get along, but that’s not really accurate. It’s a movie about how man and nature don’t get along. Nobody gets along with anyone, and it's far too late for talking. The knives are drawn and everyone wants blood. When the title character is finally introduced, Ashitaka has traveled to the edge of a mystic forest and walked into the middle of a full-scale war. San, the wolf girl, the Princess Mononoke, her adoptive wolf pack on one side, fighting to preserve the forests; Lady Eboshi, her women equipped with firearms, on the other, their ironworks village clearing the land to mine their ores.
Within each side lie several factions, all pushing and pulling in different directions. Everyone grows distrustful of each other. The Ape Tribes, who plant seeds and grow in despair; the Boar Tribe, who seek slaughter on the battlefield; rival samurai clans who seek to capture the ironworks for their own; Jigo, a conniving monk whose army is hired by the Emperor; the men of the ironworks, quietly resentful of the woman who marched in and took over their town, succeeding where they never could.
At the center of everything lies the Shishigami, the Deer God who calls the mystical forest his home, who comes and goes with the wind. This is a God who is ultimately unknowable, intimately connected at one moment and distant the next; its motives and reasons, even its itentity, are always in question.
There are really two movies at work here. Western audiences can enjoy Mononoke on a purely visual level, marveling at the astonishing detail, the terrific animation, the lush and varied color tones, and the swift movements of the camera. CGI is used to great extent, mixing with the cell animation, and it all looks stunning. But notice how the computer animation is used to support the action; note how its use in scrolling and panning allows for more dynamic camera work, capturing compositions and landscapes straight from Ford and Kurosawa.
Japanese audiences are far luckier; they got to see the real movie. This is the first film Miyazaki directed since completing the Nausicaa comic. Nausicaa the novel was wildly successful, first appearing in Animage magazine and then selling ten million copies as a seven-volume series of books. What makes it great is how the story grows and expands as it goes along, and this is because Miyazaki took long breaks when working on his pictures. Each time he returned to Nausicaa, the scope widened, the themes became more complex, and the issues became more nuanced. What began as a Buddhist spaghetti western evolved into a serious examination on feminism, the environment, war and pacifism, human suffering, life and death, and the nature of God.
Miyazaki had finally retired the novel he spent nearly fifteen years writing, but here he was again, plunging back into these themes and adapting them to a story set in 14th Century Japan (and deconstructing much of its history and mythology in the process). This is why I refer to Princess Mononoke as his Ran; it’s a grand summing-up film. It’s the final statement from his serious side, and the fingerprints are all over the picture.
Like that early chase scene, most of the key moments in the film are taken from Nausicaa; minor moments like camera shots, scenes that draw parallels, even the characters themselves. Ashitaka and San truly are Nausicaa’s children (goodness knows they have the haircut - the moment when Ashitaka cuts his top-knot is almost comic). One child is the spiritual pacifist, the other the fierce warrior. Notice how, even here, the gender roles are reversed; it’s the girl who goes for the knife, and the boy who pleads for understanding.
That defiant feminism has always been a Miyazaki trademark, and it shines brighter here than any other Ghibli production. These characters are allowed dimension, nuance. Where is the melodrama? Who’s the good guy? Who’s the villain? There is no good or evil side, only living beings trying to do the best they can, controlled by circumstance and driven, inevitably towards the final violent climax. San is driven by her obsession to kill Eboshi, compelled and repulsed by her attraction to Ashitaka, confused about her identity. Eboshi, in turn, carries her own obsessions – she seeks to kill the Deer God and take the forest – but she also displays compassion and empathy; she takes in prostitutes and lepers and identifies closely with them.
And poor Ashitaka, the conscience of the film (his name literally means “tomorrow?”), is pushed aside. Nausicaa asked, “Can’t we all get along,” and people listened; this wandering prince makes the same plea and gets beaten down. Nobody wants to listen, because this is opera; everything must end tragically. Despair and hope lie intertwined in its final message: no matter how difficult it is, we must live.
Princess Mononoke is a violent movie, with lots of blood and severed limbs, but doesn’t revel in it. The mood is one of sadness, of loss. The tension is ratcheted up and up (Miyazaki is a master of action cinema), and when it explodes, the results are stunning. There are crucial moments when I was shocked to my core as the climactic bullet came. One such scene is when San infiltrates the ironworks and into a death trap; Ashitaka literally walks into the middle of a knife fight between the two women. The other is when all the parties converge, in the final act, on the Deer God’s lair. The Shishigami appears, shots are fired, bodies fall.
Great moments that stay with you: the Shishigami walking through the forest at night, drawn like a Native American painting and greeted by tree spirits; peaceful transitional moments, rain falling on rocks; watching three kodama mourn a cut plant; the whole subplot involving Ashitaka’s gold dagger (cruelly cut out of Miramax's overrated American dub); the two lovers realizing that they cannot live together; the battle scenes, which are wonderfully stylized; that iconic image of San, riding against a fiery red background. Mononoke is grand opera in the fullest sense.
And another review from Anime World below:
Rating: 5 stars
"Among Miyazaki's best, and therefore one of the best, period."
Length: 133 Minutes
Production Date:
1997-07-12
Original Title: もののけ姫
Romanized: Mononoke Hime
Literal: ”Monster Princess”
Plot Synopsis
In ancient times, the forces of man and the gods of the beasts are beginning to clash over the forests and their natural resources. When young Ashitaka, the prince of an isolated village, kills a rampaging boar god, he is afflicted with a curse. In a matter of time it will kill him if he cannot find a cure. So, he travels away from his home to find the cause of the boar god's curse and hatred of humans. There he finds humans fighting not only amongst themselves, but a town of outcasts where the soil is mined for iron. The people of this town are determined to take the resources from the forest near them, but that forest is the home of the forest god, and is protected by the wolf clan. There is also one human who fights with the beasts--San, the Princess Mononoke. Ashitaka seeks only to find answers, but he soon finds himself in the middle of an epic struggle.
While anything Hayao Miyazaki puts his hand to is all but guaranteed instant anime classic status--whether deserving or not--Princess Mononoke deservedly ranks among the masterpieces of the medium, and in my opinion of cinema in general. It is a serious--yet beautiful--allegorical tale that doesn't take any easy ways out and paints a more complicated picture than movies that try many times harder than it apparently does.
Just because Princess Mononoke is a large-scale allegory doesn't mean that the story and characters are nebulous or broad; on the contrary, the feel is surprisingly earthy and the story is quite solid. The characters are equally well-developed: their motives are not superficial, and the distinction between who is good and bad, what is right and wrong, is neither clear nor simple--at times, it's not even readily discernible.
While the film superficially looks like one of those "evil mankind versus good nature" stories, it is thankfully not nearly that simple (much less so than Nausicaa or Pom Poko), and the telling of the tale is both engrossing and thought provoking. Don't sit back and expect to have the lines drawn for you, because the comforting black and white answers that make things easy are nowhere to be found--the nature-destroying "bad guys" have lives and do a lot of good things, and the forces of nature are bitter and full of very human flaws.
Writer/director Miyazaki's reputation was built on beautiful, fanciful "children's" stories, but Princess Mononoke is most decidedly not a kid's cartoon. Miyazaki's works fall relatively neatly into an age spectrum, and Princess Mononoke stands out distinctively as his most "mature" production; the themes are familiar, but there is a harder edge than even Nausicaa had, and the violence is considerably (and surprisingly) more graphic than any of his other works.
I can really only find one flaw with the film, and that's its lack of originality. Not originality in general--there are few movies like this anywhere--but originality for Miyazaki; it's immediately obvious that the basic story and theme is very similar to Nausicaa. Of course, that's not exactly a bad thing, considering how loved Nausicaa is. While it would have been interesting to see Miyazaki try some new subject matter, the very different take on an essentially similar story and characters clearly differentiates Princess Mononoke from its predecessor--the feel is more down-to-earth, the action more gritty, and the situations and characters much more complex.
Artistically, Miyazaki fans need not fear; the story may be complex, but that doesn't mean that Miyazaki's unique talent for artistic beauty is lost or even dimmed. On the contrary, this is in many ways his most beautiful movie to date. It is different from his previous works in that the locations are much less fanciful, and the startlingly graphic action is smaller-scale, but he takes the simple, realistic locales and draws an amazing amount of beauty out of them. The rendering of grassy fields, fertile valleys, and dark forests is a true work of art in and of itself, as is the almost-familiar architecture. The characters, both human and animal, are likewise exquisitely crafted and rendered. Although the character designs are no stretch for Miyazaki--their looks are mostly taken from Nausicaa (though some of their personalities are quite different)--they are as pleasing as ever, and the character animation is topnotch.
As for action, don't expect many of the sweeping chases or breathtaking flyovers of other Miyazaki films, but the action is equally striking in a more down-to-earth way. One thing you might want to pay attention to is the very effective use of open space. Due to gunfire and arrows, much of the action takes place at long ranges, and the sense of distance is impressively realistic.
At the time Princess Mononoke was produced, some hard-core anime fans were worried about the coming tide of computer-assisted animation; not so much 3D objects, but computer coloring and compositing of traditional, frame by frame animation. It seemed like the harbinger of the apocalypse when Miyazaki, master of cel animation, began using computer techniques and even 3D animation for some backgrounds. The fear turned out to be completely unfounded--the computer techniques are only noticeable in that Princess Mononoke looks as beautiful as anything. It maintains an artistic, handcrafted look while utilizing computer animation where it is most effective--with subtle moving backgrounds that can be more smoothly animated with computers. The result is barely (if ever) noticeable and quite beautiful.
Both the original Japanese version and the high-profile English dub are quite good. I think the Japanese acting and casting are somewhat better, but you won't be disappointed by all the big name actors in the dub. Billy Kudrup (Ashitaka) in particular delivers a solid performance, and most of the other characters (even minor ones) are quite good as well. I was a little wary of the very different vocal take on the wolf god--she has a rumbling, masculine voice in Japanese--but Gillian Anderson does well in the limited role. I wasn't terribly fond of San--she sounds a bit too modern--but the only performance I was really disappointed by was Billy Bob Thorton's. Not only was he a poor choice for the role and acted with too much indifference, but somehow an ancient Japanese monk with a Southern accent just doesn't seem right. In all, though, you won't go wrong with the dialogue in either language.
This was essentially the first of the great anime productions to see broad, if limited, theatrical release in America (Pokemon does not count), and there couldn't have been a better choice. I, at least, found it a little difficult to believe initially that a Miyazaki production could be serious, realistically violent, deep, thought provoking, and a visual work of art on top of it all, but Princess Mononoke is all of those things, and it is in serious contention for the position of his greatest work (I personally preferred Nausicaa by a hair). It may not be without flaw, but it's certainly close and it manages to be entertaining, mentally engaging, morally complex, and beautiful to behold in almost every way.
Much like Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
US DVD Review
Miramax is known for handling unusual material, and they did a pretty good job with the movie itself, but I was skeptical about how their eventual video release would be. Surprisingly, the DVD is a fine piece of work. On the down side, there are essentially no extras--just some trailers. On the up side, the actual movie is as good as anybody could ask for; the video is very sharp and vivid (though not quite perfect on close scrutiny), there are fine Dolby 5.1 soundtracks in both Japanese and English, an English dub transcription track, and a real, live, literal translation of the original Japanese (important, since it is somewhat different from the English script).
As an extra (and extremely pleasing surprise), if you're watching in Japanese, you get the original version; the opening features the original Japanese text overlay (with translation in the subtitles) instead of the voiceover used in the English version, the title is in Japanese, and the Japanese credits are intact (with major voice players translated in the subtitles, although they did leave out a few). Not fancy, but as far as solid productions go, this disc is near perfect in my book.
Notes and Trivia
For those wondering about the setting, the movie theoretically takes place in Japan some time during the 15th century, a feudal period before the country was unified, and the general scenery and architecture is based on fact. The story does, however, obviously take significant liberties with the reality of the time; aside from obvious fantasy, the musket-like guns used in the story probably did not exist, the creature Ashitaka rides is entirely fictional, and while Ashitaka's isolated tribe is based on an actual ethnic group, they had been wiped out or assimilated by the time the story theoretically takes place.**
Released theatrically in the US by Miramax, Princess Mononoke grossed a few million dollars in relatively limited release. At the time of its release it was the all-time highest-grossing film in Japan, a title later taken by Titanic, and again by Spirited Away after that.
Mononoke Hime was also, at the time of its production, the most expensive anime film ever made, with a budget of about 2.4 billion yen. In comparison, this is over twice as much as Akira's budget, and thanks to Japan's near-zero inflation rate, little adjustment is necessary to compare the figures.
Mononoke Hime was the first stage of Disney's deal to release Ghibli films in North America in completely uncut form (Miramax is a division of Disney, for those unfamiliar). Disney has since released more or less all of the Ghibli catalog either in theaters or direct to home video. The "absolutely uncut" stipulation in the deal was certainly a boon to Miyazaki fans--that is almost certainly the only reason all the violence in Princess Mononoke was left intact in the US release. It was apparently spurred by the treatment Nausicaa saw in a very early US release as "Warriors of the Wind," a dub-only video release that drastically edited the film, changed characters' names, and altered the plot. That movie is usually cited as the reason that Castle of Cagliostro (and some Lupin III TV episodes) was the only Miyazaki production to make it to North America until quite recently.
**additional comment by Loftus regarding musket-like guns; yes, they were introduced a little later in the 16th century, 1543 to be precise. So, depemnding on how precise the setting is considered to be, it is possible to "imagine" them being manufactured and used in Japan in second half of the 1500s.
Original Japanese Cast
Ashitaka: Matsuda Youji
San: Ishida Yuriko
Lady Eboshi: Tanaka Yuuko
Gonza: Kamijou Tsunehiko
Jiko: Kobayashi Kaoru
Old Woman: Mori Mitsuko
Toki: Shimamoto Sumi
Kouroku: Nishimura Masahiko
Wolf God: Miwa Akihiro
Okkotonushi (Boar God): Morishige Hisaya
Kaya: Ishida Yuriko
Cursed Boar: Sato Mitsuru