Now, there’s a reason that I’ve finally brought all this up, because Princess Mononoke was the last film produced this way. It was completed when Miyazaki was 56 years old: not a decrepit old fool but neither a spring chicken with something to prove. At any rate, he was old enough that he didn’t want to indulge in that kind of draining, labor-intensive filmmaking any more, and he indeed announced that he’d be retiring from features altogether after Princess Mononoke came out. This didn’t happen, of course, but he has not since then involved himself so deeply in any project. Indeed, he first intimated that he’d retire from features altogether, a threat he repeated after his next two pictures as well.
So: Princess Mononoke, the last all-Miyazaki Miyazaki film, in a sense. And what a confoundingly uncharacteristic film at that. If I were to summarise all of the previous subjects we’ve seen in this retrospective, one of the key things that would surely crop up would be the director’s commitment to a sort of innocence. Even at their most adult (the political undercurrent in Porco Rosso, the post-apocalyptic warfare in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), his films still have enough amazement in them, and enough delight at the worlds they’ve created, that even the ones that aren’t clearly “children’s” films are still at heart the kind of fable that is family-friendly, if not family-geared. And does this thread continue on in Princess Mononoke?
When Princess Mononoke opened in the United States in 1999, it became the first anime for a whole lot of us Americans; anecdotally, I might be inclined to call it the greatest anime gateway drug of all time. But without being readily compared to Miyazaki’s earlier films – which most of us had barely heard of, and never seen – it’s not so jaw-droppingly obvious that this is a damn dark movie, darker by far than anything he’d previously done. And I don’t just mean that it’s violent.
Before I get to the story, let me bitch about the English-language title a moment; technically, Princess Mononoke is a very literal translation of もののけ姫 (Mononoke-hime), though it has the deeply unfortunate implication that there is in the film a princess named Mononoke, and the translated script, both in the dub and the subtitles, don’t exactly contradict this. But if I am not mistaken – any help from Japanese speakers would be outstanding – the sense of the title is closer to “Princess of the Mononoke”, where mononoke is a Shinto concept that we don’t really have in English, but I gather it’s something close to “nature spirits”. I can certainly appreciate why Princess of the Nature Spirits isn’t marketable – I still find it irritating.
In approximately the late 15th or early 16th Century on the island of Honshū, one of the last villages of the dwindling Emishi people is attacked by a demon: a boar god that has been overrun by some kind of worm. The Emishi prince Ashitaka (Matsuda Yôji) is able to repel the demon, but in the process the worm-substance attaches itself to his arm, infecting him; the village elders agree that he shall assuredly die unless he can find a cure in the west, whence the creature came. He journeys on his red elk Yakul, meeting a nomadic monk called Jiko (Kobayashi Kaoru), who tells him of a forest god nearby who may be able to help. Ashitaka is eager to find this god, but when he arrives in the region, things are all in disarray: the forest is besieged by the residents of Iron Town, an important smelting community led by Lady Eboshi (Tanaka Yûko). The forest will not take the humans’ aggression quietly though, and its chief defender is a wolf god named Moro (Miwa Akihiro), and her human daughter San (Ishida Yuriko), locally known as mononoke-hime. Ashitaka’s loyalty is torn between the Iron Town humans whose fragility in the wild moves him, and the forest, which he recognises as a primeval force greater by far than the simple imperial need for firearms. Thus is the stage set for a horrible battle between the forces of industry and nature, that will surely result in grave casualties on both sides.
This much is true: we’re squarely in Miyazaki Country thematically. This is, indeed, a somewhat pushy message picture when you get right down to it, and the message is one that the director had been referencing ever since Future Boy Conan, 19 years earlier: the environmental cost of technological advance is dire, and probably not worth paying, but nor can you just flip a switch and stop technology. You could fairly argue that Princess Mononoke is a bit didactic about this, but at the same time, Miyazaki is far too great a storyteller and entertainer to channel his inner Bertolt Brecht. The film is also a rich – appallingly rich! – fantasy adventure, though the fantasy elements are somewhat subdued by the fact that it’s also an historical epic (at 134 minutes, it’s comfortably his longest film), taking place in a mythic past where the line between history and folklore starts to blur, and what we might call “magic” in Western film is really more the animist traditions of Shinto belief, freed by the distance of history to be an active part of the everyday world. Not that I want to commit the sin of suggesting that all Japanese filmmakers are equals, but it calls to mind more than anything the jidaigeki (period films) of Kurosawa Akira, especially the ones where the paranormal is given free reign, like Throne of Blood; or maybe I’m just being unduly influenced by how much Princess Mononoke quotes visually from Kurosawa’s depictions of historical warfare.
I cannot lie, though: the humanism in Princess Mononoke is strained to me, perhaps even forced, something never before seen in a Miyazaki film. I think that if it weren’t so unbearably luscious, I might have a difficult time liking it much at all: the very grim seriousness of the message, and the director’s earnest use of epic film tropes, tend to leave the movie rather too grand for the simple personal narrative that has always been the heart and soul of his work. To put it another way, there is a personal narrative, but Miyazaki is doing everything he can to subvert it, with his scope and his nightmare-fuel imagery.