WARNING: Spoilers below the fold; it’s the only way to talk about the movie in depth.
I’ve heard so much about the films of Hayao Miyazaki, but I had only seen Spirited Away prior to this one (and that was a long time ago.) Out of curiosity, I decided to watch his 1997 movie Princess Mononoke, which I remember the media speaking highly of when I was a kid. At the end of it, I came away quite impressed. Before reading anyone else’s thoughts on the movie, I decided to get my own thoughts down.
Summary
Ashitaka, the prince of a dying tribe, gets poisoned when he defends his village from a possessed boar that rots all it touches. At the advice of his elders, he rides west on his red elk to seek the spirit of the forest, who could cure him. Along the way, he reaches Irontown, an industrialized village where women hold significant power and firearms are the primary weapon. Ashitaka makes contact with the leader, Lady Eboshi, and he questions her about a bullet he found lodged in the cursed boar’s body.
However, a girl raised by wolves (the “Princess Mononoke” of the title) attacks Irontown with an intent to kill Eboshi since she and her people cut down many trees and attacked many animals to expand the village’s domain. With strength granted by the curse, Ashitaka breaks up a duel between the wolf girl and Eboshi and carries the wolf girl out of town. He then gets wrapped up in a conflict between humans and animals and ends up fighting to protect the spirit of the forest from having its head removed. The conflict ultimately destroys both Irontown and the spirit, though many of Irontown’s residents still remain.
Thoughts
I knew going in that this was not going to be some action movie where the hero rides in, beats up a villain, gets the girl, and rides out, though there is plenty of action. Ashitaka, while not a swaggering macho man, is shown to be very capable and brave, willing to risk everything to bring peace between humans and animals while at the same time getting violent if the situation demands it (as a side note, the poisoning gives Ashitaka superhuman strength when it flares up; this is the likely inspiration for Sasuke’s curse in Naruto, as well as Owain’s infamous sword hand in Fire Emblem Awakening.) He is not intimidated by the headstrong wolf princess, sticking to his ideals even in the face of her hostility. The wolf princess’s dismissal of peace is notable here because in real life, the Japanese wolf went extinct in the beginning of the 20th century due to human expansion.
But the most notable part of the movie is Lady Eboshi and her Irontown.
When she is introduced, she is very much framed as a villain — dark clothing, firearms in a world of swords, cutting down trees to get resources, etc. But when Ashitaka has his talk with Eboshi about the bullet that angered the boar, it is revealed that Eboshi is actually quite generous and fair: she gives dignity to prostitutes and lepers by letting them work in her foundry and fight as her soldiers, and she defends her people from the rampaging samurai armies with weapons far more effective than swords and bows. There’s a strong sense of “low overcoming high,” or gekokujou, said to characterize Japan’s feudal period in real life. The movie also very obviously infers modern progressive ideals by having women in particular — and former prostitutes, no less — be the bold leaders and fighters. In this way, Eboshi defies the viewer’s expectation of a nature-destroying villain by giving her significant redeeming qualities; she is no different than any other leader in that regard.
(Again — it appears as if this character inspired Princess Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Irontown inspired the Fire Nation from the same show. Only in Azula’s case, she’s far more obviously evil.)
When Eboshi takes up a plan to seize the forest spirit’s head, it is because a red-nosed monk manipulates her into doing so, since she was already at war with both the animals and the samurai. Thus it is this monk that is the true villain of the film, since he seeks the head to gain the favor of his superiors, without regard for the effect it would have on nature. Even as the forest wilts around him, he could only think of keeping the head for himself. The movie defies expectations here as well, since the monk is introduced as friendly and helpful in the beginning. It is not Eboshi with her resources and weapons that is the enemy, but a sneaky, squirrelly man full of greed who is.
As for the ending, Irontown is totally destroyed, Eboshi loses an arm, and the forest spirit is dead. What would be a heroic triumph in a movie about a more standard villain is instead a tragedy as this group of peasants and prostitutes is now completely unprotected, with a physically crippled leader and no means to make new firearms. Ashitaka opts to stay with Eboshi’s people while the wolf princess rides off, but considering Irontown’s open defiance of the samurai, it is questionable how long they would last. The only small reprieve is that the wolf princess is unlikely to attack them again since Ashitaka is with them (she had fallen for him earlier.) Though the film frames it as a happy ending due to the restoration of a lush, green landscape, it’s easy to see it as more of a tragedy in light of what I just mentioned, even though no main characters died. Irontown had simply bitten off more than it could chew.
All in all, it was an excellent, thought-provoking movie that told its story well. Definitely a recommend, since my summary and analysis don’t do it justice at all.
This was the first of Miyazaki’s films that I ever saw and I quite agree: very impressive.
I second your recommendation, but with the warning that this is not really a film for children. The death of the forest spirit in particular upset a number of my younger relatives.
Agreed — kids should watch this with a parent or older sibling. And the forest spirit’s death was quite sad, though it cost Lady Eboshi an arm.
Pingback: castaliahouse.com
Princess Mononoke is one of my all-time favorite films. I even went and saw it layer in theaters when it aired an hour away from me.
A thought:
You are right that showing women in leadership positions is shown to be “progressive”, but I submit a LOT more is going on than is meeting the eye there.
Ashitaka’s goal is to see “With eyes unclouded”. The trip to Irontown is an excellent example of that. Eboshi shows him to the town and the immediate, external signs show Eboshi as a beloved and benevolent ruler.
But this is an illusion, something only an outsider like Ashitaka realizes. There is a “wrongness” to Irontown, a sense nothing is quite right, and this has tovdo with the sexual dynamics – how the women browbeat the henpecked men, and the women are slowly given more and more personal power while the men get less. They are not even trusted with defending the city at the end.
Which is the big tell. Eboshi says to the prostitutes at one point “Remember, you can’t trust men”….a line that is particularly remarkable because at that very moment SHE is misleading THEM!
And it nearly leads to disaster. As it turns out the death of the forest spirit more or less eliminated the samurai as a threat but they could hardly have known that in advance, and it takes Ashitaka to bring the men back into town.
Lady Eboshi is almost never straightforward. She always has her own agenda, and is my favorite Miyazaki character.
But why this film in particular is my favorite Miyazaki film, and one of my favoritd films, IS the ending.
Almost nobody else but Miyazaki could have pulled off of an ending like this and NOT made it an epic tragedy. That Miyazaki pulls off this sweeping epic morality tale about overcoming hatred and the political interplay between so many different parties while not descending into George R.R. Martin style nihilism or meanspirited cynicism is nothing short of astonishing.
That a movie like “Princess Mononoke” ultimately ends up being superversive is the reason it is not just a great film, but one of the greatest films ever.
A good insight. This story could have easily gone off the rails, but Miyazaki sticks the landing with this movie. At no point does it become strident or didactic, nor does it become nihilistic.
One of the big misconceptions people have of the film is thst it is too didactic, which I believe misses the point.
Every party here, but Ashitaka, is flawed. The flaw of the wolves is that while they see more clearly than anyone else their doom they refuse to look for compromises. San becomes a tragic character because her very existence perfectly places her as a peacemaker, and the wolves instead go the opposite direction and use her essentially as a vengeance machine, putting her life on the line out of hatred.
They never even consider the possibility of talking things out, or at least trying to. Eboshi actually IS willing to listen to reason. We know this because at the end of the story she doesn’t double down but says she’s willing to work together to build a stronger future.
You might say “It took the total failure of all of her plans”, but this misses the point. The point being that if Eboshi could have been convinced that an alliance or truce was in her best personal interest, she probably would have taken it, and then the story with the samurai would have gone very differently.
Again, a great insight. There’s a lot going on in this movie.