Mononoke-hime / Princess Mononoke

July 17th, 2009

I saw it again last week after many-many years and I have got to say, it was better than I remembered. And I remembered it as something very good.

Although the whole man vs nature polemic seems to be on repeat, you can’t really say anything bad about this movie. It was made twelve years ago so it is OK in my book.

The man vs nature theme here is so much more interesting than all the other black and white versions of the problem. In Mononoke-hime there are no good guys or bad guys. The characters on both sides are both good and bad. To be able to make the distinction is great, and whether you’re watching Princess Mononoke or just throwing on a bit of Gundam Wing in the background as you play some foxy bingo, it’s the sign of a good story when the morals of characters are so easily identifiable.

The woman making guns and taking down the forest is your typical bad guy and at first you think that you should hate her. And then it turns out her village is filled with girls from brothels and lepers who are dead to the rest of the society. She has taken all of these people in and given them a job and they are very grateful for it.

And nature with your wolf gods and boar gods, your typical ‘good guys’, is motivated only by hate and rage. And by acting out only on these emotions the gods get caught in it. A vicious circle is inevitable: rage causes more rage.

The protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, is in the middle of this ongoing war. He does not take sides. He tries to balance these two forces, man and nature, tries to show them both a better world. He is there to show that man and nature are not supposed to be natural enemies.

So although the basic theme of this animation is too familiar, this is the one movie that gets it right in my opinion. This problem is not black and white. Otherwise there would not be a problem.

Entry Filed under: TV/Film