Top 25 Favourite Films: #1 Princess Mononoke (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
#1. Princess Mononoke. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, 1997
I knew two things when I started planning for this list, a couple of months ago. One, that one film had to be my #1, and that I would work back from this point, and secondly, that I had to restrict this to one film per director. For the latter, you can blame Hayao Miyazaki-for the past forty plus years, Miyazaki has, alongside Studio Ghibli, made some of the best animated-nay, some of the best films, period, of all time, from the ecological fable Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds to the steampunk action adventure, Castle in the Sky to the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and the Oscar-nominated Howl's Moving Castle. Miyazaki is, simply, the director who turned, at least in the western imagination, anime into an artform-his films are shot-through with everything from anti-war sentiments to strongly ecological messages to an almost uniformly feminist set of messages, not to mention a beautiful set of visuals and memorable characters to match.
Atop all of these is his unquestionable masterpiece; released in 1997, Princess Mononoke, in which a cursed prince travels to the west in search of a cure, and stumbles into the middle of a conflict between gods and men, the film is Miyazaki at his best, nimbly juggling every one of his recurrent themes on an epic scale, whilst dealing with questions of fate and death in the film's two central characters, Ashitaka (Yōji Matsuda/Billy Cruddup), a prince cursed to a terrible fate by killing a demonic boar, and San, the titular Princess Mononoke (Yuriko Ishida/Claire Danes), a young woman raised by wolves to hate humans, who eventually crosses paths with Ashitaka. Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki's masterpiece, a sweepingly epic narrative that, simply, is Japan's master-artist at work on the largest canvas possible.
So why this film? For that, we have to go back a decade or so. It's 2007, and Film4, a film-dedicated channel belonging to broadcaster Channel 4 has just arrived on free-to-air platform Freeview. To celebrate, they decide to show a season of works by Studio Ghibli. By now, the trailer is gone, consigned no doubt to some digital vault in the bowels of Channel 4, but by chance, one Spring evening, I am suddenly transported by forty seconds of animation, a veritable rabbit hole opening up beneath me and dropping me into the world of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli. No names, no titles. Just animation. Two shots I remember crystal clear-a foot, in various colours and shades of green coming down into frame, ripples running out from it, and a face, surrounded and encircled by tendrills. I was hooked.
Finding this mysterious Studio Ghibli, however, was a far from simple matter-you have to remember, this is a period in which the Internet was still in its Web 1.0 era, streaming was but a blink in the eye of some marketing executive, and Netflix still sent DVDs in the post. Fortunately, the local library had several films by the studio, (released, as they still are here in the UK by Optimum), and among them was, simply, the coolest looking poster art in history-a girl, bloody-faced, carrying a knife and a mask, behind which a colossal wolf towers-I was, I should add, going through a phase of liking wolves at the point, so this seemed an added bonus. Almost by chance, I'd picked the film that these two memorable shots had come from. Almost by chance, I now held the film that arguably changed my visual, artistic and story-telling viewpoint more than any other piece of work, set me on the path of a comic book artist and writer, and the film that made me an eternal fan of Japanese animation, culture and history.
Princess Mononoke is a film about living, and learning to live with yourself. Ashitaka is cursed by the demon boar, Nago, and leaves his people to find a cure and, in his own words, to "see with eyes unclouded by hate". This takes him across Japan, to Irontown, run by Lady Eboshi (Yūko Tanaka/Minnie Driver), a town essentially populated by Eboshi's soldiers, freed prostitutes and lepers, acting as a base for Eboshi's inroads into the forest in search of iron to produce firearms to defend the town. Against them is pitted the forest and its creatures, most notably the wolf-god, Moro (Akihiro Miwa/a scene-stealing Gillan Anderson) and her children, including the adopted San, together with the boar-god Okkoto (Hisaya Morishige/Keith David), and his forces.
Despite his impending mortality, with the curse slowly spreading across Ashitaka's body, and granting him unnatural powers, he attempts to play peace-keeper between the two sides, in a film that arguably has no true villains, simply two groups whose short-sightedness, and quick turn to violence to solve their problems weakens them. We unquestionably see both sides-Moro is quick to highlight the evil and destructive elements of the humans that take the forest for granted, but glosses over how their daughter is essentially a weapon to use against the humans, whilst Eboshi, their unquestionable mirror as a strong leader, may well protect her village and look after the most marginalised in society, but uses her power to produce weapons of death and destruction, and destroys the fragile calm of the forest with her greed, culminating in the death of the Forest Spirit, and a nightmarish headless beast of destruction unleashed.
The scenes in Irontown, in particular, are a microcosm of the three themes of the film-Eboshi and San are every inch the strong and powerful women we've come to expect from Miyazaki's work; a refraction, by a smarter, and one may argue more jaded Miyazaki, of the protagonist and villianess of Nausicaa, of the pragmatic warrior and the nature loving princess set against her, but more complex, more nuanced. San, undeniably, represents the traditional, Eboshi the modern, but there is a care to show both sides carefully-San is violent, even towards Ashitaka who promptly saves her at the end of this part of the film, and almost zealous in her hatred towards humans, rejecting her own humanity until the end of the film. Eboshi may be a modernist, the arquebus, as in Kurosawa's Ran representing the oncoming mechanisation of war, and the end of the samurai age, but Ashitaka respects her, and her intent is undeniably that of a good, if misguided woman; San and Eboshi's clash is not just that of two opposing forces, but two opposing, and equally valid idelogies.
Indeed, they represent the warriors of the natural, and the man-made-the portrayal of the forest turns it into a character of its own, with the Forest Spirit, only seen a couple of times in the film, an undeniably beautiful piece of character design, a benevolent if otherworldly creature, together with the tree-spirits, the head-clicking kodama, whilst the very way that Ghibli represent nature, in lush, verdant greens and deep washes of colour, is genuinely some of the best artwork they have ever created, at once forbidding and welcoming. Irontown and the stripped area around it is, in comparison, almost shocking, a mix of sludgy browns and greys, the contrast stark, with this colourscheme returning whenever the work of man corrupts the natural in the form of Okkoto and the Forest Spirit-a sickening mix of muddy tones and viseral bloody red. If Miyazaki is even-handed when it comes to the characters, when he comes to their settings, he is absolutely, as he was in Nausicaa, as he is throughout his body of work, on the side of the unspoilt environment, without the influence of man.
And if there is one villain in Mononoke, it is war and conflict, whilst he portrays absolutely unflinchingly-at the very end of the Irontown section, Ashitaka is shot through the chest as he carries the prone San away, in such a matter-of-fact way that it's genuinely searing, blood dripping after him and pooling as he pushes open the gate and leaves. Throughout Mononoke, as he is nowhere else in his forty-year career, Miyazaki portrays violence, from decapitations to an impressively dark visual of a body-strewn battlefield to arms being bitten, shot and blown off, in a style that brings himself close to Kurosawa's depiction of battles and the samurai period. There is, certainly, the start of the depiction of war that would catalyse best in Howl's Moving Castle's more overtly anti-war (in this case, against the invasion of Iraq), best seen in the harrowing scene after the film's largest setpiece battle, in which a shellshocked survivor struggles to recount to Ashitaka what exactly happened.
The architect of this battle, and indeed the war on the forest as a whole, Jigo (Kaoru Kobayashi/Billy Bob Thornton), is a mercenary monk, and the closest the film ever gets to a true villain. Even so, he's a likable pragmatist who seems sympathetic to Ashitaka's curse, whilst being undeniably the empitome of militarization, this sense of conflict as a driver to the destruction of nature, at the behest of a distant and paranoid emperor, scared of death. At the centre of Mononoke is the idea of life and death, of living in a cursed world, and Ashitaka symbolises this perfectly-his curse can be seen as a metaphor of anything from AIDS to cancer, and his attempts to live on with this curse, to travel through the world and to seek a cure, or indeed, peace within himself almost divorces him from Jigo's conflict, through which he passes, from side to side, without hindrance.
Against this story, we see Miyazaki at his most artistic, and most forward-looking-Mononoke was one of the first times CGI was used on a theatrical animated feature in Japan, whilst the animation itself is Miyazaki at his best-his characters bold, and perfectly designed, Ghibli's backgrounds never-better in their scale and ambition. Together with Joe Hisaishi's score, which pulls on everything from the great Gustav Mahler to tribal percussion for influence, it is Ghibli at their most sweeping-the scale of the story almost threatening to burst out of the screen itself to match the grandeur and scale of the animation and the battles, but not afraid to highlight the intimate, the personal, as only Miyazaki can.
Princess Mononoke is a film about mortality, and living at the end of the 20th century, in an industrial world that crowds out nature, where war and violence are rife, and where good people die of illnesses out of our control. As one character puts it,
“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still you find reasons to keep living.”
Films like Princess Mononoke, films like every single film on this list, are reasons to keep living. There are few films like it in cinema, a beautifully made cry against the mass-produced, against the ever-encroaching rule of the multiplex, of the profitable above the artistic, a singular vision from a film-maker that breathes life into unforgettable films, with memorable characters and perfectly wrought stories. A lot of these films on this list are memorable, or contain characters i adore or emulated at some point. Princess Mononoke-only Princess Mononoke changed my life. I can give no film a higher plaudit than the impact that it left on me as a person, and continues to do as an artist and creator.
There is no film like it, nothing that captures both Ghibli and Miyazaki at their finest, no other work that captures the nuance of our world at the end of the second millenium, in its tale of 16th century Japan. No other film captures that message, of living for reasons to keep living, of grasping on to the tiny moments of happiness and hope that make up our lives, better than it. It is the film that made me who I am today.
I knew two things when I started planning for this list, a couple of months ago. One, that one film had to be my #1, and that I would work back from this point, and secondly, that I had to restrict this to one film per director. For the latter, you can blame Hayao Miyazaki-for the past forty plus years, Miyazaki has, alongside Studio Ghibli, made some of the best animated-nay, some of the best films, period, of all time, from the ecological fable Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds to the steampunk action adventure, Castle in the Sky to the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and the Oscar-nominated Howl's Moving Castle. Miyazaki is, simply, the director who turned, at least in the western imagination, anime into an artform-his films are shot-through with everything from anti-war sentiments to strongly ecological messages to an almost uniformly feminist set of messages, not to mention a beautiful set of visuals and memorable characters to match.
Atop all of these is his unquestionable masterpiece; released in 1997, Princess Mononoke, in which a cursed prince travels to the west in search of a cure, and stumbles into the middle of a conflict between gods and men, the film is Miyazaki at his best, nimbly juggling every one of his recurrent themes on an epic scale, whilst dealing with questions of fate and death in the film's two central characters, Ashitaka (Yōji Matsuda/Billy Cruddup), a prince cursed to a terrible fate by killing a demonic boar, and San, the titular Princess Mononoke (Yuriko Ishida/Claire Danes), a young woman raised by wolves to hate humans, who eventually crosses paths with Ashitaka. Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki's masterpiece, a sweepingly epic narrative that, simply, is Japan's master-artist at work on the largest canvas possible.
So why this film? For that, we have to go back a decade or so. It's 2007, and Film4, a film-dedicated channel belonging to broadcaster Channel 4 has just arrived on free-to-air platform Freeview. To celebrate, they decide to show a season of works by Studio Ghibli. By now, the trailer is gone, consigned no doubt to some digital vault in the bowels of Channel 4, but by chance, one Spring evening, I am suddenly transported by forty seconds of animation, a veritable rabbit hole opening up beneath me and dropping me into the world of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli. No names, no titles. Just animation. Two shots I remember crystal clear-a foot, in various colours and shades of green coming down into frame, ripples running out from it, and a face, surrounded and encircled by tendrills. I was hooked.
Finding this mysterious Studio Ghibli, however, was a far from simple matter-you have to remember, this is a period in which the Internet was still in its Web 1.0 era, streaming was but a blink in the eye of some marketing executive, and Netflix still sent DVDs in the post. Fortunately, the local library had several films by the studio, (released, as they still are here in the UK by Optimum), and among them was, simply, the coolest looking poster art in history-a girl, bloody-faced, carrying a knife and a mask, behind which a colossal wolf towers-I was, I should add, going through a phase of liking wolves at the point, so this seemed an added bonus. Almost by chance, I'd picked the film that these two memorable shots had come from. Almost by chance, I now held the film that arguably changed my visual, artistic and story-telling viewpoint more than any other piece of work, set me on the path of a comic book artist and writer, and the film that made me an eternal fan of Japanese animation, culture and history.
Princess Mononoke is a film about living, and learning to live with yourself. Ashitaka is cursed by the demon boar, Nago, and leaves his people to find a cure and, in his own words, to "see with eyes unclouded by hate". This takes him across Japan, to Irontown, run by Lady Eboshi (Yūko Tanaka/Minnie Driver), a town essentially populated by Eboshi's soldiers, freed prostitutes and lepers, acting as a base for Eboshi's inroads into the forest in search of iron to produce firearms to defend the town. Against them is pitted the forest and its creatures, most notably the wolf-god, Moro (Akihiro Miwa/a scene-stealing Gillan Anderson) and her children, including the adopted San, together with the boar-god Okkoto (Hisaya Morishige/Keith David), and his forces.
Despite his impending mortality, with the curse slowly spreading across Ashitaka's body, and granting him unnatural powers, he attempts to play peace-keeper between the two sides, in a film that arguably has no true villains, simply two groups whose short-sightedness, and quick turn to violence to solve their problems weakens them. We unquestionably see both sides-Moro is quick to highlight the evil and destructive elements of the humans that take the forest for granted, but glosses over how their daughter is essentially a weapon to use against the humans, whilst Eboshi, their unquestionable mirror as a strong leader, may well protect her village and look after the most marginalised in society, but uses her power to produce weapons of death and destruction, and destroys the fragile calm of the forest with her greed, culminating in the death of the Forest Spirit, and a nightmarish headless beast of destruction unleashed.
The scenes in Irontown, in particular, are a microcosm of the three themes of the film-Eboshi and San are every inch the strong and powerful women we've come to expect from Miyazaki's work; a refraction, by a smarter, and one may argue more jaded Miyazaki, of the protagonist and villianess of Nausicaa, of the pragmatic warrior and the nature loving princess set against her, but more complex, more nuanced. San, undeniably, represents the traditional, Eboshi the modern, but there is a care to show both sides carefully-San is violent, even towards Ashitaka who promptly saves her at the end of this part of the film, and almost zealous in her hatred towards humans, rejecting her own humanity until the end of the film. Eboshi may be a modernist, the arquebus, as in Kurosawa's Ran representing the oncoming mechanisation of war, and the end of the samurai age, but Ashitaka respects her, and her intent is undeniably that of a good, if misguided woman; San and Eboshi's clash is not just that of two opposing forces, but two opposing, and equally valid idelogies.
Indeed, they represent the warriors of the natural, and the man-made-the portrayal of the forest turns it into a character of its own, with the Forest Spirit, only seen a couple of times in the film, an undeniably beautiful piece of character design, a benevolent if otherworldly creature, together with the tree-spirits, the head-clicking kodama, whilst the very way that Ghibli represent nature, in lush, verdant greens and deep washes of colour, is genuinely some of the best artwork they have ever created, at once forbidding and welcoming. Irontown and the stripped area around it is, in comparison, almost shocking, a mix of sludgy browns and greys, the contrast stark, with this colourscheme returning whenever the work of man corrupts the natural in the form of Okkoto and the Forest Spirit-a sickening mix of muddy tones and viseral bloody red. If Miyazaki is even-handed when it comes to the characters, when he comes to their settings, he is absolutely, as he was in Nausicaa, as he is throughout his body of work, on the side of the unspoilt environment, without the influence of man.
And if there is one villain in Mononoke, it is war and conflict, whilst he portrays absolutely unflinchingly-at the very end of the Irontown section, Ashitaka is shot through the chest as he carries the prone San away, in such a matter-of-fact way that it's genuinely searing, blood dripping after him and pooling as he pushes open the gate and leaves. Throughout Mononoke, as he is nowhere else in his forty-year career, Miyazaki portrays violence, from decapitations to an impressively dark visual of a body-strewn battlefield to arms being bitten, shot and blown off, in a style that brings himself close to Kurosawa's depiction of battles and the samurai period. There is, certainly, the start of the depiction of war that would catalyse best in Howl's Moving Castle's more overtly anti-war (in this case, against the invasion of Iraq), best seen in the harrowing scene after the film's largest setpiece battle, in which a shellshocked survivor struggles to recount to Ashitaka what exactly happened.
The architect of this battle, and indeed the war on the forest as a whole, Jigo (Kaoru Kobayashi/Billy Bob Thornton), is a mercenary monk, and the closest the film ever gets to a true villain. Even so, he's a likable pragmatist who seems sympathetic to Ashitaka's curse, whilst being undeniably the empitome of militarization, this sense of conflict as a driver to the destruction of nature, at the behest of a distant and paranoid emperor, scared of death. At the centre of Mononoke is the idea of life and death, of living in a cursed world, and Ashitaka symbolises this perfectly-his curse can be seen as a metaphor of anything from AIDS to cancer, and his attempts to live on with this curse, to travel through the world and to seek a cure, or indeed, peace within himself almost divorces him from Jigo's conflict, through which he passes, from side to side, without hindrance.
Against this story, we see Miyazaki at his most artistic, and most forward-looking-Mononoke was one of the first times CGI was used on a theatrical animated feature in Japan, whilst the animation itself is Miyazaki at his best-his characters bold, and perfectly designed, Ghibli's backgrounds never-better in their scale and ambition. Together with Joe Hisaishi's score, which pulls on everything from the great Gustav Mahler to tribal percussion for influence, it is Ghibli at their most sweeping-the scale of the story almost threatening to burst out of the screen itself to match the grandeur and scale of the animation and the battles, but not afraid to highlight the intimate, the personal, as only Miyazaki can.
Princess Mononoke is a film about mortality, and living at the end of the 20th century, in an industrial world that crowds out nature, where war and violence are rife, and where good people die of illnesses out of our control. As one character puts it,
“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still you find reasons to keep living.”
Films like Princess Mononoke, films like every single film on this list, are reasons to keep living. There are few films like it in cinema, a beautifully made cry against the mass-produced, against the ever-encroaching rule of the multiplex, of the profitable above the artistic, a singular vision from a film-maker that breathes life into unforgettable films, with memorable characters and perfectly wrought stories. A lot of these films on this list are memorable, or contain characters i adore or emulated at some point. Princess Mononoke-only Princess Mononoke changed my life. I can give no film a higher plaudit than the impact that it left on me as a person, and continues to do as an artist and creator.
There is no film like it, nothing that captures both Ghibli and Miyazaki at their finest, no other work that captures the nuance of our world at the end of the second millenium, in its tale of 16th century Japan. No other film captures that message, of living for reasons to keep living, of grasping on to the tiny moments of happiness and hope that make up our lives, better than it. It is the film that made me who I am today.
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