Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
Do not be fooled. Yes, this is a full-length animated film. But if you bring the kids, they better be made of strong stuff. This is one of the best and most powerful movies I've seen in a long time. But a Walt Disney production this ain't.
The Princess Mononoke comes out of Japan and out of anime, a genre I have to say I know little about, having gone through much of my life convinced that it has little to offer besides a lot of chipmunk-voiced, anti-grav-breasted Barbie doll women with invisible noses and eyes the size of soup plates. It is true that the three main characters here do suffer somewhat from Anime Face, but otherwise the animation is nuanced, compelling, and often strikingly beautiful. Most important, the animation makes you believe. Specifically, it makes you believe that this landscape is in fact inhabited by gods and spirits, that these gods and spirits are absolutely necessary to the health, beauty and life of this universe, and that if they are destroyed, very bad things will happen.
For instance, in the film's opening sequence, the protagonist--a young lad named Prince Ashitaka who lives with the rest of his tribe in a remote village--saves his village from a rampaging demon by shooting it through the eyeball. Take the hunters who shoot Bambi and line 'em up next to Cruella DeVille, Ursula the Sea Witch, the wicked Queens from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and that pack of ravenous wolves who almost kill Beauty and the Beast, and you still are not getting close to the amount of scare this monster is packing. It's huge, it's ugly, it's fast, and it's clearly dripping evil from every oozing purulent pore of its fetid and corrupted body as it withers grass and scorches the earth in the wake of its headless and 35-legged form. Your head may be telling you it's just a cartoon, but your gut knows that if Ashitaka doesn't kill this horrible thing we're all going straight to hell in a handbasket. And that's why the film works, and that's why very young or very sensitive children are probably better off at 101 Dalmations. Otherwise, as soon as the dying demon shouts, "Soon you will all feel my rage and perish consumed by my hatred!" or words to that effect, you'll be dragging them to the ladies' room for a change of underwear.
Ashitaka does kill the demon, who turns out to be a boar god gone bad. Unfortunately, the demon leaves him with a poisoned wound in his arm. Told by the wise woman that his only chance for survival is to lift the demon's curse, he travels west, whence the demon came, and finds out what started all this trouble. The problem is that the great forest--which is inhabited by the Good Spirit of the Forest and guarded by gods who take the form of enormous wild animals--is being cut down in order to make more room and more money for Irontown, a giant iron and armaments factory owned and operated by the amoral but fearless Lady Iboshi. The forest gods are, naturally, defending their territory, with the help of the eponymous Princess Mononoke. Actually, the Princess Mononoke is hardly ever called that; usually she's referred to either as San or as "the wolf girl." This is because she was raised by wolves and therefore identifies with the animals/gods and against the humans. Ashitaka becomes embroiled in the struggle between man (or in this case, woman) and nature, and is faced with the challenge of trying to somehow resolve the conflict so that neither side is destroyed.
I know that plot sounds like the recipe for a seriously boring and didactic film that would only get shown as evening entertainment on a Greenpeace cruise. But this is the thing about the animation. This movie really makes you believe not only that these forest spirits exist but that they are beautiful and good and that their loss, or their perversion into demons, will be an irreparable tragedy; and that makes what might otherwise be a really annoying "message" into an absolutely engaging and engrossing conflict. And when I say "beautiful and good" I'm not, again, talking about the Disney version of same. The Good Spirit of the Forest is not a big pixie in green felt shoes; it's an appropriately alien, remote, mysterious creature who always appears in absolute silence and whose movements and motives are both compelling and inscrutable. The animal gods, who are slightly more anthropomorphized because they do speak, are still animals and the fact that they have right on their side does not overwrite their animal nature. The wolf god Moro, for instance, is still a wolf even if she is a tender and nurturing mother to San, and she and her cubs often have to be restrained from, for instance, killing and eating Ashitaka's pet elk Yakul. (She is also voiced by Gillian Anderson in a very un-Scullylike growl. It says something that neither of us recognized her voice until we saw the credits.) The little forest spirits who appear and disappear at various points and whose lives are indicative fo the health of the forest are both cute and at the same time disturbing. And all of these entities are liable, if pushed too far, to turn into demons who wreak havoc with an indiscrimination that is seriously politically incorrect.
The three main human characters--Ashitaka, the princess, and Lady Iboshi--are not perhaps perfectly three-dimensional, and yet at the same time they are far less flat than most Disney characters. One thing this film really has going for it is a willingness to embrace moral ambiguity. For instance, Lady Iboshi is clearly ruthless, power-hungry, and completely impious as regards the forest and its inhabitants, and is therefore responsible for much of the evil Ashitaka is fighting. However, she has also rescued large numbers of women from the local brothels (as well as a bunch of lepers who are kept on as her special weapons design team) and given them better lives, earning in return their loyalty and to some extent Ashitaka's. On the other hand the princess, while admirable and brave in her fight against Irontown, also betrays an intense hatred for humanity that prevents us from identifying too closely with her. Ashitaka, it is true, is a much more run-of-the-mill hero, being as he is a paragon of all the virtues the writers could think up; and there is one human character who is pretty much irredeemably evil.
But I'll forgive them for the oh-so-straight Ashitaka, and even for lines of dialogue like "I'm leaving, and I'm taking the wolf girl with me!"--yes, I'll even forgive them for that horrible cheesy song that somehow got made into the romance motif for him and the princess--because of the female lead. The Princess Mononoke has, as I said, that anime face; but her body is proportioned like that of a normal human and she is convincingly, and indeed somewhat frighteningly, feral. The first time Ashitaka gets a good look at her, the Princess is tending to her wolf-mother Moro's bullet wound. She is doing this by sucking the poisoned blood out of the wound and then spitting it out through her teeth in a graceful arc, smearing her entire face with wolf blood in the process. You ain't gonna see Pocahontas do that no matter how many sequels they make.
All in all, it adds up to a visceral experience that is unlike anything else I've seen. I found myself much more emotionally involved in this film than in many another that was meant to be more sophisticated. The range of vocal talent they've gathered is impressive--Minnie Driver as Lady Iboshi, Billy Bob Thornton as the monk Gigo, Gillian Andersona s Moro the Wolf Goddess--but the actors never overwhelm the animation. If it's still around, go and see it before it disappears, and if it's already gone, then find a video store you can rent it from.
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