Movie 666

Princess Mononoke finally arrived in the United States with the promise that her ink and paint action and epic-length story would transcend not only your average animated movie, but your average live action feature. This coupled with progressive notions of man and nature, Mononoke is not your average toon.

Furthermore, the Princess is an adult, not a child. Forget about the bubbles and smooth curves of Pocahantas, Mononoke is jagged and sharp — Japanese anime from animator Hayao Miyazaki, a pioneer of the genre.

Mononoke is also a bit old fashioned. Miyazaki had most of the film produced using traditional animation techniques, limiting the use of digital technology and relying on the classic appeal of hand drawn images.

But Princess Mononoke only partially lives up to her promise. Her appearance is spectacular, to be sure, with fascinating looking characters and animation that is remarkably fluid and dynamic compared to the static electricity of some other anime (the forest is particularly remarkable, with its deep green flora, sparkling rivers, ghostly spirits, and vicious tribal hogs). However, her story is strangely tangled and her lofty themes of man and nature a confusing mess. Environmentally speaking, Princess Mononoke is victim of the cliched simplicity of compromise that haunts environmental debates in general.

Princess Mononoke lives in a world of conflicting values, where humans are pitted against the forest in a battle for survival. Humans must clear the forest in order to get at the precious iron beneath the soil. Forest creatures, on the other hand, must kill humans in order to protect the forest. The Princess herself is caught between the two worlds, as both a human raised by wolves and a young girl who yearns for human companionship.

Enter Ashitaka, a wandering warrior with a fatal curse that will soon turn him into a demon. He journeys to the forest looking for answers to his dilemma and observes the conflict between forest creatures and humans with an outsider’s neutral perspective. Ashitaka takes turns siding with humans and forest creatures, trying to mediate relations between the warring parties. He soothes the tormented soul of Mononoke, helping her come to terms with her human identity (namely, her need for other humans), and he helps the hardworking proles of Iron City to realize their basic dependency on the life of the forest.

Eventually, the true villains of the film are revealed not as the warlike Mononoke or the calloused workers of Iron City, but a money-grubbing cadre seeking the head of the Forest Spirit. This group of self-serving, mercenary, semi-corporate villains procedes to gun down the Spirit (a remarkably drawn stag), lock his severed head in a box, and unleash a torrent of acid sludge that destroys both forest and city alike.

Ultimately, the head of the stag is replaced and the forest grows anew. The villains of the film seem to realize (or do they?) that they went a little too far with their last financial venture and guffaw into the sunset.

For an adult film with its fair share of arrow piercings and decapitations, Mononoke offers little in the way of justice. One cannot help but wonder if the original fairy tale on which the movie was based ended in such delicate terms. Furthermore, while the human characters wander away to build new cities, raise new armies, and tinker with the idea of sustainable growth, the majority of forest creatures are stacked in bloody piles, including the majestic war pigs. The age of large predators is truly over.

Mononoke is spectacular to watch, but in terms of her themes of man and nature, she errs with her message of compromise.

“Compromise” as a concept generally assumes “two sides” to an issue as well as assumes that these two sides can join in some middle ground of agreement. Oftentimes, however, there are many aspects of an issue and the sides rarely have equal weight. The notion of “split opinion”, furthermore, is more of a media trope than an actual real-world condition. Duality of opinion — two-sidedness — is convenient for brief segments on television news (assuming environmental issues even make an appearance), but rarely reflects the complexity of the issues, the participants, or the philosophies involved.

In the environmental arena, the effects of “compromise” have already resulted in a great unbalance that favors polluters and developers over natural systems. The collective result of compromise is the fact that much of the planet has already been developed, exploited, and trashed. Currently, environmentalists are adding up the results of compromise and wondering what happened to “their half” of the deal.

Perhaps instead of dividing one half of a forest for development and one half for preservation, and calling it equal — which might be the philosophy of Princess Mononoke, extracted from the movie and put into practice — why not restore half of the existing cities to forests, half of the current beaches to rugged seacoast, and half of the existing dams to wild running rivers?

Now this would make a remarkable animated movie. But how do you bring war pigs back from the dead?

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3. SUV Smashes Subcompact then Tips Over Killing Mom and Thirteen Children: Final Thoughts on Cronenberg’s Crash
4. Canooing the Matrix
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