“The Forest Spirit gives life and takes life away. Life and death are his alone.”

One of the most beautiful things about Princess Mononoke is the magnitude of the world, and it’s not merely in terms of how director Hayao Miyazaki brings his resplendent hand-drawn landscapes to life.

There’s a level of complexity to the ecosystem that knows few equals, allowing the movie to feel not just like a story but a genuine world we are being immersed in. We begin to experience a grand scope and mythology with so many familiar archetypes woven together for our benefit. Somehow, they manage to transcend any differences in culture or belief.

The Princess in the title doesn’t actually show up for some time. Instead, we meet Ashitaka. He is the protector of his village, and he faces off against a demon-possessed warthog. Immediately, I thought of Legion, a spirit Jesus allows to possess a host of pigs before running them into the gully. In that story, the villagers ask Jesus to leave because they recognize some power is at work. Ironically, there is much the same belief here, although they are far from the Judeo-Christian point of view.

It makes for gripping storytelling when you start from a place of belief and awe. Skepticism never enters the equation, and there is evil in the world just as there is good. Their local oracle pays homage to the great unknown god in a show of deference unwittingly similar to the people of Athens. She knows there are forces she does not understand acting upon the world, and she reveres them.

Ashitaka’s arm is left stricken with a curse even as he defends his town selflessly. This propels him on a journey to seek out a forest spirit in the form of a deer who might be able to bestow his life back to him.

Princess Mononoke is a feudal Miyazaki film and the closest inheritor of Akira Kurosawa’s cinema; it’s darker and bloodier than some of the Ghibli maestro’s movies for a youthful audience, and yet these attributes simply make it feel like an epic adventure in the grandest sense of the word. There is danger and blood and evil, just as there are heroes and grand acts of sacrifice.

I was recently reinvigorated reading C.S. Lewis on his thoughts on Fairy Tales and writing for children. He says:

“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”

I’ve heard Miyazaki compared with Lewis’s compatriot J.R.R. Tolkien, and the differences are so vast as to almost dismiss comment altogether. However, in the broadest strokes, I can see it with Mononoke. A mythic hero like Ashitaka or Strider who gleams with attributes almost preordained to make them heroes. There is treachery as much as supernatural impositions. The struggle between civilization vs. nature–technology allowing for a kind of perversion of the natural world, even as the beasts are prone to violence as they feel humanity encroaching on their forest home.

Tolkien represents it with orcs in their mines, building weapons of destruction. Here, there is Lady Eboshi, a regal leader who leads an outpost of ironworkers. However, far from being a tyrant, she has a degree of tenacity in defending their position and extending compassion toward a grateful troupe of freed women and the ostracized sick. Meanwhile, they’re prepared to use their flintlocks to tame the wild around them and obliterate any human enemies who descend on them.

The story is full of conflicts of interest, and every character desires something different. We are told this is how great stories are made, but Mononoke shows us what it looks like in action with compelling acuity.

The emperor desires for the lady to hunt down the aforementioned deer god, sending some of his best trackers and hunters to bring him the mythic beast’s head. Meanwhile, an unseen warlord, Asano, has been terrorizing the countryside and continues to extort the ironworks before deciding to ambush them at their most vulnerable.

These are mere human concerns. It would be drama enough, and yet Miyazaki’s story is equally concerned with the natural world and the original inhabitants of the land. There are giant wolves, warthogs, apes, and every other creature imaginable.

Ashitaka gets the opportunity to be a mediator between all sides with a kind of stoic clarity that feels almost supernatural. He comes in contact with the wolf girl San, who has turned her back on the human culture and runs with the wolves as one of their own. They both act as these borderstalkers existing between cultural spaces based on blood or allegiance. First, contentious and then drawn together by a mission bigger than either of them.

Princess Mononoke is not just a feast of images but of sound design and scoring. I noticed one dialogue scene where Ashitaka rests in a cave at night, sharing a conversation with a fellow travel companion; there’s the underscoring of Joe Hisaishi, of course, but also the faint sounds of cicadas and birds chirping. Easy to miss but hardly immaterial. It’s this layering that feels so extraordinary in its attention to the full breath of the soundscape. It mirrors the forethought in every frame of the narrative.

Miyazaki and his team have an almost inexhaustible fount of creative imagination. Consider the human toadstool-like creatures twirling and clicking in the forest depths — a cross between mechanized toy soldiers and playful apparitions. There’s the molasses-like ooze of the demonic, a startling visual manifestation of this cankerous evil familiar across the director’s oeuvre. Or the curious nightwalker, which goes from a translucent Godzilla tramping around the forest depths to a transfigured creature of great repute.

We also witness the saving power of water and a rebirth and rejuvenation scene with plants sprouting up again. There were even a few solitary moments, whether it was the deer god appearing or the growth in his wake, reminding me of some of the more delightfully psychedelic faces and foliage in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine movie. Perhaps it sounds like an almost crass comparison, but I don’t mean it to be. Because there is something so striking and singular about it; magic is in the air, and it affects us profoundly.

The wolves want to eat Ashitaka’s faithful elk Yakul in an early scene. By the end, the world has been remade, and the lion has laid down with the lamb, as it were. It feels like an immaculate portrait of new beginnings and a new creation, even as Ashitaka is reunited with his love as they vow to live on the fringes.

It’s as if Miyazaki knows a world such as this cries out for a happy ending. What makes it resonate is the height and depth of the evil and the disrepair the world was saddled with, as embodied by Ashitaka’s wound. It’s these very realities making the denouement that much more extraordinary. We crave stories with the level of gravitas and satisfaction that the likes of Tolkien and Miyazaki build. When you’re given something such as this, so many other tales pale in comparison. Because they fail to do justice to our deepest human longings — longings not dictated solely by culture, creed, or even faith. If these stories ring true, they run deeper still.

5/5 Stars