Here’s the problem, as Princess Mononoke sees it: in the forest, wolves are wolves, boars are boars, apes are apes. They have a nature, they have a role, and they are ruled by their tribal gods. Wolves kill prey; boars are stubborn; apes are creepy. Simple.
Then we get to people, who have no set and specific place in this world. They are neither predators nor prey. They can be anything—they can even be wolves. Since there is no special place for human beings, they make their own place. Like any animal, they extract what they require for their own needs and their own ends, but those needs and those ends are not related to anything other than themselves. Making iron from sand is not like a wolf killing its prey. The unnaturalness of the weapon so derived poisons the gods and makes them into demons.1
Human beings don’t have a god of human beings and they can’t become demons. They are always both. Unlike other animals, human beings can change their own nature. This multifacetedness is what makes them so destructive. It would be fine if human beings were simply cruel prey animals; so are wolves. Instead they are something less predictable, with priorities less easy to understand, which is great if you are a human being, and bad if you are anything else.
When Ashitaka, the hero of our film, asks why the ironworks and the forest can’t live in harmony, it’s not a stupid question, but it is the wrong question. People and the forest could live in harmony. Ashitaka knows this to be true because it’s true where he comes from. The ironworks extracts resources from the forest and does not give something back to the forest in return. It has no place in the forest’s ecosystem. It will only take until it has nothing left to take.
The mistress of the ironworks, Lady Eboshi, exemplifies the way human beings can be many things: she is a hero to her village, a thorn in the side of the emperor, and a villain to the forest. Part of the genius of Princess Mononoke is that this destructive person is also so admirable and brave. Lady Eboshi takes in lepers and she saves women from slavery. She is a singular anti-heroine who is somehow both noble and ruthless, who is willing to take big risks and accept responsibility. She’s not like Muska or the evil Count or even Kushana, her closest counterpart in Miyazaki’s previous movies. She’s not power mad in the same way. You don’t want her to lose, because if she loses, it doesn’t save the forest—it just means all those women will get sold into slavery again.2 Eboshi’s big sin, in her own terms, comes when she decides to pursue the Deer God when the ironworks are under attack. She gambles with the safety of her people here and I wonder if this is part of why she accepts her arm being bitten off with a kind of equanimity.
Ashitaka and San do not possess Eboshi’s mutability. San is single-minded: kill humans. Ashitaka, as the observer whose task is to see with “eyes unclouded,” and dying from a curse nobody can lift, does not make judgments about the sides in the conflict, which is why people keep demanding to know what side he’s on. Ashitaka clearly accomplishes something over the course of this movie—he is not just a passive onlooker—but it’s honestly hard to say what. The movie ends in a stalemate. Nobody wins. The Deer God leaves the forest, the ironworks are destroyed, and the emperor doesn’t get the head of a god to give him eternal life or whatever it was he wanted it for. Lady Eboshi finally wins her long battle against the wolves, but loses her arm. San will stay in the diminished forest because she hates human beings and Ashitaka will stay in the rebuilt ironworks and visit her.
I didn’t get this movie the first time I watched it (previously), which was probably around the time Howl’s Moving Castle came out.3 I know that “I didn’t really get this, then I did” is a recurring motif in my commentary in this newsletter, but it’s true. I often don’t get things and then I do. A certain kind of pure negative judgment is unlikely to change—sometimes you do get things right off and you hate them. But if I feel a little lost or bewildered by a piece of art, it’s usually a sign to go back to it again. Is it weird for somebody who is, to the extent such a thing exists anymore, a “professional critic,” to advertise the flexibility of my own judgements? Oh well.
In the case of Princess Mononoke, what I did not grasp is that the conflict in this movie does not involve “villains.” Like the characters, I kept demanding to know what side Ashitaka was supposed to be on, so that I would know who to like. There are bad people in this movie, and they intensify the conflict, but the central conflict of the ironworks and the forest is about survival on both sides. (It’s hard to imagine an ending to this story where everybody talks it out and decides to take on the real enemy, the emperor.)4 So the question the movie poses through this conflict, but cannot answer, is about what survival can justify. It poses this question on multiple levels, including Moro revealing to Ashitaka that the infant San was thrown in her path by fleeing humans hoping to distract her.5
And the basic pessimism here is that while there are actions we can say value survival too highly (“tossing a baby at a wolf”), it’s hard to say there should be limits on the basic will to live, and harder to place those limits, and even harder when human beings’ desires are so unfixed. Even Ashitaka’s village is a kind of special enclave. It won’t be left alone forever by other human beings. He represents a way of life that has already become impossible to imagine. Princess Mononoke is a movie that offers a lot of short-term hope but long-term despair. After all, Eboshi is going to rebuild the ironworks there at the end. Even though nobody wins this round, we are products of an industrialized world, and we know who wins eventually.
Moro rags on Ashitaka about how human beings are terrible and how he can’t save San and then turns right around and tells San “there’s a life for you with that boy.” Wolves, man.…
I did not see a standalone post on Princess Mononoke from Animation Obsessive, but here are some relevant newsletters:
I don’t really feel “done” with this movie, to be honest. This post feels more like notes toward something… well… I guess it is a notebook. Like that is the name. Of the newsletter.
After I rewatched the movie I thought of putting the dubbed version on in the background while I did some housework and shut it off before Ashitaka even got out of his village because I found it incredibly annoying. Then I found out the script was written by Neil Gaiman… my annoying detector never fails.
Next movie is My Neighbors the Yamadas, August 29.
I’m making less of an effort than I usually do to try to make this newsletter comprehensible to people who haven’t seen the movie in question, because I feel like probably one million words have been written about Princess Mononoke. At some point it just feels unnecessary to explain what the movie is about. You know that it’s an environmentalist movie. You probably know it’s a movie where a guy’s arms get shot off. There are wolves. There’s a girl raised by wolves. Etc.
It’s made very clear in the movie that Lady Eboshi’s biggest problem is not the forest gods, but the neighboring samurai who wish to take over the ironworks she’s built.
I would say in fact I watched this movie, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle with basically the same feeling that I just didn’t get what was happening or how the story was put together or even what was at stake, and that is part of why all the Miyazaki movies after Howl’s Moving Castle will be new to me.
I’m sure there are people who watch this movie thinking that the ironworks is simply “evil,” but I don’t really think the movie works very well if understood that way.
It also presents the viewer with different models of relationships between humans and animals: Ashitaka and his red deer, San and the wolves, and, in the creepiest instance, the trackers who wear the skin and the blood of the animals they kill. The trackers are almost like an evil parody of San.