September
6, 2004
There’s
a great opening scene in Princess Mononoke, where a quiet,
pastoral village is beset by a thunderous, crazed, giant boar. The
creature is covered with a thick skin of blackened tentacles that
snarl and snake with wild abandon, and it becomes more than a second
skin. It’s monstrous and foreboding, like something Ray Harryhausen
would cook up if he had a bad trip while watching The Beatles’
Yellow Submarine.
Ashitaka,
the young chieftain of the village, launches into pursuit, and we’re
hurled into a chase sequence. It’s thrilling to watch, and
the camera swoops and dives right in the action. There’s an
almost desperate momentum at play, as this enormous, mutated thing
stampedes on, while the boy vainly tries to calm it down. He is
reluctantly forced to bring the creature down with two well-placed
arrows, but not before one of the black tentacles latches onto his
arm; Ashitaka saved his people but is left burned, scarred.
For
those of us in the West, this was our first introduction to Japanese
filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, and we were instantly hooked. Back home,
Japanese audiences who loved his work would flock to theatres, break
all box-office records and make Mononoke a phenomenon.
They also had an added advantage of knowing the score; knowing that
the opening chase is a clever reenactment of an early chase scene
in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
In
that film (and the graphic novel on which it’s based), the
heroine successfully calms down a stampeding Ohmu, a giant, green
bug with claws and a dozen eyes. Now, in the new version, the tone
is different, and the mood is shockingly bleaker. The setup is the
same, but the payoff is tragic; the hero is fatally cursed, and
doomed to walk alone in search of answers. The serial adventure
has collided into the anti-war picture.
Miyazaki’s
earlier works, from Animal Treasure Island and Future Boy Conan
to My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's
Delivery Service, carry a romantic idealism at their core. But
now, in middle age, we see the emergence of the serious, somber
Miyazaki. Miyazaki, the heartbroken idealist. Miyazaki, the cynic.
Mononoke is a much darker picture, wrestling with complex themes
and issues, one that clearly has no patience for pat solutions or
easy answers.
Mononoke
is often referred to as a movie about how man and nature should
get along, but that’s not really accurate. It’s a movie
about how man and nature don’t get along. Nobody gets along
with anyone, and it's far too late for talking. The knives are drawn
and everyone wants blood. When the title character is finally introduced,
Ashitaka has traveled to the edge of a mystic forest and walked
into the middle of a full-scale war. San, the wolf girl, the Princess
Mononoke, her adoptive wolf pack on one side, fighting to preserve
the forests; Lady Eboshi, her women equipped with firearms, on the
other, their ironworks village clearing the land to mine their ores.
Within
each side lie several factions, all pushing and pulling in different
directions. Everyone grows distrustful of each other. The Ape Tribes,
who plant seeds and grow in despair; the Boar Tribe, who seek slaughter
on the battlefield; rival samurai clans who seek to capture the
ironworks for their own; Jigo, a conniving monk whose army is hired
by the Emperor; the men of the ironworks, quietly resentful of the
woman who marched in and took over their town, succeeding where
they never could.
At
the center of everything lies the Shishigami, the Deer God who calls
the mystical forest his home, who comes and goes with the wind.
This is a God who is ultimately unknowable, intimately connected
at one moment and distant the next; its motives and reasons, even
its itentity, are always in question.
There
are really two movies at work here. Western audiences can enjoy
Mononoke on a purely visual level, marveling at the astonishing
detail, the terrific animation, the lush and varied color tones,
and the swift movements of the camera. CGI is used to great extent,
mixing with the cell animation, and it all looks stunning. But notice
how the computer animation is used to support the action; note how
its use in scrolling and panning allows for more dynamic camera
work, capturing compositions and landscapes straight from Ford and
Kurosawa.
Japanese
audiences are far luckier; they got to see the real movie.
This is the first film Miyazaki directed since completing the Nausicaa
comic. Nausicaa the novel was wildly successful, first
appearing in Animage magazine and then selling ten million copies
as a seven-volume series of books. What makes it great is how the
story grows and expands as it goes along, and this is because Miyazaki
took long breaks when working on his pictures. Each time he returned
to Nausicaa, the scope widened, the themes became more
complex, and the issues became more nuanced. What began as a Buddhist
spaghetti western evolved into a serious examination on feminism,
the environment, war and pacifism, human suffering, life and death,
and the nature of God.
Miyazaki
had finally retired the novel he spent nearly fifteen years writing,
but here he was again, plunging back into these themes and adapting
them to a story set in 14th Century Japan (and deconstructing much
of its history and mythology in the process). This is why I refer
to Princess Mononoke as his Ran; it’s a
grand summing-up film. It’s the final statement from his serious
side, and the fingerprints are all over the picture.
Like
that early chase scene, most of the key moments in the film are
taken from Nausicaa; minor moments like camera shots, scenes
that draw parallels, even the characters themselves. Ashitaka and
San truly are Nausicaa’s children (goodness knows they have
the haircut - the moment when Ashitaka cuts his top-knot is almost
comic). One child is the spiritual pacifist, the other the fierce
warrior. Notice how, even here, the gender roles are reversed; it’s
the girl who goes for the knife, and the boy who pleads for understanding.
That
defiant feminism has always been a Miyazaki trademark, and it shines
brighter here than any other Ghibli production. These characters
are allowed dimension, nuance. Where is the melodrama? Who’s
the good guy? Who’s the villain? There is no good or evil
side, only living beings trying to do the best they can, controlled
by circumstance and driven, inevitably towards the final violent
climax. San is driven by her obsession to kill Eboshi, compelled
and repulsed by her attraction to Ashitaka, confused about her identity.
Eboshi, in turn, carries her own obsessions – she seeks to
kill the Deer God and take the forest – but she also displays
compassion and empathy; she takes in prostitutes and lepers and
identifies closely with them.
And
poor Ashitaka, the conscience of the film (his name literally means
“tomorrow?”), is pushed aside. Nausicaa asked, “Can’t
we all get along,” and people listened; this wandering prince
makes the same plea and gets beaten down. Nobody wants to listen,
because this is opera; everything must end tragically. Despair and
hope lie intertwined in its final message: no matter how difficult
it is, we must live.
Princess
Mononoke is a violent movie, with lots of blood and severed
limbs, but doesn’t revel in it. The mood is one of sadness,
of loss. The tension is ratcheted up and up (Miyazaki is a master
of action cinema), and when it explodes, the results are stunning.
There are crucial moments when I was shocked to my core as the climactic
bullet came. One such scene is when San infiltrates the ironworks
and into a death trap; Ashitaka literally walks into the middle
of a knife fight between the two women. The other is when all the
parties converge, in the final act, on the Deer God’s lair.
The Shishigami appears, shots are fired, bodies fall.
Great
moments in that stay with you: the Shishigami walking through the
forest at night, drawn like a Native American painting and greeted
by tree spirits; peaceful transitional moments, rain falling on
rocks; watching three kodama mourn a cut plant; the whole subplot
involving Ashitaka’s gold dagger (cruelly cut out of Miramax's
overrated American dub); the two lovers realizing that they cannot
live together; the battle scenes, which are wonderfully stylized;
that iconic image of San, riding against a fiery red background.
Mononoke is grand opera in the fullest sense. |
