Princess Mononoke
Black Cardamom Pear Sorbet swirled with Wolfberry Vinegar Kaki Sorbet
Made 25 years ago, the themes depicted in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Princess Mononoke for Studio Ghibli, still ring loud and true. The movie opens when an Emishi village is attacked by a demon boar god. As Prince Ashitaka saves his village, his arm is marked by a deadly curse. To save himself, Ashitaka travels west, meets an opportunistic monk, seeks to find the healing Great Forest Spirit, and finds refuge in Iron Town. The leader of Iron Town, Lady Eboshi was the one to turn the boar god sour in attempts to protect her people and is at odds with San, Princess Mononoke, a girl who lives with wolves. Ashitaka is wounded in a fight between San and Eboshi, but is healed by the Forest Spirit. The forest, wanting to restore the land, goes to war with Iron town, which believes it needs the head of the Great Forest Spirit to survive. Death ensues, but in the end the Forest Spirit’s dying form heals the land and Iron Town is rebuilt better.
Partially thought up in the 1970s, Miyazaki beginning creating Princess Mononoke in the mid 90s. To gather inspiration, the creators visited the ancient forests of Yakushima. Miyazaki molded Iron Town after frontier towns that appeared in old Westerns. Although the film is set in Medieval Japan, it purposefully isn’t an accurate representation, and instead works to “portray the very beginning of the seemly insoluble conflict between the natural world and modern industrial civilization.” In addition to the theme of environment, the movie explores sexuality and disability. Lady Eboshi protects, yet also puts to work female sex workers and lepers. Her viewpoint is both enlightened and exploitative. Princess Mononoke highlights the complexities of life. There is no clear divide between good and evil. And even the most sympathetic characters are multi-faceted, while the conclusion of the story is ambiguous.
In 1997, Princess Mononoke was released, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of that year and the first animated film to receive a Japanese Academy Award. It became one of the first Studio Ghibli films to be dubbed in English by Disney in 1999. The Miramax Chairman had a fit when a Studio Ghibli producer shipped him a samurai sword with the message “No Cuts.” Yet, there were still changes made for the story to resinate with an American Audience. For example, a character calls soup watery, an insult in Japan, but to pack the same punch, Neil Gaiman changed the comment to “donkey piss.”
After 3 years working on the project, which included 144,00 hand drawn cells, Miyazaki swore he was going to retire, which, of course, did not last long. Princess Mononoke gave both nature and underrepresented groups of people a voice rarely heard in Japanese media. The story also presents a world of conflict to children, something important to Miyazaki after witnessing the Yugoslavia wars. Inspired by both history and fantasy, Princess Mononoke, breaks down myths of Japanese history. The Emishi were an ancient ethnic group that resisted the expansion of the Yamato Empire. Viewers are left to assume Ashitaka’s village did not survive or the people lost their identity, becoming Japanese. While Iron Town displays the accurate historic reality of women needing to work as men fought, San’s character doesn’t align with the stereotypical image of the submissive Japanese woman. Influenced by Shinto religion, Princess Mononoke presents the environment as a spiritual force, and Princess Mononoke’s namesake is described in The Tale of Genji (believed to be the World’s first novel) as parasitic spirits that settle in women. This can be seen as San’s hatred towards Eboshi and Iron Town, only to be released with the environment’s conservation.
