Hayao Miyazaki’s forest adventure gives its human combatants enough sympathy to make the destruction hurt. The crowded storytelling needs patience, but we recommend it for the creatures, the force of its action and the care given to both sides.
Princess Mononoke is a fierce, humane adventure, and we recommend it with a warning about how much there is to follow. Hayao Miyazaki takes the familiar struggle between people and nature and gives the people enough competing needs to complicate our sympathies. Industry threatens the forest, but the human beings involved retain their dignity. The creatures defending it can be frightening. There is plenty of fighting, though choosing someone to cheer for becomes an uncomfortable business.
Miyazaki’s screenplay is especially good at letting a person’s needs remain understandable even when their actions are destructive. The gods, the humans and the samurai all have interests, and the film asks us to keep track of them without supplying one convenient villain. Ashitaka, voiced by Yoji Matsuda, gives us a human figure to follow through those competing demands. The ecological concerns stay close to the practical question of how people are supposed to live.
The hand-drawn animation rewards attention at a much smaller scale, too. The forest sprites and the Spirit of the Forest make the woodland feel occupied, with creatures whose existence does not depend on being useful to anyone. Atsushi Okui’s cinematography gives these presences enough weight to stand beside the human action. We found ourselves caring about the forest before we had sorted out the quarrel. Seeing its creatures makes the threatened loss more immediate than any speech about nature could.
We were taken aback by the violence. The care spent drawing this living world makes the physical damage in the fighting harder to dismiss as routine adventure. Takeshi Seyama’s editing keeps the action forceful without making it seem like a separate attraction, provided for anyone losing interest in the disputes. The fighting makes the film’s concern for coexistence harder to accept on comfortable terms. The wish to live together has to survive what the combatants do to one another.
The crowded storytelling is the main reservation. At 134 minutes, the film has room for its different factions, but some of the effort spent keeping their interests in view makes the journey feel slower than it needs to be. Seyama’s editing is less convincing when the film moves between these concerns than when a confrontation is under way. Joe Hisaishi’s score can also insist too heavily on the size of the occasion. The creatures already command our attention without the extra prompting.
The film also resists the usual reassurance of an enchanted landscape. Its gods and sprites make the forest inviting to look at, but they do not make it a safe retreat from the human disputes. That is a useful complication in a fantasy adventure, where a marvellous creature can too easily become a pet or a guide. Miyazaki lets the creatures remain strange, even when we want them to help us decide whom to trust.
Give it an evening when there is enough attention left to follow the people as closely as the creatures. The crowded passages are worth sitting through for the forest scenes, though this is a demanding choice for casual family viewing. It carries a PG certificate, and the violence deserves more thought than that label alone can provide.
