PRINCESS MONONOKE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Miramax Films Director: Hayao Miyazaki Writer: Neil Gaiman Cast: Claire Danes, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver, Gillian Anderson, Jada Pinkett, Billy Bob Thornton
They say that things were simpler when we were kids back in the early fifties. That's easy to trumpet now, but when you're struggling to add and subtract fractions in sixth grade, life seems as complex as it would ever be. For relaxation, you could always go to the movies on Saturday--every Saturday in fact--to enjoy a cartoon, a serial, two features and a newsreel. And oh how redundant and violent the animations were! Elmer Fudd never could gun down the carrot-eating Bugs Bunny with his shotgun and Tom never did get to eat Jerry. The moral of these cartoons was always that it pays to be an underdog--or cat or bunny--because the oppressor always got blown up trying to get you. The Japanese animes that have come our way during the nineties are just as violent, but they're obviously more adult. The complexity is mind-boggling. Satoshi Kon's "Perfect Blue" is not that intricate, featuring a leading character who sinks into psychosis and gets into an awful lot of trouble because like Willy Loman, presumably, she seeks out a career that she was not meant to bear.
By contrast Hayao Miyazaki's epic "Princess Mononoke" is a veritable Fuji of a complicated, difficult story about as multidimensional as a series of Marcel Proust recherches. But the time the tale is over, though, the pieces come together. You won't place the old moral that the underdog will prevail in this one but rather a whole succession of themes, universal in scope, among which is the idea that warfare among competing clans (and even species) does not necessarily take place between the forces of good and evil. The gods are not on anyone's side in this anime, because both positions have validity and, in fact, a single human being can possess elements of good and evil. Sounds strangely enough like the current reality, no?
The story is set in feudal Japan, more or less the fourteenth century, a time in which that archipelago was in ways more democratic than it is today. Women were helpers, just like the western women of 19th century America who would fight alongside the men, and spoke right up against their boorish husbands. Peasants and samurai were virtually indistinguishable. The laborers worked with their hands--ore diggers, charcoal makers and drivers of oxen. (In this film they are from the Tatara clan). The forests are devoid of people--thick, pristine, a Rousseau-esque state of nature. But the ironworkers are homeless and have located in the forest to mine the fields for iron where their presence is opposed by the gods and creatures of the woodlands, including the title character who has been raised by the wolf- gods, who does not identify herself as human, and who hates everything that moves on two legs.
The film is dubbed in English for an English-speaking audience with well-known actors assuming the voices of the human beings and the animal gods. The story centers not on San aka Princess Mononoke but on the hero and lover of peace, Ashitaka (Billy Crudup). When Ashitaka kills a huge, fierce and vindictive boar, he is cursed like Coleridge's ancient mariner but instead of wearing the great big beast around his neck, he receives an imprinted burn on his arm which causes him great pain and is destined to kill him unless.....He must leave his tribe (symbolized by his cutting his hair) and make an odyssey to the Tatara workers led by Eboshi (Minnie Driver), winding up in the middle of a complex life-and-death struggle involving not only the ironworkers and the forest gods but at least two feuding groups of human beings as well.
What follows comes across as perhaps the most sophisticated video game you've ever seen. As with the amusement park machines, when arrows hit their targets, whole heads fly off, indicating that director Hayao Miyazaki may have been inspired by some Monty Python episodes. Moro (Gillian Anderson), the Wolf Spirit, is a leading fighter for the preservation of the pristine woodlands and he is accompanied by the human woman he raised, San (Claire Danes), who talks to the wolves and thus is called Mononoke ("spirits of things"). Not being wholly committed to feminism, San is the bitter enemy of the other principal female, Eboshi, who is intent on destroying San and killing all the gods--even though such a feat would be somewhat more difficult than slaying mere animals.
Obviously a labor-intensive effort despite the dependence on computerized digital animation, "Princess Mononoke" excels in giving the viewer the broad panorama of nature, from the cloud-covered hills to the verdant forests, with the characters gliding through the air with the grace of Mikhail Barishnikov floating across the Lincoln Center stage. Arrows fill the air, occasionally sliced into pieces by fearsome samurai swords, and elks, wolves and other four-legged creatures loyally guide their human cargo into the fray. What we're made privy to is the virtual world of the film's director, a land more primeval than Thoreauvian, where human beings must learn to reconcile themselves with nature instead of trying to tame its majesty.
The plea for humanity to live in harmony with nature is in no way an original supplication, but Miyazaki puts a decidedly original and distinctive spin on the theme and has made fine use of actors like Claire Danes, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver and Billy Bob Thornton, and the particularly resonant and guttural tones of Gillian Anderson as the wolf Moro. What comes across best is the idea (previously mentioned) that in warfare, good does not necessary fight against evil. We are continually baffled trying to label the wolf, the boar, the humans like Eboshi who despise San and San herself, who hates all human beings despite her being one of that very species. The 135 minutes that Miyazaki takes to put across his many motifs are deserved considering the complexity of his task and the movie, which avoids repetition despite the many battles, does not fail to entertain.
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 135 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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