PRINCESS MONONOKE (Miramax) Voices: Billy Crudup, Billy Bob Thornton, Minnie Driver, John Di Maggio, Claire Danes, John De Mita, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Gillian Anderson. Screenplay: Neil Gaiman, adapted from the screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki. Producer: Toshio Suzuki. English Voice Director: Jack Fletcher. Director: Hayao Miyazaki. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 136 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Somehow, somewhere, this whole "anime" wave has left me behind. Sure, the Japanese animation style is distinctive, but it strikes me that the form has not progressed radically in the 30 years since "Speed Racer." Though the backgrounds may have become richer, there's still a vaguely Anglicized blandness to the character design, a strange lack of fluidity to the acrobatic movements. When the Japanese smash PRINCESS MONONOKE made its way to our shores, it was spoken of as the future of animation. I was skeptical that it would bring anything that wasn't already the past of anime.
From an animation standpoint, I still think that's true, though PRINCESS MONONOKE does have some striking imagery. The real revelation in the film is the depth and complexity of its mythology and storytelling, which manage to overcome the problems with the human story. Hayao Miyazaki's tale begins with a prince named Ashitaka (Billy Crudup) of an exiled tribe. In the course of defending his village from a boar-demon, Ashitaka is infected with a malignancy that can only be cured by the Great Forest Spirit. Thus Ashitaka begins a quest that leads him to an iron mining town at the edge of a huge forest, a town led by the Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver). The town is in conflict not only with a rival warlord who wants a share of the iron, but with the nature spirits who loathe the encroachment of humans on their forest. Ashitaka finds himself caught in the middle, especially when he becomes enamored of San (Claire Danes), the human stepdaughter of the great wolf goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson).
In case there is any confusion on the subject, let's be clear that PRINCESS MONONOKE is a film for adults. Heads and limbs fly at a rate approaching that of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and the manipulative monk Jigo (Billy Bob Thornton) uses some salty language. It also maintains an adult tone in the set-up of its mystical world, with gods who can be petulant, violent and even just plain stupid (a cosmology far more in keeping with most ancient civilizations' mythologies than Disney's benign pantheisms). Most impressive, Miyazaki keeps his story free of the didacticism so common in films with environmental themes. Lady Eboshi isn't portrayed as some cackling, grasping villain representing "civilization bad" -- instead, she's a philanthropist revered by the lepers and former prostitutes she employs in her iron works. While the nature gods are understandably bitter as they watch forests fall, theirs is not the only side of this story. Rare is the tale that suggests industry could be a co-existing entity in nature, rather than an inherent evil.
PRINCESS MONONOKE is so engrossing as both legend and lesson that you wish it could treat its characters with more care. The conflicts of its principal characters (Ashitaka's struggle with his ever-more-homicidal infected arm, San's struggle to reconcile her human and lupine backgrounds) are given only passing attention, leaving most of the focus on the set pieces and the philosophy. The line readings by the English actors are flat and constricted, performances set to a stopwatch of mouth movements instead of to the needs of the scene. And then there's the dialogue, which generally ranges from the annoyingly literalist (characters seem incapable of looking at a thing without calling out its name) to the purely giggle-inducing (I don't believe I'll ever embrace unreservedly a film that includes the line, "Forest Spirit, we give you back your head"). PRINCESS MONONOKE at times appears to be an animated variation on this year's more ballyhooed version of mythopoetics over substance, THE PHANTOM MENACE.
Still, there is something compelling about the look of PRINCESS MONONOKE, more so than I was expecting. The design of the supernatural characters is always intriguing, from the writhing worm-bodies of the demons to the Pillsbury Doughboy-cum-tiki-idol sprites called the Kodamas; the battlefields are arresting in their gore-spattered silence. Indeed, silence plays an unexpectedly effective role in this epic film, giving it a sense of reverence. There's just the problem of those darned people, whose homogeneity in word and countenance hinders an otherwise stellar effort. Anime may be more or less what it used to be, but at least the storytelling behind it is growing up.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 anime shuns: 6.
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