Princess Mononoke - Movie Review

Princess Mononoke was directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary in theaters. It showed most recently on the 5th and it's going to be showing again on the 9th in case you missed it. And naturally I want to review this movie because it's a Studio Ghibli film and Miyazaki is one of my favorite directors of all time. This film follows a young prince who in the brilliant, riveting opening scene is attacked by a boar that contains a demon inside of him. And after he comes in contact with this boar he gets this strange rash around his arm that gives him odd powers but also causes him to be banished from his village because now they view him as unclean. So he has to go out into the world and discover it for the first time which is where he comes across Princess Mononoke, a girl who lives with the wolves, and a war between nature and this town led by a woman who's obsessed with killing the spirit of the forest. Now I feel like whenever I review a Studio Ghibli movie I'm always going to pinpoint one specific thing but there's no escaping it. The animation is fucking brilliant. This is one of the best looking Ghibli movies there is. This film came out in 1997 in Japan and it was revolutionary for hand-drawn animation. I mean today when you see films like Zootopia and Up and Toy Story 3 and all these amazing animated films you marvel at the computer animation and it's it really is incredible what they can do today. But when you actually think about the fact that people sat there with pencils and pens and they painted these hand-drawn cells and they animated them to interact with each other and they got the grit underneath their fingernails and they wiped sweat from their brow, when you really think about that the animation in this film becomes all the more impressive because of the way shadows interact with things, the way the trees can obscure things in the background, the wind moving through the leaves, the animation of the demon boar in the opening scene. What they accomplished with this movie for its time and still today it's breathtakingly beautiful. Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite Ghibli films. What's even more impressive about this movie is that Miyazaki rarely ever helms action sequences. Most of his films are very children friendly. This film has a lot of gore and a lot of action scenes and what I took away from it this time re-watching it a couple days ago is how masterful the editing is. Miyazaki's timing is so on point with the editing in this film to fully maximize visual awe at what we're looking at and that's something he captures wonderfully in this movie, a childlike sense of awe. Despite the fact that we're watching a slightly more mature film than Miyazaki usually helms, there's still something childlike and beautiful about his vision for this world. Whenever our main character sees the spirit of the forest, this large deer-like creature, you almost get the sense that Miyazaki is showing you a vision of heaven and that level of wonderment is maintained throughout this entire film. Something else I love about this movie is Irontown, the depiction of this city. It feels like a workable, believable city. You see the politics of it, you see the women and how they control things, and you see the men and how they control things. You understand how this city is able to prosper. A lot of times in anime, and especially movies, people just wander across a big prosperous town and the film takes no time to explain how this town is even a thing. But in this film, you understand what these people are after, how they all work together to get it, and how this town specifically relates to the opening scene with the boar demon monster, and you understand how everything ties together. But the main message that I think Miyazaki is trying to get across in this movie is that man is at war with nature and that nature isn't doing anything about it yet. But if nature did and nature fought back, we'd be completely screwed. And although it can get a little preachy at times and slightly heavy-handed, it's a message that in 1997 needed to be heard. I mean when you look at today and how everyone talks about nature and how we need to protect the environment, imagine when this film came out 20 years ago and this was what Miyazaki was trying to preach then. The guy was ahead of his time, he knew exactly what he was doing. This is a brilliant, fantastic animation film. It truly is a remarkable thing to look at. It's hard sometimes to separate just how visually beautiful this movie is with trying to focus on the story, but I've seen it so many times now that I can do that. And Princess Mononoke is one of my all-time favorite Studio Ghibli films, and I'm gonna give it an A. Guys, like I said, it's gonna be showing once more in theaters this month, dubbed in English on January 9th. Look forward to that. If you want to see it in theaters, you can get your tickets now, because it is worth it. Guys, thank you so much as always for watching, and if you like this, you can click right here and get Stuckmanized.