“Ultimately, although San and Moro do not exactly triumph, they are also not entirely defeated. The supernatural forces with which they are connected are strong enough to threaten an apocalyptic end to the environment, which temporarily defeats the monks and samurai, and forces the material civilization of Tatara to rethink its position vis-a-vis the forest. San’s refusal to live with Ashitaka and her decision to stay in the forest ensure that a sense of loss or absence inevitably permeates the film’s conclusion. As a result, the ending of Princess Mononoke is a kind of draw, with neither side triumphant and the abject still not entirely repudiated.”
“However, looking at the ending with the long gaze of twentieth-century hindsight, it is clear that the forest of the shishigami no longer exists except, perhaps, as an archetypal shadow on the contemporary unconscious. In this regard, the complex, intriguing, and enigmatic character of Eboshi and her association with the proto-industrial Tatara take on pivotal importance. In the film’s refusal to destroy Eboshi or Tatara we see an implicit acknowledgement of the inevitability of “progress”. Princess Mononoke’s abjected Others function as an all-out confrontation with the notion of modernity as progress, but the film is too sophisticated to offer only a simple antiprogress/antimodernity message. By acknowledging Eboshi’s humanity, the film forces the viewer out of any complacent cultural position where technology and industry can be dismissed as simply wrong. It is worth reemphasizing that Eboshi’s femininity, especially her nurturing capacity, ensures that the viewer cannot slip so easily into a simplistic moral equation of industrial equals evil.”
“Miyazaki problematizes the issue even further by making Tatara not just a site of industrial production but a site of weapons manufacturing. In addition, one of the weapons it produces, the iron ball that lodged in the boar, has engendered a lasting curse on humanity.”
“However, it is these weapons that give employement to Tatara’s outcast citizenry, who surely have as much right to survival as the denizens of the forest.”
“In contrast to a vision of a fundamentally approachable world in which conventions may be destabilized but never totally undermined, Princess Mononoke subverts the traditional history, aesthetics, and gender relationships of Japanese society. In opposition to elitist and masculinist versions of Japanese history, the emperor and the court are seen as struggling with powers potentially beyond their control, while the only authoritative guidance comes from a female wolf and the female leader of a weapons manufacturing community. Most shockingly […] Princess Mononoke uses female characters who exist in their own right, independent of any male interlocutor. Furthermore, these independent females are not domesticiated by marriage or a happy ending but are instead interested in living separate but presumably fulfilling lives. San with her companions in the natural world. Eboshi with her industrializing community.”
“In contrast to the traditional tropes of homogeneity and harmony, the film offers a vision of what might be called a Japanese form of multiculturalism. This observation is supported by a striking essay by critic Saeki Junko in which she compares Princess Mononoke to director Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Although acknowledging the obvious difference between an American science fiction film set in the twenty-first century and a Japanese historical fantasy set in the fourteenth century, Saeki points out that the films possess a significant commonality in their mutual fascination with the problem of Otherness […] Blade Runner and Princess Mononoke answer this question by promoting a willingness to accept difference as an essential part of life […]”
“Saeki’s vision of what I have called Princess Mononoke “multiculturalism” is intriguing not only in relation to Blade Runner but also in regards to a more recent work, the 1999 animated Disney film version of Tarzan, released two years after Princess Mononoke. Both films feature primordial natural settings and human protagonists raised by animals, and both privilege to an extent a fantasy of revenge by the natural world upon human technology. However, the narrative strategies and imagery they employ are significantly different, as are their ultimate ideological messages. While Princess Mononoke insists on difference, the Disney film attempts to erase it.”
“Thus, despite its jungle setting and an ending that seems to suggest the autonomous power and appeal of the natural world, Tarzan’s underlying message privileges an anthropocentric view of the world, emphasized by the film’s final scene, in which Tarzan, Jane, and her father are seen frolicking with the anthropomorphically rendered apes in a paradisial jungle. In a sense this is a vision of a Garden of Eden, in which all species live together in contentment. It is also a vision that ignores the steady march of history, technology, and progress that ultimately destroy any hope of such an Eden in the contemporary world.”
“In contrast, Princess Mononoke’s world is one in which nature, emblematized by the inhuman shishigami, remains beautiful but threateningly and insistently Other. This is also a world in which technology cannot be erased or ignored but rather must be dealth with as an unpleasant but permanent fact of life. While Tarzan uses fantasy to gloss over the inconvenient facts of historical change and cultural complexity, Princess Mononoke employs the fantastic to reveal how pluraity and otherness are a basic feature of human life […] In Ashitaka’s and San’s agreement to live apart but still visit each other (the opposite of the inclusionary ending of the Disney work), the film suggests the pain involved in choosing identities in a world in which such choices are increasingly offered. Although set in a historical past, Princess Mononoke reflects the extraordinary array of pluralities that suggest the ever more complex world of the twenty-first century.”
ANIME: from Akira to Princess Mononoke, Susan J. Napier, 2001.
