Princess Mononoke (1997): Movie Review

One of the thoughtful bday gifts I received from MrM this year was a DVD of Princess Mononoke. In typical MrM fashion, he didn't actually know that I had seen and loved this movie. I've wanted a DVD for a while and never ended up buying it. So here we are, birthday evening, opening a gift that turned out to be an even better surprise than he could have imagined! Its been 3 months since then and we finally found time to tuck RoRo in and watch this movie. In two installments. My pregnant blog readers, take heed. Pull all-nighters watching movies right now, because there is no such luxury post-baby except when you are nursing at 2am and need something to keep you awake. :)

I enjoy Japanese anime a lot and clearly don't watch enough. Princess Mononoke is directed by Hayao Miyazaki. He's made several movies (d-uh) but two of them received widespread theatrical release in the US in recent years, and you may have heard of them - Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away. Of these three, Mononoke is my clear favorite.

Mononoke is the story of prince Ashitaka who is affected by a curse when he kills a boar-demon that was attacking his village. The curse will take over his body slowly and turn him into a demon unless a cure is found. Ashitaka leaves on a mission to find what turned the boar into a demon, and to find a way to rid his body of the curse. His search takes him across the forest of the Forest Spirit, which is protected by a princess (Mononoke) raised by the wolves, into Irontown - the source of the poisonous metal that injured the boar-God and turned him into a demon. Here Ashitaka is trapped in a battle between the humans of Irontown who need to clear the forest to continue their mining, and the Gods and Spirits of the forest who protect it from human destruction.

The movie definitely draws many parallels to the reality of our lives - the struggle between modernizing and ecological preservation, getting what we need and trying to not ruin the Earth while doing so. But it doesn't do it in a Michael Moore kind of way. Princess Mononoke has a beautifully conceived screenplay and feels like poetry in motion. I was blown away by the imagination that went into constructing each scene, the maturity of the theme and the cohesive telling of the story. It has several scenes that could be scary for a child, and its PG-13 rating is probably appropriate unless you are going to sit around blocking the scary scenes. It doesn't have a Walt Disney ending or Pixar rendering (wait - aren't they the same family now?), but this is an absolutely lovely movie that you have no good reason to miss.