19th of June, 2020
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Princess Mononoke, the film by Hayao Miyazaki.
In a technical sense, Miyazaki's speciality is lending animation the sense of a real space that live action has. He maps out imaginary spaces via the movement of characters or the virtual camera through that space, and Princess Mononoke for a long time I felt was a lesser work of his since it largely ignores this aspect of his film-making. This is in fact not true—the film’s cinematography aligns with its narrative and emphasises margins and thresholds. One of the first images of the film, the first to involve magic anyway, is when Ashitaka and Yakul converge on the outskirts of their village and trace a path along the dry stone wall that separates ground of different elevations. The second magical image is the boar demon struggling to cross the threshold of shade into the dazzling sunlight, stopping dead for a spell as he is bathed in light and the wriggling blight tortures him in its pain.
Most of the most striking images in the film are like this for me. Shots of convoys on precarious cliff faces, a valley fortress on the water's edge, characters connecting across a river. The astonishing image of flowers sprouting at the fall of Godly hooves is more in line with the intentional conceptual content of the film’s narrative, but as amazing as these spiritual images are they are what best demonstrates the tension that stops this film being among the very best that Miyazaki made. Princess Mononoke is so concerned with the margins that the divisions it creates can never be healed, and so when it comes time to venerate nature it does so in a cursed sense. For all its moral struggle it eventually fails to reconcile humanity and nature, and what ought to be (and in practise is) a tragic story without proper resolution is treated as though it isn’t. I think I love the film, since I happen to love Miyazaki, and the tragedy of its frustrated effort to love too many things at once is extremely moving. It can’t affirm any transcendent spiritual philosophy in the way Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle can though. The contradictions make it too human to be spiritual.