Princess Mononoke
At a glance...
- Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
- Released in 1997
- Runtime 134 minutes
- Watched at The Beacon Cinema
- Final feelings: beloved, complicated, enduring.
"We're still alive."
Put this movie on the list of "Movies I will eventually write a big long essay about hopefully". For Princess Mononoke the subject will be, "this is a bad "environmentalist" movie but it's a good movie about human suffering and endurance, and also Ashitaka is trans". I think watching this subbed totally renewed my love for this movie in an unexpected way. Don't be fooled by my essay title, I have always loved this film since I first saw it as a little pre-teen, it was my first Ghibli film and I related so much to Ashitaka wanting to just hang out with the girls all the time and didn't understand why I found that so interesting (I learned eventually).
The thing with the sub is that while there are many performances/individual lines I love in the dub, on the whole I see now it is just plain overacted in a lot of ways? Like, the direction of that dub was playing up the comic relief nature of Kuroku, Gonza, and other characters that in the original is just not there as much. And also, the subs show how much more contextually Japanese this film is. The word "shogun" is nowhere to be found in the dub but it is right there towards the beginning of the movie in the subs. Maybe another hot take for the future essay but the dub of this movie has influenced the English-speaking world to think of this movie as far more universal than it actually is.
In my adult life I've struggled with understanding the "message" of this film because I just don't think in actuality the exploited victims of industrialization and modernity owe anything at all to the perpetrators of their suffering and annihilation. If it's an environmentalist story, it feels vaguely "both-sides" in nature, which is what will happen when you don't have a strong critique beyond pure environmentalism. But with this viewing in the sub, I was able to see it also as a story of enduring catastrophe, and for everyday people how valuable it is that they live. If you are alive, you can live to learn the truth about why you are cursed. If you are alive, you can live to help your neighbors and resist against the things that you know will bring forth continued destruction. "So you say you're under a curse? Well so what, so's the whole damn world", and Jiko's right for saying that. At the beginning, those words are dismissive, but at the end, they offer the chance for cooperation, improvement, and maybe even solidarity. As much of a liberal girlboss as Lady Eboshi is, I don't usually feel very convinced that her experience actually convinces her to change her worldview the way she seems to do at the end of this film. But maybe I can see it now as a change for the subjects of her rule, that they might live in a better way.
For me, I leave this screening of Princess Mononoke feeling determined. I've mentioned in the last couple of reviews that I recently had a mental breakdown/crisis, and it's been difficult in the months after I left my intensive therapy program to maintain stability. I wasn't expecting for this movie to teach me something about myself, I wasn't expecting to see myself in Ashitaka again like I did as a child, and this time I wasn't expecting to feel him speaking to me. "We're still alive". We're still alive, and that is everything.