I’m not sure now if the Popeye cartoons I watched as a kid taught me the right lessons. I’m not talking here about the genuinely great Fleischer Popeyes or the slightly less-great Famous Studios Popeyes. Those cartoons did teach valuable lessons, even if eating spinach every day didn’t spawn battleships in my biceps (better off, anyway—probably painful). No, I’m talking about the Popeyes that were produced under the aegis of King Features Syndicate in the 1960s, the ones done in Czechoslovakia (look it up), or by the likes of the Bozo the Clown guy. You know, the crappy ones.
There was a trope in those cartoons that, if memory serves, cropped up a few times: Brutus (not Bluto—that was the result of a weird rights mix-up; you can look that up, too) would do something seemingly nice for Popeye—offer him a drink of water or something (it was spiked, obviously)—and Popeye would walk away, saying, “Gee, he’s not such a bad guy after all.” And all of us six-year-olds would sit in front of the TV, thinking, Popeye, you sap, don’t you see he’s playing you?
This is not an uncommon thing in film storytelling, where the audience, given their outsider advantage, is ahead of the protagonists in understanding what’s going on. (I don’t think it happens as much in written fiction, where we’re often looking at the narrative from someone’s viewpoint.) Handled correctly, it can actually provoke empathy for the characters. But let the audience get more than two steps ahead, and you wind up with the situation where an entire theater full of spectators is yelling at the screen while the cheerleader, having just hooked up with the school’s lead quarterback, goes alone into the basement with a faulty flashlight. We, the savvy youth of America, could see right through Brutus—so what the flip was wrong with Popeye?
Given the restricted economics of televised kids animation in the ’60s (which probably hasn’t changed all that much over time), you can understand why creators, rushing to push their product out, would rely on a child’s binary view of the world to avoid complicating the job for their crew. Brutus is a dick, has always been a dick and will always be—why add to the workload by dragging in nuance? (Let me just take a moment to point out that there’s a distinction between the classic Popeye cartoons—which were created to entertain theater audiences of all ages—and the King Features versions, which were deliberately crafted to shovel into after-school kid-vid blocks.) And yes, sometimes a bastard’s good side is a façade, so developing a child’s critical thinking muscles should never be discouraged. But neither should we convey the lesson that the bad shall always be bad, or that they might not have redeeming qualities.
Hayao Miyazaki gets it. Across a fifty-plus year career (which he repeatedly insists he’s retired from, and to which he repeatedly returns), the Japanese director has taken the tools of fantasy and made his tales entrancing enough for younger audiences while evoking an expansive understanding of human nature. While he’s gone as far as to create animated features—such as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988)—without any adversaries at all, even when opponents do appear, as with the air pirates of Castle in the Sky (1986) or the witch Zeniba in the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001), they can just as often manifest admirable features as not. Maybe it’s just that Miyazaki made his directorial debut working on the Lupin the Third TV series (and went on to write and direct the much-beloved feature adaptation, 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro) and discovered that good-bad people were more fun than bad-bad people. Whatever his motivation, even when his films feature real, honest-to-gosh villains, it’s the antagonists bestowed with elements of grace that tend to stick in your mind.
Nowhere is that more true than in the stunning historical fantasy, Princess Mononoke (1997).
Miyazaki loves to reach back into the past for his tales, frequently setting them in a vaguely defined, imaginary Europe, with an admixture of pre- and post-war technologies. Not so with Princess Mononoke, which is set definitively in Japan sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, albeit a fantasy Japan in which boars and wolves tower over humans and can communicate telepathically, where red elk are viable transportation options, and where gods, monsters, and playful spirits with rattling, gourd-like heads haunt the forest.
It’s a monster that actually gets the story moving: A rampaging, wild boar suffering under a curse that turns it into a roiling mass of thrashing pseudopods. When the young Emishi prince Ashitaka (Billy Crudup voicing the English dub; Yôji Matsuda for the Japanese) kills the beast, he winds up infected with the curse, and must exile himself from his village in order to discover the source of the malignancy. His only clue is a crudely cast iron ball—a bullet, in fact—dug from the monster’s side.
Ashitaka’s investigation leads him eventually to Irontown, a fortified village and foundry set in the center of a forest and led by Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver/Yûko Tanaka). Business may be booming for the community—especially since Eboshi’s main product is munitions for the latest innovation in war tech: rifles—but it doesn’t come without risk. Not only is the leader of a band of samurai eager to commandeer the installation, by force if necessary, but the forest creatures are none too happy about the smoke-belching chimneys and the ruthless deforestation. While the woods’ giant boars are planning an attack, Eboshi sees a more daunting adversary in San (Claire Danes/Yuriko Ishida), aka Princess Mononoke (roughly translated as “Princess Monster” or “Spirit Princess”), a young girl raised by giant wolves, who has been staging guerilla attacks on the town’s supply runs, and who is determined to kill Lady Eboshi.
If you’ve seen promotional materials for Princess Mononoke (including the trailer above), you’ve likely seen one of its more indelible images: San, standing beside her wolf-mother, mouth smeared in blood and delivering a formidable death-stare. It’s not the image you’d expect from the filmmaker who invented the benevolent woodland god Totoro. Then again, this film’s forest god, Shishigami, looks much less like a grinning, roly-poly, stuffed animal come to life; instead, we glimpse an eerie deerlike creature with a placid, human face that at night morphs into a ghostlike, humanoid giant (Miyazaki emphasizes the deity’s uncanniness by having the soundtrack go completely silent whenever the creature is on screen). From start to finish, Princess Mononoke features Miyazaki in a darker mode, with more explicit violence, copious decapitations and dismemberments, and an ending that, while it doesn’t go full-on apocalyptic, also doesn’t attempt to reset this world to its earlier incarnation.
That adult level of storytelling extends to how the director treats his characters. While the Emishi (a people who once existed in the northern realms of Japan’s main island) are portrayed as isolated and relatively primitive, they are in no way helpless innocents—a startling moment at the beginning of the film has a young villager pulling a machete against the boar monster, ready to stand her ground. A travelling monk, Jigo (Billy Bob Thornton/Kaoru Kobayashi) is affable and friendly, but is also devious and greedy, out to leverage Lady Eboshi’s munitions to claim a bounty the Emperor has placed on Shishigami’s head. (Literally. He wants that noggin.) And Ashitaka may not be well-versed in the complexities of modern-day commerce—he pays a village vendor with a gold nugget far more valuable than the goods bought—but he is able to read Lady Eboshi more accurately than the woman might desire, seeing how her ambition interferes with her more honorable impulses.
And yes, one of the more surprising things about Princess Mononoke is how it refuses to cast Lady Eboshi in classic villain mode—this despite her angular design that’s typical anime shorthand for Not a Good Person. There is a severity to the woman, as when she dismisses as dead two villagers who fall off a ridge during one of San’s attacks, and in the way she sadistically toys with the girl when they finally confront each other in battle.
Then there’s the issue of the ecological nightmare Eboshi is unleashing. Environmental concerns run through many of Miyazaki’s films, although rarely in a stridently overt way—you get the play of a lush, bucolic country life against the urban world in My Neighbor Totoro, or the “Stink Spirit” spawned of rampant pollution in Spirited Away. Following that pattern, Lady Eboshi could have been drawn as the greedy capitalist willing to run roughshod over the environment so long as the Mon (the standard currency at that time) keeps rolling in. That’s clearly an aspect of the woman, but it’s not the only one.
Miyazaki is careful to counterbalance the Lady’s darkness with a considerable amount of humanity. The craftspeople at her rifle works are lepers that Eboshi rescued from their outcast status; the women working the forge are former prostitutes she bought out of slavery. They all praise Eboshi for the respect she gives them, and for providing them with the dignity of honest work. It could be dismissed as another form of exploitation, but in the context of the times, we can see that their lives are infinitely better for the Lady’s intervention. (It’s also implied that the women are free to take lovers as they please, returning agency to their sexuality—something Ashitaka gets a sample of as they drool all over the handsome prince.) And while it isn’t stated explicitly in the film, I get the sense that Eboshi is some kind of exile herself, maybe just from her determination to stand as an equal in a male-dominated society. Her empathy for outcasts may well stem from her own outcast status.
This complexity of character creates an interesting tension in the film. Lady Eboshi is not a paragon of good—her ambitions have tainted the harmony of a forest; her products bring death and destruction; and it was a bullet from her foundry that inflicted the curse upon the giant boar who then cursed Ashitaka. She doesn’t hesitate in joining forces with Jigo, using a more advanced rifle to kill the forest god, thereby triggering a calamitous deluge that destroys Irontown.
And yet, we can’t hate her. It’s clear she cares for and respects those who work for her (she even apologizes to the men she left for dead once Ashitaka has rescued them). Her establishment of Irontown is done not purely out of greed or a thirst for power, but a desire to stand as her own person, and by extension to raise up those who serve her. She is a distinctive example of nobility—not a perfect person, in fact, a person possibly wrong in most of what she is doing—but she is more than her negatives. When Ashitaka expresses concern for Eboshi’s welfare during the film’s cataclysmic finale—a cataclysm Eboshi had a direct hand in—it comes as no surprise. From all we’ve seen, the Lady has earned it.
Princess Mononoke ends on an ambivalent note. The scoundrel Jigo, thwarted out of his Emperor’s bounty, squats on a precipice, grins, and declares, “You just can’t win against fools.” Shishigami regains its head, but vanishes from the Earth, marking the end of an era of harmony between nature and humanity. And Eboshi promises her villagers that they will rebuild a “better” Irontown. What that means—whether a further despoiling of the forest in the ongoing quest for more efficient ways to kill, or something more in accord with nature and more beneficial to humanity—is left open for interpretation.
Either way, we don’t grieve over her pronouncement. We might even root for her. Princess Mononoke portrays a world on the cusp of mammoth transformation, moving away from the realm of magic and mysticism to one of science and enlightenment. (Okay, okay, all you Tolkien fans can sit down now.) The revolution may come on the heels of improved ways to deliver mortality, but it might also lead to a better, wiser world. In encapsulating the good and bad of progress in the form of a complex, ambitious, yet empathetic woman, Hayao Miyazaki once again demonstrates that humanity is not divided into pure good and pure evil. Even the worst of us must be regarded through understanding eyes, just as we must always examine the motivations of our own acts.
Hayao Miyazaki followed up Princess Mononoke with Spirited Away (2001), which deservedly won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Still, as good as that film was, I regard Mononoke as the more towering achievement, both for its gorgeous animation and the maturity of its themes. What do you think? Are there Miyazaki films that you hold in higher regard? Are there other animated films you feel better confront the world with nuance and insight? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. And let’s not give into any villainous impulses while doing it—we’re better than that.