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Princess Mononoke – Film Analysis (Introduction to Japanese Film – Week 3)

Hayao Miyazaki is Japan’s most famous animator and probably the world’s best living animator. Along with Isao Takahata, he founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 after the success of Nausicaa. Eight of Studio Ghibli’s films are among the 15 highest-grossing anime films made in Japan. The Academy Award winning Spirited Away still holds the box-office record in Japan, sitting comfortably above Titanic. However, despite box office glory, his films are remarkably beautiful and clever, as we will see with Princess Mononoke.

Princess Mononoke

Miyazaki’s films have contained many progressive themes, such as pacifism, environmentalism, and feminism whilst being critical of capitalism, globalisation, and modernisation. After making the happy worlds of Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service Miyazaki wanted to make something more powerful with Princess Mononoke. In his own words:

“We’ve made many films in the past, and our goal with those films has been to send a message of hope and the possibility of happiness to growing children. What we realized was that by continuing to make movies that only taught them about hope and happiness, we were in fact turning a deaf ear to their very urgent needs and pleas, and that if we did not make a movie that directly addressed their needs and pleas, we no longer would have the right to make films that would encourage them to be hopeful and happy. So we made this film knowing that we would need to step outside the boundaries of what you call entertainment; we made this film from a sense of mission.”

Princess Mononoke addresses many issues absent from Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. It was his return to the more political realms of Nausicaa and Laputa, of films which promote awareness of global issues such as discrimination, global warming, and war.

Industry vs. Nature

To understand the context a little better, let me tell you that Miyazaki chose to set this film in the Muromachi Period (1336-1573). Japan had always been fairly closed off from the rest of Asia, but the Muromachi period was around the time when new ideas (religion) came to Japan. Whereas before, people worshipped nature, they now sought to tame it. Hence the deforestation around Iron Town to fuel the growth of civilization.

As we will explore throughout this analysis, Miyazaki somewhat impartially poses nature against human civilization. Yes, the iron cannon balls that caused the great boar at the beginning to turn to a demon were from Iron Town, showing that humanity doesn’t care enough about nature. But juxtaposing that, the leader of Iron Town is a strong woman who takes in lepers and former prostitutes, giving them jobs and food. Nothing in Princess Mononoke is good or evil. Hatred is what drives bad actions. The animal god’s hatred for human deforestation of their forest is justified as much as Lady Eboshi’s hatred for the animals that threaten her town and people.

You may be thinking otherwise. Of course nature is the victim in this film! Well you’re probably right. Miyazaki, like Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), held a bit of disdain towards industrialisation and modernisation. (After all, his intentions with Totoro were to encourage kids to venture outside.) But thankfully Miyazaki cleverly does not overtly favour nature in this film. Think about it. The apes want to eat the humans, the wolves want to chew their heads off, and the boars just want to wipe out Iron Town. Unlike singing animals in Disney films, these animals are more human. They debate, they argue, and they fight. Only those animals that do not speak are portrayed positively (think of the Forest Spirit and Ashitaka’s trusty elk steed Yakul).

It is only by portraying each side (nature vs. civilization) that Miyazaki can demonstrate that they can coexist. For human viewers, there would be no point in showing that we are completely evil; telling children that they are better off leaving nature alone is not what Miyazaki wants. Miyazaki wants people to care about nature and respect it. Similarly the film teaches us to respect and to try to understand everyone else; whether that is Lady Eboshi or Princess Mononoke.

2. Ashitaka and Jesus

Do I sound crazy? I kept thinking that Ashitaka’s role as the voice of peace and friendship was a definite allegory of Jesus, or at least reminiscent of a religious prophet. Well, here’s my reasoning in bullet points.

Ashitaka like Jesus has to leave his family in order to answer a higher being (tree spirit)
He has to resist hatred in the same way that Jesus had to resist temptation (infected arm)
He is a good Samaritan – he saves two men from Iron Town despite them being from what might be classed as the ‘enemy.’
- He also saves two enemies from killing each other (Lady Eboshi & San)
He is saved by the nature spirit, in the same way that Jesus rises from the dead. What’s more, is that his wounds, like the crucifixion marks of Jesus do not disappear at this point.
He preaches love. He seeks to protect each and every living thing – everyone is equal no matter what. He like Jesus, sees the good in everyone and respects everyone.
Yet Ashitaka, like Jesus, suffers for everyone. He is shot by the people of Iron Town, he is bitten by the wolves, and attacked by Princess Mononoke.

Ashitaka also seems to know exactly what he is doing the whole film. The usual ‘hero’s journey’ monomyth described by Joseph Campbell in his excellent book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is that the protagonist receives a ‘call to action’ which they initially refuse. Think of Rey in the latest Star Wars, not wanting to leave her home planet or of Frodo Baggins initially refusing the burden of the ring. In Princess Mononoke Ashitaka’s ‘call to action’ comes in the form of the boar which puts a curse on him which forces him to leave his town. However, unlike the usual ‘hero’s journey’ story, Ashitaka never doubts his path or hints that he will not try to locate the forest spirit. This decisiveness and purpose, to me , make him seem even more prophet-like. It is like he carries omnipotence (all knowledge) along with his benevolence (all loving character). Adding in his faith (in finding the forest spirit and spreading love and respect) makes him appear like a religious prophet or saint.

3. Don’t Underestimate Animation!

Isn’t the animation beautiful? I cannot imagine this film being shown in any other medium.

Miyazaki favoured animation because he could create whatever he wanted. There are no limits of reality those live-action confines directors to. Talking animals do exist in Babe, but to have a shimmering night walker in CGI will end up looking like a giant monster from Predator. Animation is the perfect medium for Princess Mononoke just as much as Princess Mononoke is the perfect story for animation. Without animation, the fantastical world would not work – especially given the technology in 1997.

In Princess Mononoke Miyazaki manages to blend hand drawn animation with computer generated animation seamlessly. The bulk of the film was hand-drawn but scenes with progression are smoothed over with computer generation. Think back to the scene where Ashitaka kills the boar god at the start of the film, and after it issues an omen to Ashitaka it decays before our eyes. This scene used technology to blend these hand drawings together smoothly and seamlessly. Similarly, this occurs right at the end of the film when greenery returns to the landscape as grass and plants grow. Unlike the technical leaps made by Pixar in animation, Miyazaki is a master of hand-drawn animation. Whilst Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle employed aspects of computer animation, Miyazaki returned to hand-drawn feature films with Ponyo. Therefore, think of him as one of the true auteurs of animation. He made an effort to review every frame of his films, and always maintained a hand in every aspect of film-making.

I really hope that after this film, you do not just think of animation as for kids! There are so many incredible animations that I will have to revisit in the future.

In context to Introduction to Japanese Film

Here’s to a quick few comparisons between Princess Mononoke and the two films we have looked at in the last two weeks.

How is Princess Mononoke like Like Ran?

Miyazaki uses high numbers of characters for blockbuster effect – just as Kurosawa used massive casts to emphasise the importance of key moments, Miyazaki drew a large boar army, large samurai armies, and masses of tree spirits for blockbuster effects.
Strong and important female characters! Lady Eboshi and San in Princess Mononoke, Lady Kaede in Ran.
Landscapes feature in both films to empower nature and the divine. (think of the tree spirit dominating over his landscape in comparison to the Gods in the sky in Ran).

How is Princess Mononoke Like Tokyo Story?

Miyazaki’s characters are well developed. As in Tokyo Story, we see their motives, their flaws, and their goodness.
Both films appear anti-modernisation. Tradition is the victim in Tokyo Story and nature is the victim in Princess Mononoke, both at the hands of modernisation and industrialisation.

What’s Next for Week 4?

We will take a look at one of the most famous Japanese film icons. Godzilla! Remade and remade again, Godzilla spawned the great monster blockbuster film. This is for all you fans of Pacific Rim, Jurassic Park, or King Kong. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy entertainment at its most glorious (without all the crazy CGI effects).

Los Conductos – Piece Together Colombian Society – Berlinale 2020

Los Conductos starts off like Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. A Dostoyevsky-esque man of the shadows (like the protagonist of Notes from Underground) peers out of the shadows watching the source of some footsteps nearby. He disappears and a gun appears. Shots are fired. The outcast steps out from the darkness and peers into the fresh bullet hole in his target. As the camera zooms closer to the wound, it cuts to a petrol pump being inserted into the petrol tank of a motorbike (a technique most recently used in Uncut Gems). Our shadow dweller, Pinky, reappears, robs the motorbike and escapes. It’s a minimalist opening that uses editing to generate the action and excitement without explicitly showing any violence.

The minimalist thriller opening doesn’t last as this film switches styles throughout. Here’s a quick list of all the different styles I caught in the film:

Music video: Pinky takes drugs and we get a close up of two Pinky heads bopping madly to very loud music. Reminiscent of the music and drug driven scenes in Trainspotting.
Documentary: The scenes in the print shop are static and slow, showing the workers guiding the printing machines without any narrative. Feels like Sergei Lonitza’s Factory, revealing the everyday workings of the factory.
Storytelling: A well-trimmed copy of Pinky tells his double a story about The Fallen Devil, adding mystery to the film like the storytelling of Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto and Mariano Llinas’ Extraordinary Stories.
Sketch Comedy: There’s even a scene in which Pinky and his double appear as clowns in a go-kart patrolling the streets of Bogota.

The stylistic mashup reminded me a bit of Pedro Manrique Figueroa’s collages, explored in Ospina’s A Paper Tiger, which bring together conflicting images to create political statements. In Los Conductos, the mix of styles construct Colombia as a nation built upon a mix of histories. Without a solid past, the country has no solid foundations to move forward from or even exist upon.

It isn’t helped by our single narrator, who we never feel like we can fully trust. He’s a murderer and junkie, plus he also splits into two characters at one point. Hardly elements that build a trustworthy narrator. He even looks like he’s been living in a cave for a few months, with wild unkempt hair and a long beard. But, whilst we can’t fully trust him, he’s a great candidate for narrator on the state of Colombia. Who best to comment on society, then someone who seems to exist outside of it? He’s experienced a lot and followed a range of cults and philosophies. He shows us Medellin from the street: inside the factories and vacant lots; and from above: through many shots of the city lit up from the hills he lives in.

From his perspective, we see the failures of consumer culture and capitalism in Colombia. The warehouses producing fake t-shirts to sell on the black market that Pinky works in, are ironically the only way Pinky can earn an ‘honest’ living. The mountains of garbage become Pinky’s search for treasure, a physical scar on the land courtesy of the endless waste produced by capitalism. Plus, there’s a distinct lack of care for the average worker. Pinky is forced onto the street by the factory and lives an existence as a forgotten man. This Colombia is cold and heartless.

Camilo Restrepo makes sure you feel it too by embodying a physicality into his film. The 16mm film gives the picture a graininess that you believe you could reach out and feel, whilst the close up of hands constructing, drawing, holding objects pulls you closer to the action, making it feel more tangible, like you’re controlling a character in a first person video game. You’re a part of the puzzle of Colombian society, and you, with the help of Pinky are given an opportunity to try and figure it out.

If you want to read more about Los Conductos, I strongly recommend reading Ben Flanagan’s review of the film for Vague Visages.

La Chimera (Italy) – Combining Time-Travel with Classic Cinema

La Chimera Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Time-travel is a key ingredient of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. It holds an unnatural power to change the future and the past, adding the driving plot behind the Back to the Future and Terminator series from the 1980s and a few modern Christopher Nolan films. Over in Italy, Alice Rohrwacher has mastered the ability to use time-travel naturally. Instead of using it as the driving force of the plot and drama, it is the icing on the cake. She has combined time-travel with wholly Italian influences; De Sica’s Neo-realism and Fellini’s Surrealism, to make her own fantastic style.

From: Italy, Europe
Watch: Trailer, JustWatch
Next: Happy as Lazzaro, First Cow, Caro Diario

La Chimera – The Breakdown

La Chimera starts with a dream. Sepia-tinted snippets of a woman in a garden evokes the feeling of warm nostalgia. The dream is interrupted by a train conductor asking for tickets, which introduces us to our dreamer: Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor. He picks out a very old looking train ticket the size of a postcard and his train-cabin-mates pick up on his unusual accent and ask where he comes from. “Far,” is his one-worded answer, coding the mystery of his character.

So who is Arthur, and has he come from another era? He doesn’t reveal anything obvious on the train. It’s not clear where he’s going or coming from, and as per his one-worded answer in the paragraph above, we don’t know who he is or where he is from either. A few puzzle pieces are inferred from the following scenes, but these do not give us a complete picture. We find out that:

He’s English
He’s been in jail – likely as the fall guy for a troubadour group of associates
He’s looking for a woman
He has a special skill at finding treasures from the past

Whilst these attributes build his character, they also all add to his mysteriousness by leading to new questions:

Why is an Englishman in rural Italy with a group of grave-robbers?
What led to his capture and was he turned in?
Who is he looking for and what happened to them?
How did he get his supernatural skill?

This mystery makes him appear like he’s been picked up from another world and time and plonked into rural Italy.

Time-travel has popped up before in Alice Rohrwacher’s films. In her previous feature, Happy as Lazzaro, the titular character falls from a great height, blacks out, and reappears in a modern era, portaling from his previous life in feudal Italy. Whilst the time-travel is more metaphorical than literal, Rohrwacher makes the jump more believable by situating Lazzaro (the lead character) in a location stuck in the past; a small rural Italian town with old, decaying houses, no modern infrastructure, and no signs of modern technology, before transporting him to the modern city. The town that Arthur finds himself in is exactly the same setting as Lazzaro’s decaying town. His house is a DIY shack on the outside of the town wall, he visits the crumbling house of his lost lover, and electronic screens and electricity itself are practically non-existent. This setting, combined with Arthur’s mystery makes viewers accustomed to Rohrwacher’s films feel like Arthur is from another era and place, and has got lost in old-town Italy whilst searching for his lost love.

Conclusion

If the time-travel and mystery haven’t already sold you on watching La Chimera, know that watching La Chimera is like watching a bubbling pot of Italian Cinema influences whilst witnessing a new talent find their stylistic voice. There’s pieces of De Sica’s neo-realism in the poverty-stricken characters and tough world they exist in, fragments of Antonioni’s mood-driven mystery in their vague backgrounds and existence, and a large chunk of Fellini’s surrealism and panache in the bombastic scenes and cinematic magic. Rohrwacher in La Chimera manages to bring together all these influences whilst building on the natural time-travel of Happy as Lazzaro, forming her own style from the embers of the Italian classics.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (France)

By Sebastian Torrelio

In the sparsest year for animation in some time, France has quietly put out what has been highlighted by the press as an “oddity.” Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds sports Juliette & Carmen, two young sisters staying with their neighbor Agnés for a spontaneous sleepover. Upon the first recess of supervision, they stumble into one of Agnés’ authored children’s books, are re-imagined as human-sized cats and seized by fantastically unevolved creatures. Within the book’s confinement they are assisted by Selma, an avian opera singer, who has connections to both the author’s past and to the most powerful figure in the land, the air-bound and unpredictable magician Sirocco.

Chieux’s Annecy Audience Award-winning feature is as simple as the art-house form ever presents itself, a fairy tale guided by so many instantaneous decisions the room to breathe compresses just short of heart-stopping. As Juliette and Carmen stumble into their neighbor’s tales, so does curiosity bite their new cat-like instincts near immediately, finding them in various states of ownership, imprisonment, freedom, and heroic resplendence within as little as 30 minutes of runtime. Nothing about Sirocco is hard to follow, a credit to Chieux’s knack for embedding a child’s perspective into his wonderland of immense proportions, yet the story’s constant moving target of new objectives does hinder its otherwise easygoing nature. Even in the opening minutes, the rug is pulled out by a change of perspective, the protagonist quickly redirected from a sleepy Agnés to the children’s hurricane of energy.

For what may prove more divisive in the Kingdom of Winds is Chieux’s choice of art-style. Sirocco is not crude-looking, per se, but intentionally rough and sparse in between the lines. Layers of atmosphere and Earthly settings in Selma’s world are rendered in light, ambient colors, near nothing to saturation, over layers of even further comparable color swatches. The character designs, aside from Selma herself, are rather spare – crowds of minions, flying beasts and assistants all with a bulb-like rounded figure, clone-like blobs fighting frenetic stick-limbed beings. Even the first fantastical character Juliette and Carmen encounter, a small wooden toy, humorously reminded me of a cheap Adult Swim character. Still, many will find the minimalism of anything presented at two dimensional-face value as charming these days.

Far and away, Sirroco’s biggest asset is its score – classical and orchestral, booming in its symphony, particularly in the theatrical setting it will get minimal playtime for in the United States. For all its public anime comparisons, the music of Sirocco is what ties it closest to recent Studio Ghibli efforts, a bountiful mixture of adventure and climactic overture to soundtrack the sights of Selma’s overhead journey. French vocalist Célia Kameni provides Selma’s singing voice, a baroque operatic performance that stuns in its un-poplike nature, her gorgeous, sustained notes an instrument in their own right.

If this review did not imply otherwise, Selma’s very existence is the only thing that holds Sirocco together as a story. Strong and goodhearted, but not without emotion, she keeps the value of a more considered, budgetary (real world) animation intact while engaging with naivete at every plot turn. Her most sagely words of wisdom echo what Chieux may have thought bringing her into this world: “Such a shame. The audience gets to see what artists they want. But the artists do not get to choose their audience.” With its bounty of unrestrained whimsy, Sirocco will be buried under other European efforts into the second half of this year, where it will advocate on its own modern merits for adolescent viewing attention. It should nevertheless not go unnoticed – many of life’s most pleasant joys are better stumbled upon, or into, anyway.

Seen at Laemmle Royal, Los Angeles