Princess Mononoke Review

The moral structure is what makes it endure. Eboshi is deforesting a mountain and she is also the only person in the film who takes in lepers and buys women out of brothels, and Miyazaki lets both facts stand without resolving them. Ashitaka is written as a mediator rather than a hero, and the film keeps refusing him a decisive victory. San stays feral and unassimilated to the end. The craft is at Ghibli's peak: the kodama's clicking heads, the mud-and-blood texture of the boar god's corruption, the Forest Spirit's shift from a deer into a towering nightwalker, and the sheer physical weight of the ironworks bellows sequence all read as events rather than images.

Joe Hisaishi's score, patient and modal, withholds its choral swell until the film has earned it. Even the violence is unglamorous, with arrows removing limbs in single unshowy cuts. The ending grants no restoration, only the obligation to begin again, which is a harder position than anything else in this catalogue takes.