Princess Mononoke

Judged on structure. The spine is required. A curse taken in defence of a village sends a prince west to find its cause, and the cause is an iron ball fired from a town that is clearing a forest, so the wound in his arm is the film’s argument carried on a body. The raid on Irontown, with Ashitaka walking out through the gate with San while shot through, is required; so are Okkoto’s march and corruption, which repeat Nago’s fall at the scale of a clan, and the head’s return. What gives is the middle, and it holds the axis at its figure. The film crosses between town and forest more often than the argument needs. Lord Asano’s samurai at the gate, whom the plot drops, and the market’s long introduction of Jigo could go without loss of a fact; Kohroku’s comedy is relief, not law. At this length the scale is permitted more than compelled.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the same act that cares for the outcast destroys the living world, and no one in the film is wrong about what they are owed. Eboshi buys women out of brothels and gives them the bellows, takes in lepers no one else will touch and gives them work, and with that work makes the guns that kill the gods. The lepers bless her; the forest dies of her. The film shows it in image more than in speech: the town’s walls and furnace against moss and water, a god’s flesh boiling into black worms around an iron ball. A second truth is in San, a human who refuses to be one, and in Ashitaka’s discovery that the place between is exile, not peace. Held below the top because the theme is stated in speeches more than once, and because Ashitaka, the eye that sees both sides, is clearer than any person can be.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Elevation is frequent, of several kinds, and placed at the joints. Nago coming out of the trees as a mass of writhing red and black worms is terror on the first page. The Forest Spirit at its pool, a deer with a face near human, flowers rising and dying in each print of its feet, is the sublime in the old sense, beauty and fear at once. The Night-walker, the same god as a translucent giant crossing the hills at dusk, is grandeur. San sucking the blood from Moro’s wound; the boar army in the mist; Moro’s severed head still closing its jaws on Eboshi’s arm. The summit is the headless god spreading death over the mountain and then life as it falls. Held below the top because the war of boars and men is action more than elevation, and the rise there is slower.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The myth is built, not borrowed. The Shishigami is Miyazaki’s composition from older matter, a god who gives life and takes it in one step, by day a deer and by night a giant of the hills, and the plot is the killing of that god and the return of its head. That is load-bearing: without the decapitation there is no last act and no disclosure. Around it the film builds a second order of archetypes: the cursed hero sent out of his people, whose wound is the measure of his journey and is never quite healed; the girl raised by wolves who will not be human; the animal gods whose age is ending. The particular stays particular: rice, iron sand, a leper’s bandaged hand, an Emishi elk. Held a tenth below the top because the Emishi frame is evoked more than built, and the end restores only grass, a smaller myth than the one the film has killed.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is the period film of Japan, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and the jidaigeki that followed, set among lords and warriors; the animated adventure for the family that Ghibli had made its own; and Miyazaki’s own Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which had already set a heroine between a poisoned forest and the people who burn it. The turn is real and cost something. The period is moved from samurai to the people the genre left out, a leper, a woman at the bellows, an Emishi prince, an ironworking town, and the samurai are a rabble at the gate. There is no villain, and the hero settles nothing. The violence is real, arrows taking off arms and heads, from a studio known for children’s films. Held below the bar because Nausicaä had proved the path thirteen years before, and the turn deepens it more than it leaves it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows: that gods and men are made of the same matter and can be wounded by the same iron. The drawn image does what a photograph could not without division. The curse is a drawn line that moves; the god’s footprints bloom and wither in the same frame; the wolves and boars carry faces and speech without becoming costume; the forest is painted in a density that makes it a world and not a set. The episodic quest is the form of Ashitaka’s knowing, since he learns each side by entering it. What holds the figure is that the narrative form is the adventure film’s, journeys and raids and a siege, and much of it is container rather than instrument. Retold as a live-action epic, the film would lose its gods; retold as another kind of animated story, it would lose less.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Twenty-nine years of return are evidence, and the questions have stayed open: whether Eboshi is condemned or vindicated, since she loses an arm and resolves to build a better town; whether the ending is restoration or loss, grass growing where the old forest stood; whether the parting of San and Ashitaka is hope or its refusal. Readings have gathered beyond the ecological one: the film as a counter-history of Japan, its people the marginal and the Emishi rather than the court; as a study of industry’s care and cruelty held in one hand; as Miyazaki’s argument with his own Nausicaä. The form yields on return, chiefly in the backgrounds and the god’s design. Held by span, and because the moral reading converges once Eboshi is seen whole: the question is posed with great clarity, and a clear question renews less on return than an obscure one.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Released in 1997, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that a drawn film could carry a historical tragedy without a villain, for adults, at epic length, and that animation could be the means of a serious national film and not a genre beside one. It synthesised more than it reorganised: Nausicaä and Takahata’s work had done much of it in smaller rooms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film broke Japan’s box-office record and moved the place of animation in the national cinema, and it was the film by which much of the world outside Japan first took Miyazaki as a director rather than a maker of children’s films. That redirection was concentrated in animation and in Japan; against the whole cinema of its decade the reach is strong but not the widest, and the figure stands a tenth below the bar.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-nine years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one cut, and the English dub is an alternative track that replaces nothing. Presence has been continuous. In Japan the film has been broadcast and sold without a break; abroad it has been in repertory and on every home format, though its presence is below that of the studio’s most widely seen films. The surface is mostly free of its moment, set in a medieval Japan and painted by hand, but it carries a small charge: the digital compositing of 1997 is visible in places and is of its year. Wide presence over that span, with a slight charge on the surface, meets the bar and no more.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts, and the making bears weight in most departments. The backgrounds, under art directors who include Kazuo Oga, make the forest a place with light, damp and depth. The animation of animals carries weight and fury, the wolves’ run and the boars’ charge above all, and the curse is a technical invention made to look like a disease of matter. Joe Hisaishi’s score, with the title song, carries the film’s scale without pressing it. The cutting of the opening and of the headless god’s flood is exact. The costs: the human faces are the house’s, San and Ashitaka drawn from a repertoire rather than for this film; the voice work, Hisaya Morishige’s Okkoto and Akihiro Miwa’s Moro excepted, is plainer than the picture; and the middle sieges are staged with less invention than the opening.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Jigo, a comic monk who eats from a pot and complains about his feet, and the headless god pouring death across the mountain. One law governs both: every life is bought from another, and every party has a reason the film respects. Jigo serves the emperor’s writ for the god’s head because that is his living; the flood of death is what the taking costs. Eboshi’s charity and her guns, the women’s songs at the bellows, the boars’ pride and their failing size, Moro’s love for San and her hatred of men all obey it, and comedy and dread live in one world. The strain is in Kohroku and the town’s broad humour, which obey the law but lightly, and in the ending, where the grass and a single kodama make a consolation the law has not quite earned. The range is wide, and it mostly holds.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what a film of this length holds. The natural order, as a forest with its own gods and its own politics; the sacred, in a god of life and death and its killing; labour, in iron-making as a whole economy, from sand to furnace to gun; disease and its outcasts, in the lepers; women freed from brothels into work, and a woman governing a town; the state, in an emperor’s writ, a lord’s samurai and a monk’s commission; war, on three sides; history, in the Muromachi age and the Emishi pushed east; technology, in the gun. They are held together, not listed: the iron ball in Nago links them all. What holds the axis at its figure is consciousness, rendered from outside and chiefly in action, and the family, present only as Moro’s foster-daughter and Ashitaka’s lost village.

Score: 8.2 / 10