Princess Mononoke: Miyazaki's Environmental Politics and the Forest That Fights Back

"Princess Mononoke" was released in Japan in July 1997 and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history at the time, surpassing "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." It was the first of Miyazaki's films to be rated PG-13 in the United States — a consequence of its violence, which is more direct and more graphic than his previous work — and its theatrical release in North America, handled by Miramax, was his first significant international theatrical exposure. The film that most Western audiences encountered as their introduction to Miyazaki was also, by any measure, his most politically and morally complex work.

The conflict at the film's center is between the forest and the ironworks. Lady Eboshi's settlement, Irontown, has been built by giving refuge to lepers and women from the brothels — people whom the broader society has discarded — and sustaining them through the operation of iron smelters that require the clear-cutting of the forest. The forest is inhabited by forest gods, animal spirits, and Princess San (Mononoke), a human girl raised by wolves who fights to protect the forest from human encroachment. Both the settlement and the forest have legitimate claims; both will suffer if the other succeeds. There is no position in the film from which the conflict resolves cleanly.

Miyazaki's environmental politics are sometimes described as straightforwardly conservationist — nature good, industry bad — but "Princess Mononoke" is more honest than that reading allows. Lady Eboshi is not a villain; she is someone who has made choices that help specific people at the cost of damaging something larger. The people she has helped are real people whose need is real. The forest she is destroying contains values and lives that are also real. Miyazaki depicts both sides as containing human scale and human complexity, which is what makes the conflict genuinely tragic rather than melodramatically simple.

The film's protagonist, Ashitaka, is explicitly positioned to see both sides — he has been cursed by a corrupted boar god, which gives him a stake in understanding how corruption happens, and he travels between the forest and the settlement trying to find a way for both to survive. His position is not neutral; it is active and partial and ultimately insufficient, because the film is honest about the limits of individual mediation in structural conflicts. He can slow the destruction; he cannot stop it; and the ending — provisional, incomplete, more like a ceasefire than a peace — reflects the reality of the conflicts it depicts rather than the satisfactions that narrative convention would provide.

The forest itself is a character with a visual specificity that Miyazaki and his studio achieved through obsessive attention to environmental detail — the specific quality of light through canopy, the specific relationship between deep roots and shallow water, the specific way large trees move in wind. The deer god who lives at the forest's center, who appears as a graceful stag by day and a translucent giant by night, is among the most formally original character designs in animation history: a being of such scale and strangeness that the camera cannot quite contain it. Its eventual fate, which the film treats with the same moral seriousness as everything else, is among the most affecting sequences Miyazaki has produced.