Princess Mononoke

3.5/4

Starring: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Billy Bob Thornton, Jada Pinkett-Smith

Rated PG-13 for Images of Violence and Gore

Without a doubt, Hayao Miyazaki is one of the great masters of cinema.  Not only are his stories exceptionally well told and gorgeously animated, but they are marvelously inventive and never settle for conventional plot elements.  “Princess Mononoke” is easily his most ambitious film yet (at least for the ones that I’ve seen), and it is almost wholly successful.

Ashitaka (Crudup) is a young warrior who is tasked with defending his small town.  At the edge of the wall, he sees something stirring.  It’s a hideous monster that looks like a walking pile of worms.  Ashitaka kills it, but in doing so, he is cursed.  To find a cure, he must find a way to settle a war between the industrious humans and the gods of the forest.

Putting it simply, this is a conflict between the old and the new.  What makes this film so special is the way Miyazaki tells the story.  The humans have gone the way of industry, and in their hubris, and ceased to care about the forest or its inhabitants.  The forest creatures in turn are blinded by their hatred of the humans, who they view have intruded on their turf.  This isn’t a particularly new kind of conflict but unlike “Avatar” or “Dances with Wolves,” Ashitaka never casts his lot with either side.  All he wants is for both sides to get along.

Animation is the one genre where dubbing really doesn’t make a difference.  The mouth movements are generally indecipherable, so subtitle-phobes and dubbing-haters need not worry.  It helps that the American voices are all first rate.  Billy Crudup is solid as the usually low-key Ashitaka, making sure that the character never becomes boring.  Claire Danes is adequate as San, the Wolf Girl (she was abandoned by her parents and adopted by wolves), but she’s not jarring like Cloris Leachman was in another Miyazaki feature, “Castle in the Sky.”  Minnie Driver is unrecognizable as the powerful Lady Eboshi.  She’s the head of the humans, but she has her reasons for the sometimes reprehensible things she does.  Jada Pinkett-Smith is also good in a small role.  The only one who doesn’t work is Billy Bob Thornton; his voice is too recognizable and we fail to see the character.  Fortunately, he’s only on screen for a relatively short amount of time.

This is easily Miyazaki’s most complex and challenging film to date.  But through superb storytelling and beautiful images, he manages to guide us through it without much confusion (the details of how the curse is caused by hatred are a little messy).  This is a thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable epic.