To Hope, or Not to Hope?: A Reflection on Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke

Princess Mononoke (1997) by Hayao Miyazaki is a spellbinding epic of a film, filled with animation eye candy and gripping conflict throughout. Last fall, a friend and I took it upon ourselves to watch every film Miyazaki has ever directed in chronological order. More than one kept me thinking long after its conclusion (I’m looking at you, Porco Rosso, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and The Wind Rises!), but Princess Mononoke really took the cake in this regard. To tease out my thoughts and emotions in response to this film, I decided to write an essay on what the film has to say about climate change. (You can find my review of a similar theme in Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron here.)

At first, I found the film uplifting. “Yeah! We can end the strife between Man and Nature! We can make better, more sustainable choices!” After all, most of the main characters emerge unscathed from the war. Prince Ashitaka and San go on to explore a long distance relationship, Lady Eboshi escapes with her life (albeit with one fewer arm), and even Jigo — the orchestrator of the assassination plot against the Forest Spirit — lives to fight another day. Indeed, the very “death” of the Forest Spirit at the end of the film proves no death at all, instead a rebirth in the form of greenery as far as the eye can see, where earlier there had stood only man made structures and scorched earth. This was all nice and good until I asked myself, “How exactly was peace achieved in the film?” The answer, of course, is Ashitaka. And that’s when my mood took a turn for the worse.

You see, Ashitaka is a Christ figure. He goes forth to “see with eyes unclouded by hate” despite a mortal curse wrought upon his arm, much as Jesus chose to love even those who ultimately would betray him. When the townspeople of Iron Town encroach upon San, Ashitaka throws a cross between her and them to keep her safe. Later, he opens the gate to Iron Town by himself — a 10-person feat, according to the gatekeeper — and thanks the townspeople for their hospitality before departing with San slung over his shoulder. (Keep in mind that a woman has shot Ashitaka through the back with a rifle! Talk about “turning the other cheek…”) Like Lazarus, Ashitaka is resurrected by a higher power. San brings him to the island of the Forest Spirit, where the creature cures him of his bullet wound (though not of his cursed arm). In short, he is born again, ready to continue his crusade for harmony between Man and Nature.

In other words, Ashitaka is more of a divine being than a mortal man. And using that divine strength (physical and otherwise), he is able to end the war between Lady Eboshi, who represents civilization, and San, who represents the forest. The two may never be friends, but by the end of the film, they at least agree to stop fighting. We know peace has been achieved because of two conversations toward the end of the film. The first takes place between Ashitaka and San. At this juncture, San betrays human fallibility when she confesses, “Ashitaka, you mean so much to me. But I can’t forgive the humans for what they’ve done.” Of interest to us here is the implicit distinction San draws between “the humans” and Ashitaka himself. To Moro, the wolf goddess (and San’s adoptive mother), he is no more than a boy. San, however, acknowledges his extra-humanness (read: divinity) when she continues to love him in spite of her derision for “all humans,” which she professes early and often throughout the film. Moments later, Ashitaka responds to San’s grudge. “I understand. You’ll live in the forest and I’ll go help them rebuild Iron Town. I’ll always be near. Yakul and I will come and visit you whenever we can, alright?” In reply, San nods and smiles. That San permits Ashitaka to help the “humans” rebuild Iron Town notwithstanding the recent murder of Moro by these people is a gesture of peace on the forest’s side of the war. She either trusts that Lady Eboshi won’t make the same mistake twice or she knows that Ashitaka will steer her away from violence toward the forest in the future. In either case, San responds to this news without violence.

The second conversation takes place between Lady Eboshi and her townspeople, the cut immediately after that between Ashitaka and San. Lady Eboshi remarks, “Amazing. The wolves and that crazy little wolf girl helped save us all… We’re going to start all over again. This time, we’ll build a better town” (my emphasis). “Start all over again” summons the idea of another Iron Town, where humans continue to exploit the earth’s riches for material gain. “A better town,” though? Decidedly more ambiguous. If Lady Eboshi had uttered this sentence earlier in the film, I would have interpreted it to mean more of the same, only on a grander scale: iron ore, extracted from a deforested mountain, much to the dismay of its non-human inhabitants. Yet insofar as Lady Eboshi is saved by San and her wolf siblings (and Ashitaka), and to the extent that she acknowledges this debt in the denouement, I read “better” here as synonymous with “more sustainable,” or “in more harmony with Nature.” Such an interpretation functions as Lady Eboshi’s rejoinder to San’s behavior earlier. Each one consents to live in peace with the other moving forward.

But if it takes a Christ figure in the form of Ashitaka to engender peace in Miyazaki’s world, what hope is there for us to be saved in the real world, short of the Second Coming? This summer, Man seems more at war with Nature than ever before in my lifetime. Hurricanes on the East Coast; wildfires throughout the West. Unprecedented heat waves across the entirety of the United States; air quality alerts (in Denver, at least) on a weekly basis. What better term to describe these calamities than “war”? And, if we are at war, can we count on an Ashitaka figure to broker a peace treaty between humans and the forest?

Unfortunately, we can’t. Furthermore, it is this answer that causes me to read Princess Mononoke as the tragedy of our time. Although the narrator assures us at the start of the film that there was once harmony between Man and Nature; and while Miyazaki offers us hope at the end of the film that humans and the forest will choose to live more harmoniously moving forward; significantly, both of these dynamics occur off camera. To be clear, this choice is not devoid of artistic merit. Miyazaki seems more interested in posing questions than answering them in Princess Mononoke (a far cry from the moralizing rampant throughout Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind). However, the fact that such harmony is alluded to twice without explicit illustration thereof does make one wonder: Does Miyazaki even know what worldwide harmony in the universe of the film would look like? Moreover, if the genius behind Princess Mononoke cannot conceive of such a world in detail, what hope do we have as mere humans — neither Miyazakis nor Ashitakas — to do so?

Lest I despair, I try to remember Ashitaka’s words to San in the aftermath of the Forest Spirit’s decapitation. San laments, “It’s over. Everything’s over. The forest is dead.” Ashitaka replies, “Nothing is over. The two of us are still alive. Now, will you help me, San?” So long as San, who represents the forest, still lives; so long as Ashitaka, who represents harmony, still lives; there is hope. Or, at the very least, there can be no hope without these two. Perhaps it is the duty of Man to keep the pursuit of harmony alive. (As well as the forest, to whatever degree we as individuals are able.)