Princess Mononoke
I’m calling it: Hayao Miyazaki is the feminist film maker everyone thought Joss Whedon was. For years people tried to say Joss Whedon was the best at representing women in film and tv, citing Buffy and Firefly as examples. And Whedon was so smug about it. You know who’s not smug about the way he writes women in film and tv? Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki has made ten feature films and a solid eight of them are about or have main characters that are women. I could have chosen any of those films to talk about this month to be honest, but I picked this one, probably because of one of the primary villains of the story, Lady Eboshi. Before I talk about her though, there’s something else I want to say about Miyazaki. He was asked once (like Whedon) why he writes so many stories about women, and his response was essentially to say, because women exist in the world in diverse representations and as many iterations as the men. Because women are there.
This movie is no exception to that statement. We of course have the aforementioned Lady Eboshi, who acts as one of the antagonists of the story, but we also have the title character, Princess Mononoke, better known as San. There is also Toki and the other women of Irontown, as well as Moro, San’s wolf mother. And all of these female characters are represented in such different and diverse ways.
Lady Eboshi is the character we get to know first. She is compassionate and strong-willed but practical too. She has such a heart for the marginalised, which is such a weird trait to see in a villain, but also kind of refreshing. She is more than just her ambition and her desire to destroy the forest and the Forest Spirit. She has a passion for saving women from brothels (ones who don’t want to be there) and giving them jobs and new lives. She refuses to let the men in her town rule the roost like they want, and because they all respect her enough (because of guns, why else?), they leave the women alone. Sometimes they still say misogynistic things, but for the most part, Eboshi keeps the men from treating the women the way they were being treated before. Not only that, but she has also taken in a community of lepers who no one else would go near, and she’s given them jobs and a purpose and a place to live and receive medical care. She also demonstrates at the end of the movie that she can learn. She realises that she was on the wrong track and that fighting against nature isn’t the way to do things.
We also see many different kinds of women working in Irontown, under Eboshi. Toki is the most prominent character, and while she’s strong-willed and a hard worker, she also has a husband she loves. She states on a couple of occasions that she knows he’s stupid, but she loves him anyway. The other women also refuse to take any shit from anyone, whether it be the other men in the town, Eboshi’s guards, or the Samurai soldiers who are trying to invade Irontown.
Of course we also have San, our very own Princess Mononoke, who is an incredible fighter and has a love for nature and the forest, as well as the gods of the forest. We see her trying to take Eboshi down on several occasions to save the forest and the gods of the forest, who are slowly being taken down by Eboshi’s iron bullets which are rotting inside them. She does her best to prevent Okkoto the boar god from turning into a demon, despite Moro’s insistences that it’s hopeless. She helps to heal Ashitaka, despite saying over and over again that she hates him and all humans.
Moro, though not as prominent of a character, also serves as a lovely example of a female character. Her primary function in the story is as a mother figure for San, and we see her nurturing nature manifest in many different ways. She tells Ashitaka to leave to keep San safe, she saves her from being absorbed into demon Okkoto, and she has raised and loved San her whole life. It’s nice to also see a maternal figure represented in the film, and that’s part of what I love about Miyazaki. He’s not just showing one type of woman in these films, he spends time and effort depicting a wide range of female characters.
And that’s really the reason this film is so incredible. The portrayals are wildly diverse and each character is three dimensional and has motivations, dreams and insecurities. They have desires to overcome their hardships and they work hard and demonstrate an inability to give up on what they believe in. It’s not necessarily the kind of film you’d expect to have this sort of representation in it, but it really delivers.
Princess Mononoke is available to stream on Netflix in Australia and the UK, and HBO Max in the US. It’s available to rent or buy in Australia and the US on YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. It is not currently available to rent or buy online in the UK.
