10 / 10
Official trailer
Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 Studio Ghibli animated fantasy and among the most ambitious works in the director’s filmography. The film depicts a conflict between an industrializing iron-working settlement and the forest gods whose habitat the settlement is destroying. Yoji Matsuda voices Ashitaka, a young prince exiled from his dying tribe who encounters the conflict. Yuriko Ishida voices San, the human girl raised by wolves who fights on the forest’s side. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay.
Studio Ghibli produced the film on a budget of approximately twenty-five million dollars, and it opened in Japan in July 1997. The work became the highest-grossing Japanese film at the time of its release. Nothing else Miyazaki made grabs me as hard as this one. It’s angry and sad, it refuses to hand anybody a villain to hate, and I find that refusal thrilling in an animated film. It’s a 10 because I can’t think of another fantasy, drawn or live-action, that trusts its audience with this much moral weight.
The film works as environmental drama and as study in moral situations without clear villains. The work refuses the heroic structure that animated fantasy typically deploys. The film presents Lady Eboshi, the industrial settlement’s leader, as protector of social outcasts whose work serves a defensible human purpose even as it destroys the forest. It presents the forest gods as legitimate participants in an ongoing relationship that the human industrialization is breaking. The work asks the audience to hold sympathy for multiple positions whose interests can’t be reconciled.
The structural design produces sustained moral engagement that conventional fantasy structures don’t require.
The Refused Villain Structure
This story refuses the villain structure animated fantasy usually leans on.
Lady Eboshi runs a settlement that shelters lepers, former prostitutes and other outcasts the surrounding society threw away, and cutting the forest keeps those people fed and safe. She’s the forest’s antagonist without ever becoming a villain. I think she’s the best character in the film, and it thrills me that I can’t root against her even while she’s tearing the forest apart.
The forest gods aren’t innocent either. The boar god Okkoto leads his clan into a suicidal attack sooner than accept that the world has changed, and the wolf goddess Moro has raised San to hate humanity beyond what the situation calls for. The forest’s resistance carries its own destructive logic, and both positions make sense until they collide. Okkoto’s charge is the part that guts me, a proud old god marching his whole clan to its death because he can’t bend.
For Writers
Refusing the villain structure produces moral complexity that the structure doesn’t allow. Princess Mononoke positions both sides of its central conflict as defensible while showing how the conflict between them produces destruction. This applies to fiction with structural ambition. Consider whether your central conflicts require villains or whether the dramatic situation works more effectively when both sides hold defensible positions. The villain structure simplifies dramatic engagement. The non-villain structure complicates engagement and rewards it differently.
The Ashitaka Position
Ashitaka works as observer and mediator instead of as conventional protagonist.
The prince has been exiled from his tribe after killing a corrupted boar god and has acquired a curse that will eventually kill him. He arrives at the central conflict without prior commitment to either side. His position allows the audience to encounter both Lady Eboshi’s industrial settlement and the forest gods’ resistance without committing to either’s argument. The structural design uses Ashitaka’s outsider status to maintain the work’s moral complexity throughout the runtime.
Ashitaka ends up refusing both sides’ demand that he help destroy the other, and he works to broker survival for everyone. The film never makes that easy, and he fails again and again across the runtime. The resolution asks us to accept that some moral situations don’t come out clean, and it offers conciliation in place of victory. I find that ending braver than any triumphant finale Miyazaki could’ve drawn, and it’s the reason this gets a 10 from me.
For Writers
Protagonist position can structure audience engagement with complex moral material. Ashitaka’s outsider status allows the audience to encounter the central conflict without forced commitment to either side. This applies to fiction with morally complex material. Consider whether your protagonist’s position helps the audience engage with the material’s complexity or forces simplification. Outsider protagonists allow complexity. Insider protagonists require side-taking that may simplify the material’s demands.
The Production Scale
Its production scale is one that animation rarely attempts. The work contains approximately one hundred forty-four thousand individual cels. Miyazaki personally corrected approximately eighty thousand of them. The production employed serious digital integration alongside traditional hand-drawn animation, including some of the first digital compositing work in major Japanese animation.
The investment produced visual detail and consistency that smaller productions can’t achieve. The work is a benchmark for what committed animation production can accomplish.
Eighty thousand cels corrected by one man’s hand is a number I can’t get over. You can see that obsession on screen, and I’d take this kind of stubborn, exhausting craft over efficient studio animation any day.
The production also extended Miyazaki’s reputation for personal craft commitment beyond what later directors have typically maintained. The director’s personal correction work across most of the cel output represented investment that later commercial animation has generally moved away from.
The work emerges from production culture that prized individual craft over efficient division of labor. The aesthetic produced is partially dependent on this production approach and partially independent of it. The work shows both what such production approaches can produce and the personal cost they impose on individual creators.
For Writers
Major creative works often require production commitment that exceeds standard practice. Princess Mononoke’s production approach depended on Miyazaki’s willingness to invest personal craft labor at scale that distributed production wouldn’t have demanded. This applies to creative work broadly. Consider whether your major works require commitment that exceeds your default working practice. Major works are sometimes definable through the willingness to commit beyond comfortable practice. The output reflects the input. Decorative work can be produced through efficient practice. Foundational work often can’t.
Craft Note
Miyazaki’s structural decision to refuse the villain structure required disciplined character development across the entire ensemble. Each major character needed to occupy a defensible position that the audience could engage with sympathetically even when the character’s actions contributed to destruction. The character work required careful preparation across the screenplay development, the storyboard work, and the voice direction. The completed film works because each character has been developed thoroughly enough to support the moral complexity the structure requires.
Reactive character development would have collapsed the work into conventional hero-villain structure that the underlying argument refuses. The lesson applies to creative work broadly. Refusing conventional structures requires preparation proportional to the departure. The default structure exists partially because it requires less preparation than alternatives. Departure from default requires investment that supports the alternative.
Is Princess Mononoke as good as people say?
Princess Mononoke gets its 10 from me because it takes the hardest road animated fantasy can take and never flinches.
Eboshi and the forest gods both have a case, Ashitaka fails more often than he wins, and the ending settles for an uneasy peace. The craft behind it, all those hand-corrected cels, shows on screen. If you care about animation, about Miyazaki, about environmental drama or about films that refuse their genre’s easy shape, I can’t recommend anything more strongly.
