User:Sjones23/Princess Mononoke

Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫) is a 1997 Japanese animated historical fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Toshio Suzuki produced the film and the animation was produced by Studio Ghibli. Joe Hisaishi provided the music. The film stars the voices of Yōji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yūko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi, Sumi Shimamoto and Akihiro Miwa. The film tells the story of the last prince of the Emishi tribe seeking a cure for a curse inflicted on his right arm as he is caught in a struggle between the supernatural guardians of a forest and the humans, who consume the environment's resources.

Princess Mononoke was released in Japan on July 12, 1997.

Plot
The film opens with a description that Japan was once populated with forests, where a group of gods live. Ashitaka, a young man riding on his red elk Yakul, lives in a remote village belonging to his people, the Emishi. His village is attacked by Nago, a giant wild boar turned into a demon god (祟り神). Ashitaka kills the demon god, but the prince is inflicted with a curse on his forearm, granting him immense strength but will gradually kill him. He discovers from the village's oracle that Nago was aggravated by an iron ball in his body; Nago also came from the western lands. Following the oracle's advice, Ashitaka sets off to the western lands in search of a cure. As he wanders the land, Ashitaka befriends Jiko-Bou, a traveling monk who tells him about the forests in the west as well as the deer god (シシ神), a creature who lives there.

The forest is continually cleared by a group of citizens living in Tataraba (たたら場), a town located in the west and led by Lady Eboshi. The citizens use the forest to make charcoal to smelt ironsand and make advance weaponry called Ishibiya (石火矢), resulting in fights from the forest gods. In one such fight, Eboshi's people are attacked by a group of giant wolves led by their goddess Moro; among the group is San, a young woman raised by the wolves and has a hatred towards humans. The wolves are driven off by Eboshi's people. In the forest, Ashitaka rescues two injured men and encounters the Deer God in the process; he takes them to Tataraba (たたら場), a refuge for the country's social outcasts. While there, Ashitaka discovers that Eboshi was responsible for turning Nago into the demon god. However, San infiltrates Tataraba and fights Eboshi, but Ashitaka intervenes and ends their duel. As Ashitaka leaves, he is wounded by one of the townspeople after she accidentally shoots at him. San takes Ashitaka, who is on the verge of death, to the forest. The deer god, in the form of a gigantic Daidarabotchi, arrives and transforms to its deer-like form; the spirit heals the gunshot wound, but is unable to remove Ashitaka's curse.

As San and Ashitaka fall in love with each other, a group of boars led by their god Okkotonushi arrive and attack Tataraba. While preparing for the assault, Eboshi plots to kill the deer god. Meanwhile, Jiko-Bou intends to give the head to the emperor, who promises to grant the town's protection from the local daimyos. The citizens of Tataraba and the imperial hunters manage to kill the boars. By using the boars's skins, the hunters trick Okkotonushi into leading them to the deer god, and San is unable to convince him of the truth. After turning Okkotonushi into a demon god, the hunters trap San within it. Ashitaka, Moro and the wolves reach the forest and rescues San. The deer god takes both Okkotonushi and Moro's lives away. However, Eboshi confronts the deer god during its transformation into the Daidarabotchi, and uses her Ishibiya to behead the spirit.

As Jiko-Bou collects the deer god's head, the spirit searches for the head by destroying everything in its path; Tataraba is nearly burned down in the process. Ashitaka and San confront Jiko-Bou, who allows them to take the deer god's head and give it back to the spirit as the sun rises. After the spirit falls into the lake, the lands rejuvenate themselves, and the accursed and lepers are restored to health. San professes her love for Ashitaka, but because of her hatred towards humans, she decides to continue living in the forest. Ashitaka decides to stay and help rebuild Tataraba, but tells San that he will visit her in the forest. Eboshi vows to make Tataraba a better town, Jiko-Bou admits that it is impossible to win against fools, and the final scene shows a Kodama appearing in the forest.

Cast
Yōji Matsuda voices Ashitaka (アシタカ), the last prince of the Emishi tribe whose traveling companion is Yakul (ヤックル). Miyazaki did not want Ashitaka to be a typical hero, saying that he is a "melancholic boy who has a fate" and also stated that Ashitaka's curse "is similar to the lives of people [at the time]" Ashitaka's English voice actor Billy Crudup stated that he liked Ashitaka as "an unexpected hero. He’s not your usual wild, brave guy. He’s really just a young, earnest man who’s trying to lead a valuable life and protect his village." San (サン), a human girl raised by the wolves, is voiced by Yuriko Ishida. In the English version, San is voiced by Claire Danes.

Yūko Tanaka provides the voice of Lady Eboshi (エボシ御前), the ruler of Iron Town who continually clears the forest. Miyazaki stated that Eboshi was supposed to have a traumatic past, although it is not specifically mentioned in the film. Miyazaki said that Eboshi has strong and secure personality, evident in the fact that she let Ashitaka move freely through the settlement unescorted, despite his unclear motives. He also said that Eboshi does not acknowledged the Emperor's authority in Irontown, a revolutionary view for the time, and displays an atypical attitude for a woman of that era in that she wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice herself or those around her for her dreams. Miyazaki also said that Eboshi resembles a shirabyōshi. Eboshi's English voice actress Minnie Driver stated that she was interested "the challenge of playing [a] woman who supports industry and represents the interests of man, in terms of achievement and greed." Driver viewed Eboshi as "a warrior, an innovator and a protector.

Akihiro Miwa portrays Moro (モロの君), a giant wolf goddess and San's adopted mother. Hisaya Morishige provides the voice of Okkotonushi (乙事主), a boar god. Gillian Anderson and Keith David respectively provided the voices of Moro and Okkotonushi in the English dub.

Kaoru Kobayashi provides the voice of Jiko-Bou (ジコ坊), a monk and mercenary who befriends Ashitaka on his journey to the west. Miyazaki was unsure whether to make Jigo a government spy, a ninja, a member of a religious group or "a very good guy." He eventually decided to give Jigo elements of the above groups. In the English version, Jiko-Bou is voiced by Billy Bob Thornton.

Sumi Shimamoto voices Toki (トキ), a former prostitute and the leader of Eboshi's women; Jada Pinkett Smith provides her voice in the English dub. Tsunehiko Kamijō was cast as the voice of Gonza (ゴンザ), Eboshi's bodyguard; he was voiced by John DiMaggio in the English dub. Kohroku (甲六), Toki's wife, is voiced by Masahiko Nishimura; John DeMita voiced Kohroku in the English version.


 * Hisaya Morishige as Okkotonushi (乙事主), the leader of the boar gods. In the English version, Okkotonushi is voiced by Keith David.
 * Mitsuko Mori as Hii-sama (ヒイ様), the wise woman of Ashitaka's village. In the English version, Hii-sama is voiced by Debi Derryberry.

Production
In the late 1970s, Miyazaki drew sketches of a film about a princess living in the woods with a beast.

Miyazaki began writing the film's plotline and drew the initial storyboards for the film in August 1994. In April 1995, supervising animator Masashi Ando devised the character designs from Miyazaki's storyboard. In May 1995, Miyazaki drew the initial storyboards. That same month, Miyazaki and Ando went to the ancient forests of Yakushima, of Kyūshū, and the mountains of Shirakami-Sanchi in northern Honshū for location scouting along with a group of art directors, background artists and digital animators for three days. Animation production commenced in July 1995. Miyazaki personally oversaw each of the 144,000 cels in the film, and is estimated to have redrawn parts of 80,000 of them.

The final storyboards of the film's ending were finished only months before the Japanese premiere date.

Princess Mononoke is mostly hand-drawn, but incorporates some use of computer animation during five minutes of footage throughout the film. The computer animated parts are designed to blend in and support the traditional cel animation, and are mainly used in images consisting of a mixture of computer generated graphics and traditional drawing. A further 10 minutes uses digital paint, a technique used in all subsequent Studio Ghibli films. Most of the film is colored with traditional paint. However, producers agreed on the installation of computers to successfully complete the film prior to the Japanese premiere date.

Princess Mononoke was produced with an estimated budget of ¥2.35 billion (approximately US$23.5 million).

Inspirations
Miyazaki was a fan of John Ford, an Irish-American film director best known for his Western films. He created Iron Town as a "tight-knit frontier town" and populated it with "characters from outcast groups and oppressed minorities who rarely, if ever, appear in Japanese films." He made the characters "yearning, ambitious and tough." Miyazaki did not want to create an accurate history of Medieval Japan, and wanted to "portray the very beginnings of the seemingly insoluble conflict between the natural world and modern industrial civilization."

The landscapes appearing in the film were inspired by Yakushima. Despite being set during the Muromachi period, the actual time period of Princess Mononoke depicts a "symbolic neverwhen clash of three proto-Japanese races (the Jomon, Yamato and Emishi)."

Casting
Ashitaka was voiced by the Japanese actor Yōji Matsuda, whose only major voice acting experience was voicing Asbel in Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Yuriko Ishida, an actress and essayist, provided the voice for San.

Music
Miyazaki's regular collaborator Joe Hisaishi was recruited to compose the film score.

Hisaishi engaged the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra, and Hiroshi Kumagai conducted them. Countertenor Yoshikazu Mela was engaged to perform the film's theme song, also titled Princess Mononoke.

English adaptation
Neil Gaiman joined the project. In May 1998, Claire Danes, Gillian Anderson and Minnie Driver joined the cast.

Themes
A central theme of Princess Mononoke is the environment.

Another theme in Princess Mononoke is sexuality and disability. Michelle Jarman, Assistant Professor of Disability Students at the University of Wyoming, and Eunjung Kim, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the disabled and gendered sexual bodies were partially used as a transition from the feudal era to a hegemony that "embraces modern social systems, such as industralization, gendered division of labor, institutionalization of people with diseases, and militarization of men and women." Kim and Jarman likened Lady Eboshi to a monarch. Kim and Jarman cite Eboshi's disregard of ancient laws and curses towards prostitutes and lepers as an enlightenment reasoning and her exploit of using disability to further her modernist viewpoints. They also referenced Eboshi's use of a English accent in the English dub as an allusion to the European colonization of the Americas.

Release
The film was extremely successful in Japan and with both anime fans and arthouse moviegoers in English-speaking countries. In those countries, it was widely interpreted as a film about the environment told in the form of Japanese mythology. Disney's Miramax subsidiary purchased U.S. distribution rights, but wanted to cut the film for American audiences (and for a PG-rating). However, Miyazaki balked at this, and the film was instead released uncut with a rating of PG-13. Miramax also chose to put a lot of money into creating the English dub of the movie with famous actors and actresses, yet when they released it in theatres there was little or no advertising and it was given a very limited run, showing in only a few theatres and for a very short time. Disney later complained about the fact that the movie did not do well at the box office. In September 2000, the film was supposed to be released on DVD in the U.S. but Miramax announced that only the English dub would be included on the disc. Outraged fans demanded the Japanese track be put on the disc as well and the threat of poor sales prompted Miramax to hire translators for the subtitles, holding the DVD release back by almost three months. When the DVD was finally released it sold very well, due to no limitation in availability.

Translations
The US and UK DVD releases have both the English and Japanese soundtracks, together with subtitles for both the English dub and a more literal translation.

At Miyazaki's insistence, the film was uncut for the English release, so that only the soundtrack was altered. The English dub of Princess Mononoke is a translation with some adaptation by Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman. The main changes from the Japanese version are to provide a cultural context for phrases and actions which those outside of Asia may not be familiar with. Such alterations include references to mythology and specific names for groups, such as Jibashiri and Shishigami, that appear in the Japanese version, which are changed to more general terms, such as Mercenary and Forest Spirit, in the English version. The rationale for such changes is that the majority of non-Japanese viewers would not understand the mythological references and that the English language simply has no words for the Jibashiri, Shishigami and other terms. However, some critics (Michael Atkinson, Mr. Showbiz) have said that the translation from Japanese to English and the alterations in which it has resulted have weakened the film somewhat.

Box office
Princess Mononoke was the highest-grossing Japanese film of 1997, earning ¥11.3 billion in distribution receipts.

In January 2001, it was the top-selling film in the United States, but despite this the film did not fare well financially in the United States. It grossed $2,298,191 the first eight weeks.

Critical reception
Princess Mononoke received a highly positive response. The Daily Yomiuri's Aaron Gerow called the film a "powerful compilation of [Hayao] Miyazaki's world, a cumulative statement of his moral and filmic concerns." Leonard Klady of Variety said that Princess Mononoke "is not only more sharply drawn, it has an extremely complex and adult script" and the film "has the soul of a romantic epic, and its lush tones, elegant score by Joe Hisaishi and full-blooded characterizations give it the sweep of cinema's most grand canvases." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times stated "Princess Mononoke is a great achievement and a wonderful experience, and one of the best films of the year." Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly called the film "a windswept pinnacle of its art" and that it "has the effect of making the average Disney film look like just another toy story." However, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post stated that the film "is as spectacular as it is dense and as dense as it is colorful and as colorful as it is meaningless and as meaningless as it is long. And it's very long." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said that the film "brings a very different sensibility to animation, a medium he views as completely suitable for straight dramatic narrative and serious themes." Todd McCarthy, also of Variety, called the film "a savage and beautiful episode in the ongoing battle between man and nature."

The voice acting for the English version of Princess Mononoke was met with a mostly positive response. Ebert said that it was "well and carefully dubbed with gifted vocal talents." McCarthy said that "the [film's] dubbing, while robbing any film of its intrinsic aural personality, does much less egregious damage to an animated film than it does to a live-action piece" Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" grade. Burr said that the film is "the passing of mankind from pagan beliefs into a complex, ruinous modernity" and said that the characters are "straight out of a Joseph Campbell playbook."

The film's ecological and historical themes was also praised. Klady stated that the film shares the same ecological theme as Pom Poko, but is "much richer, drawing upon [Japan]'s history and adapting folkloric legends for a highly original tale." Janet Maslin of The New York Times quipped that "the image of plants and flowers springing to life beneath the Forest Spirit's hooves as he walks is simple, meaningful and ravishingly presented." Maslin also said that "[the film]'s forests, imbued with a stirring, forthright sense of natural beauty, turn out to be filled with Mr. Miyazaki's fanciful inventions." Turan said that Miyazaki "marries a remarkable sense of visual fantasy, both lyric and violent, with an ecology-themed story and complex characters. It's an adult fairy tale, animation as we've not experienced it before--exactly what devotees of writer-director Hayao Miyazaki have come to expect." Turan would later go on to say that Miyazaki "creates a self-contained world that could not exist without animation, and a more satisfying use of the medium would be difficult to imagine."

Princess Mononoke ranked 488th on Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. Terry Gilliam ranked the film 26th on Time Out's 50 greatest animated films. As of September 2012, the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 93% approval rating based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. It offers the consensus: "With its epic story and breathtaking visuals, Princess Mononoke is a landmark in the world of animation." On Metacritic, the film achieved an average score of 76 out of 100 based on 29 reviews, signifying "generally favorable reviews."

Accolades

 * Best Japanese Movie, Best Animation, and Japanese Movie Fans' Choice; The 52nd Mainichi Movie Competition
 * Best Japanese Movie and Readers' Choice; Asahi Best Ten Film Festival
 * Excellent Movie Award; The Agency for Cultural Affairs
 * Grand Prize in Animation Division; 1st Japan Media Arts Festival (by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Education)
 * Best Director; Takasaki Film Festival
 * Best Japanese Movie; The Association of Movie Viewing Groups
 * Movie Award; The 39th Mainichi Art Award
 * Best Director; Tokyo Sports Movie Award
 * Nihon Keizai Shinbun Award for Excellency; Nikkei Awards for Excellent Products/Service (details)
 * Theater Division Award; Asahi Digital Entertainment Award
 * MMCA Special Award; Multimedia Grand Prix 1997
 * Best Director and Yujiro Ishihara Award; Nikkan Sports Movie Award
 * Special Achievement Award; The Movie's Day
 * Special Award; Houchi Movie Award
 * Special Award; Blue Ribbon Award
 * Special Award; Osaka Film Festival
 * Special Award; Elandore Award
 * Cultural Award; Fumiko Yamaji Award
 * Grand Prize and Special Achievement Award; Golden Gross Award
 * First Place, best films of the year; The 26th "Pia Ten"
 * First Place; Japan Movie Pen Club, 1997 Best 5 Japanese Movies
 * First Place; 1997 Kinema Junpo Japanese Movies Best 10 (Readers' Choice)
 * Second Place; 1997 Kinema Junpo Japanese Movies Best 10 (Critics' Choice)
 * Best Director; 1997 Kinema Junpo Japanese Movies (Readers' Choice)
 * First Place; Best Comicker's Award
 * First Place; CineFront Readers' Choice
 * Nagaharu Yodogawa Award; RoadShow
 * Excellent Award; Yomiuri Award for Film/Theater Advertisement

Home media
In Japan, the film was released on VHS videotape on July 26, 1998. A Laserdisc edition was also released by Tokuma Japan Communications on the same day. The film was released on DVD on November 21, 2001 with bonus extras added, including the international versions of the film as well as the storyboards.

In July 2000, Buena Vista Home Entertainment announced plans to release the film on VHS and DVD in North America on August 29. Initially, the DVD version of Princess Mononoke did not include the Japanese-language track at the request of Buena Vista's Japan division, citing concerns that "a foreign-released DVD containing the Japanese language track will allow for the importation of such a DVD to Japan, which could seriously hurt the local sales of a future release of the [film]". The fansite Nausicaa.net organized an email campaign for fans to include the Japanese language track, while DVD Talk began an online petition to retain the Japanese language track. The DVD release of Princess Mononoke was delayed as a result. Buena Vista Home Entertainment released the DVD on December 15, 1999, with bonus extras added, including a trailer and a documentary with interviews from the film's English voice actors.

Legacy
In July 2012, a stage play adaptation of Princess Mononoke was announced by Studio Ghibli. The play is being produced by Wild Hog Theatre with the cooperation of Studio Ghibli. The play is scheduled to premiere in April 2013 at the New Diorama Theatre in London, England.