echo Disclaimer: The following article spoils many, many details from the films Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke. It also discusses dark and violent themes. Viewer discretion is advised.
In the ruins of what was once a thriving village, a monk shares a meal with a prince.
The monk’s name is Jigo, and it was pure coincidence that he crossed paths with the prince. The two of them are on separate journeys, in pursuit of their own quests. But night has fallen, and it’s always preferable to share a meal than to sit alone as darkness falls around you. So they have made themselves a fire, amid the wreckage of the bygone village, and are making themselves porridge.
The forest they have been travelling through is vast and dense, thick now with the shadows of trees and the forbidding silence of night. They seat themselves on wooden planks that once made up the walls of homes and rest their tired legs across piles of rubble. This little space between the trees, filled with the remains of civilisation, is a poignant spot for the prince to rest. Under his feet are reminders of life– of human life– being swallowed up by nature. Whatever people were once here had built homes, shrines, lived lives before calamity struck.
The prince can’t help but think about his own oncoming calamity.
He is cursed, you see. His body has been corrupted and he will die in agony unless he can complete his quest.
He tells the monk this as they wait for their porridge to finish cooking. He is not a talkative person by nature, but the silence of this dead place is becoming difficult to bear. So he talks, and the monk listens.
Firelight bathes them in warm tones as a thin stream of steam rises up from the porridge pot and into the sky. The prince’s voice seems to blend right in with the fire’s light and the steam of his meal– it serves as a shield from the harshness of nature. The night’s darkness is fearful and its silence threatening, the forest slowly erasing the unspoken story of the village in ruin beneath them– so the prince has made a fire to banish the dark, and tells his own story, to stave off the fact that it will one day be forgotten by all.
The monk, a wizened man of many years, is dismissive of the prince’s plight. His weathered face forms a sad smile as he responds to the boy’s tale.
“These days, there are angry ghosts all around us. Dead from wars, sickness, starvation. And nobody cares.” He ladles steaming porridge into a bowl. “So you say you’re cursed? So what? So’s the whole damn world.”
The monk has been in this world far longer than the prince has, and he has seen the cruelties men inflict on themselves. In his estimation, people require no curse to drive them to early demise. The nameless settlement in which they eat their porridge is a testament to the insignificance of man in the grand scheme of things. We all live, squabble, die. Then the Earth reclaims the things we’ve built.
What does it mean to live in a cursed world?
This is the question at the core of Princess Mononoke. The 1997 film, from which the above scene I’ve described originates, is one entranced with the idea of curses.
This is seen most obviously in the plight of its protagonist Ashitaka (the previously mentioned prince), who is propelled on his grand quest after a confrontation with a demon during the film’s opening. The demonic boar, a crazed-looking beast consumed by writhing black tendrils, threatens the people of his village. In slaying the beast, Ashitaka contracts the same curse it bore. It leaves his right arm corrupted, marred by blackened patches that look like the aftermath of a hot iron brand.
The curse, Ashitaka learns, is one of hatred.
The boar he slew was not malicious by nature or intention. It was in fact a spirit representing the forest that surrounds the village. Its demonic attributes, the black tendrils and his unstoppable rage, were implanted in him by an exterior source. A ball of metal (which the audience later learns was a bullet) had punctured his side, and poisoned his soul as well as his blood. Hatred turned a noble creature into a raving monster; it will do the same to Ashitaka if he allows it.
So off the prince goes, leaving the familiar safety of his village behind to embark on a quest. He travels with a blackening arm and a metal seed of hate in his pack, hoping that if he can determine the origin of the seed, he can stop its corruption from killing him.
But as the monk Jigo tells Ashitaka, the whole world already seems to bear the same curse.
On my first watch of the film, I found myself feeling the line more than understanding it. I hadn’t yet witnessed the rest of the film, with all its pain and struggle and heartbreak. I hadn’t yet contemplated the purpose for setting that particular conversation in that particular place. I hadn’t yet seen the two other films that will form the backbone of this article. Yet I was moved. Something in me shifted and that idea lodged itself in there for further thought, a conceptual bullet in the boar’s flesh of my mind.
Four years and a dozen Hayao Miyazaki films later, I sit here typing this with purpose. See, I want to tell you a story.
I want to tell you about the cursed world Jigo mentioned, and I want to show you that he’s not just talking about the one in which Princess Mononoke is set.
I want to tell you a story about princes and princesses and lost legacies; about fallen civilisations and fantastic machines trapped in terrible roles. It is a story about the end of the world, and of how new life springs forth from the ashes.
It begins long before this time, farther back than Princess Mononoke in 1997, or Castle in the Sky in 1986.
It starts with a girl named Nausicaä.
The girl’s name is Nausicaä, and she is an explorer.
She is also a princess and a warrior and a scientist– but before all that, she is someone who loves soaring above lands unknown and unmapped, riding the winds as if they are her home.
She flies not with a plane but with a glider, customised to her needs and maintained with loving attention. Viewed from below you might believe it to be an enormous bird, with an albatross’ wide wingspan and a dove’s white hue. It coasts through the sky smoothly, seamlessly. To see Nausicaa piloting it feels like witnessing a part of nature. One could imagine her spearheading a flock of migrating birds as the tip of the inverted V pattern we see in storybooks and postcards.
Nausicaä flies like a natural because she has worked hard to make herself a polite guest to nature. She has done so out of great respect, and also because the natural world she explores is not a kind one.
The world she lives in ended a long time ago, you see.
A thousand years before Nausicaä first flew her glider or explored the world beyond her kingdom, mankind destroyed itself. In an event known as The Seven Days of Fire, war obliterated the Earth, levelling landscapes and erasing nearly all of human civilisation. Little of this cataclysm is shown to the viewer, but the implication provides more than enough horror; towering humanoid weapons known as ‘God Warriors’ roamed the Earth, walking metaphors for nuclear weapons that left fire and death wherever they strode. How many countless people died in those seven days of hell? And what of the plants, the animals, the forests, the oceans? This mythic apocalypse that serves as the backdrop to Nausicaä’s world is staggering in its immensity.
(I think about God making the world in seven days, and about us unmaking it in the same span of time.)
Our destruction of the Earth was not nearly as complete as the destruction of ourselves, however. The planet, reeling from atomic fire, drenched in radiation and awash with the pain of billions of living creatures, adapted itself. It changed in response to mankind’s murder-suicide of the world. Precious little life survived the Seven Days of Fire, but what did came back stronger. And stranger.
Beyond the idyllic hills of her home kingdom– the cosy Valley of the Wind which gives her film its name– Nausicaä’s world is a forest of death. Vast, all-encompassing, and completely lethal to humanity, this ‘Toxic Jungle’ covers most of the planet in Nausicaä’s time. Formed of towering stalks of fungi dozens of metres tall, populated by insects the size of elephants, and constantly spewing a ‘miasma’ of toxic gases and fungal spores potent enough to kill an unmasked man in seconds, it is difficult to imagine an environment more hostile to human life.
The forest– known to the people of Nausicaä’s valley as the Rotwood and in Japanese translations as the Rotten Sea– is the form nature has taken in response to the warmongering actions of mankind.
The nuclear scars left by humanity’s sins have been patched over, fantastic fungi and skittering creatures reclaiming decimated landscapes. What little remains of humanity has been pushed to the edges of the world. We reside now in ancillary locales; in coves near the ocean, and places that receive enough salty sea breeze to keep the deadly miasma of the Toxic Jungle away from our homes.
It is in one such windswept valley that Nausicaä lives. Kept safe from the toxicity of the Jungle, the uncreatively named Valley of the Wind is one of the few places on the planet with familiar plants and animals. Green grass covers rolling hills and cattle is raised near fields of crops. Huge windmills stand watch over scattered buildings, providing energy that is renewable and non-destructive to the environment. The place looks like a vision born from the artistic movement of ‘Solarpunk’; it imagines a future that is sustainable, comfortable, and harmonious for mankind and the land it lives in.
It’s a vista you likely find familiar as a fan of Studio Ghibli– which I assume you are, seeing as you’re here reading this article. The sloping green hills of Nausicaä’s home sit comfortably next to the luscious landscapes Sophie travels through in Howl’s moving castle, or those Kiki flies over on her broom. It’s easy to imagine yourself laid out comfortably on those grassy hills, hands folded up under your head, looking up at the blue, blue sky above. How comfy, how perfect.
It is so comfy and perfect that one might ask Nausicaä the critical question of, why venture beyond the valley at all? What pleasures could the world of toxic forests and bare deserts offer to a princess?
As it turns out, knowledge is what Nausicaä seeks. Above the safety of her home and the pure joy found in flight, Nausicaä prioritises knowledge; she explores because she wants to understand the world she lives in.
(She is also, though too humble to accept this role, a chosen one. The people of the Valley have a prophecy foretelling of a savior, clothed in blue, descending onto a field of gold in a time of great danger.
Nausicaa wears blue. The golden field will come later.)
When we first meet her, she is landing her glider at the edge of the Toxic Jungle. It looms above her as she disembarks and strides determinedly in. She is protected, of course– she has on a mask to filter the toxic air and goggles to shield her eyes; her gloves and boots are thick and her flight suit covers the entirety of her body up to the neck.
Her purpose is to gather specimens from the forest that encompasses the world. She has with her vials in which toxic spores are collected, and scalpels to cut off pieces of strange vegetation.
More importantly than all her other tasks, she bears witness.
Because for all its foreboding aspects, the forest is still alive. It is, like any forest real or imagined, a place thriving with life. It thrums with the clicks and chitters of its huge insectoid inhabitants, awash in blue light filtered through the tops of the enormous fungi. Spores float down amid the stalks like huge, glowing snowflakes. It is an otherworldly place, as enchanting as it is deadly. We come to understand, as Nausicaä does, that it is beautiful. In its own strange way– and despite its painful origins– the toxic forest that envelops the world is a world, one with its own rhythms and its own distinct beauty. The atmosphere within the dense thickets of fungi is almost sacred.
And Nausicaä embraces it. She acts as a polite observer and conscientious recorder of its strangeness. She bottles up spores and clambers over the titanic corpses of dead insects, moving through this blue-hued world like any scientist would through any interesting ecosystem. But she also conducts herself with a crucial joy– the awe of youth, the openhearted understanding of someone holding themself totally open to the world.
Nausicaä is not the film’s hero because she’s a fearsome warrior or a talented pilot– though she is undoubtedly both of those things– but because she can look at the world humanity broke and understand that there is still a world that remains.
The girl’s name is Sheeta, and she too is a princess.
She’s also an amnesiac, a fugitive, and an orphan– but before all those things, she is the inheritor of a legacy.
We first meet her mid-action sequence, as she’s escaping captivity on a huge airship that’s being attacked by pirates. The people holding her captive are the agents of a corrupt government sect headed by a man named Muska, and the pirates (sky-pirates, by the way. If you hadn’t already guessed) intend to wrest her away from her first kidnappers. Both parties are doing this because they want to own the mysterious necklace that belongs to Sheeta and was passed down through her family line, and this necklace is important because– wait, hold on, Sheeta just fell out a window, somebody catch her!!!
The girl plummets, dropping like a stone past clouds and kilometres of open night sky. Her captors and would-be-kidnappers stare after her with jaws agape. The airship, travelling at high speeds during all this chaos, speeds away from her location as the ground rushes up to meet her.
When she lands gently (because of the mysterious powers of her mysterious necklace), she is asleep. She is found soon after by her story’s male lead, Pazu, a rough-and-tumble kid with a kind heart and a love of planes. He rescues her and brings her to his home to recuperate.
Sheeta’s story began for us in the sky, but much of it takes place on the ground.
After the action-packed opening, with its cackling pirates firing guns like demented firecrackers and stodgy secret agents rushing through hallways like packs of ill-trained dogs, the film slows down and introduces its world to its audience in a more laid-back manner. The next minutes are largely dialogueless, quiet and reflective in the manner of many iconic Ghibli scenes. Think of those serene moments where the characters aren’t actively pushing the plot along or speaking and are simply allowed to… exist, in the worlds they inhabit. Think of Chihiro staring out across the water during her train ride, or Kiki recuperating in a cabin in the woods.
Sheeta wakes and meets Pazu; she watches a flock of birds land, chitter, and take flight off the roof of Pazu’s cavernous home; she savours the way morning sunlight brilliantly illuminates the walls of a craggy valley, dotted with the openings to mineshafts and caves and the roofs of homes. She clambers down into the dusty yet homey bowels of Pazu’s place and learns of his plane, and of his grand aspirations to find that infamous castle in the sky, Laputa.
Laputa is, though the kids don’t know it yet, one of the arbiters of this world’s end.
This world, too, ended a long time ago.
The details are hazier, the story told more through the film’s environments than any concrete exposition or flashback. We see the aftermath of the end, instead of lingering on the fire or cataclysm. The lands Sheeta and Pazu trek, fly, and run across are beautiful, but marked with scars. Hills have huge craters at their peaks, green fields are crisscrossed by trenches. It looks as if the hand of God has reached down and carved impressions into the dirt. The press of a thumb becomes a gaping crater, the scratch of a fingernail a jagged valley. Whatever pretty simile you prefer, the implication is clear:
There was a war here. Of course there was.
This is one of the thematic throughlines linking Laputa to Nausicaä and Mononoke: war is our constant vocation as a species. Wherever we build homes and accumulate power, we inevitably concoct our own destruction. The unseen civilisations that killed the world in Nausicaä couldn’t help themselves but embrace war. Their giant engines of conflict were the God Warriors; in the world of Laputa, the floating castle is itself a harbinger of death.
When the two kids eventually find their way onto the island holding the castle– after many misadventures, including a train/ car chase, a capture by and escape from the aforementioned government stooges, and a team-up with the rowdy but ultimately well-intentioned sky-pirates– they are stunned, breathless, in awe.
The first scenes at Laputa are lavish, inspiring a sense of awe unmatched by the rest of the film’s beautiful vistas and elaborate action setpieces. Laputa, this castle in the sky obscured by clouds, this mythical Atlantis of the air, feels truly like a world untouched by man’s grubby, greedy hands. The kids, arriving with no nefarious intentions and no warmongering motives, are allowed a beautiful glimpse at the majesty of mankind’s creations, divorced from their bitter purpose.
They make their way across the floating island holding up the castle– or, I should say islands, as the place is in fact a chain of them, suspended in the air in perfect sync– and witness wonders. Buildings more grand and pristine than any on the ground, composed of concentric rings and white marble walls; gardens overgrown with vibrant flowers; cavernous halls and spaces filled with blinding light.
Laputa is gorgeous. You might forget for a moment about the other hands grasping for it.
The arrival of Muska and his government stooges, shepherding a line of defeated sky-pirates onto the islands with them, brings things crashing back into reality. They had been chasing Sheeta at the start of the film for her necklace, the one denoting her as princess and heir to the throne of the nation that built Laputa long, long ago.
Being heir to Laputa means having control over it, and to have control over Laputa is to hold power enough to end the world. Again.
Nausicaä, too, cannot avoid the shadow of recurrent war.
Like Sheeta, she is a princess, but unlike Sheeta this confers her no authority over any great weapon of the past. In her estimation, this is desirable; she has no love for killing. She is a staunch pacifist, and demonstrates this repeatedly throughout the film in increasingly aggrieved ways.
But even with her gun, sword, glider, and immaculate physical capabilities, she cannot deny the calling of war.
Nausicaä’s world is desolate, a decimated land where humankind has been brushed to the periphery, dominated by fungi and big bugs instead of man and his petty squabbles. This is mostly true, but thousands of years has been too long to leave us to our own devices. Already, the familiar oppressive structures of monarchy and empire have risen anew. Already they have come into conflict with each other, and already they yearn for mutual obliteration.
Unwittingly, Nausicaä and her little Valley are drawn into the conflict between a mess of competing factions. There is the distant empire of Tolmekia, with its intimidating armoured soldiers and vast resources; there is the nation of Pejite, smaller but no less determined to grab their slice of the toxic, fungal pie; there are solitary figures, inscrutable but still threatening, like Nausicaä’s friend Lord Yupa. There are too many to name here, but some characters in particular stand out.
Lady Kushana, representative of the empire of Tolmekia and all-round cool-looking woman, has Ambitions. She is not content to merely serve her state’s interests, nor is she a simple-minded warlord out to suppress foreign threats with brutal force. She is a complicated character, with grand designs to shape the world into a configuration she feels is best for humanity.
She seeks to eradicate what she feels is the biggest threat to the world: the Toxic Jungle.
To accomplish this, she intends to make use of the tool that caused the wretched biome in the first place– the God Warriors. Or, to be more precise, A God Warrior, as nearly all of them have been lost to time, now just hollow shells littering the Earth. But the thrilling and recent discovery of an ‘unborn’ specimen has lit the spark of determination in her.
After Lady Kushana forcefully occupies the peaceful Valley of the Wind and carts in her God Warrior-to-be, Nausicaä embarks on a journey across the wasteland, determined to find a way through this needless chaos back to sanity.
During her journey she will contend with Pejitan armies and Tolmekian schemes. She will crash-land in the toxic jungle and have to prevent the deaths of both her enemies and allies in the most hostile environment on Earth. She engages in dogfights with enemy aircraft and grits her teeth against the injustice of it all.
As a pacifist, she can’t fathom the reason for all this bloodshed. What does it win any of them in the end? The world has already ended, and they’re still squabbling over scraps.
Laputa turns from an otherworldly vision of serenity to a maze of confusing corners and strange technology as the spectre of war approaches.
Sheeta and Pazu, pursued by Muska and his men, retreat into the floating castle. They find their way into its depths, its guts, its buried secrets. Voices and footsteps seem to echo around every corner as they slink through the dark halls of Laputa’s innards. Walls of brown dirt give way to strange metal surfaces, dark and shot through with intricate lines. Their breath almost seems to mist in the cool of the castle’ underbelly.
As they find out, and as Muska confirms to them upon their inevitable confrontation, the castle’s beautiful exterior hides its true power. Deep within this chunk of earth suspended in the sky is a complex, a hub– a control room.
Sheeta, as heir to the builders of Laputa, owns the necklace that grants control over the castle’s systems. Those systems include weapons, great and terrible and unmatched by anything left on the shattered Earth below. If Muska gets ahold of Sheeta’s birthright, he will rule the Earth from the skies, an unchallengeable king looking down from a man-made Heaven.
Confronted with this potential future– with this lingering greed and unquenchable thirst for power, so unchanged from the times in which Laputa was constructed– Sheeta and Pazu reject it.
Sheeta chants the incantation she was taught as a child– handed down across the generations as a self-destruct option for Laputa– and Laputa breaks.
The central control room disconnects from the castle proper, the walls crumble, and everything shudders apart. The incantation is a spell of destruction, and it deconstructs Laputa as surely Laputa ever destroyed anything beneath it.
The fall of the central hub is a breathtaking thing to behold; one can’t help but think of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves (or, in this case, crashing back down to the earth that created it). Sheeta and Pazu grasp each other, holding on for dear life as the whole assemblage– the chain of islands, the overgrown gardens, the serene halls– seems to shake apart.
In the end, it is nature that preserves them as technology crumbles.
Growing atop and into Laputa was a tree, a truly enormous one, stretching its branches out wider than the top of the castle proper, digging its roots deep into the soil and the metal halls it concealed. The tree was never meant to be here– it had grown over the abandoned islands like a parasite, unseen by human eyes before Sheeta and Pazu arrived– and yet it is the only solid thing present once Sheeta’s spell rips the foundations of the place apart.
The kids grab onto a huge gnarled root and hang there as Sheeta’s legacy disassembles itself. The castle shudders and groans, soil and metal and dazzling ancient technology separates itself and loses whatever magic held it suspended in the air.
The weapons of old fall down to Earth as little comets, shooting stars heralding the end of this cursed era. Everyone not working for Muska’s insane government breathes a sigh of relief as they watch humanity’s lingering sins finally disassembled.
Freed from its oppressive technological burden, the islands float upwards. It’s as if the promise of potential war was the only thing keeping the castle tethered to Earth’s atmosphere.
In the absence of the control room, Laputa seeks the stars.
It drifts higher and higher, until the air thins and Sheeta and Pazu must leave the place behind. They link back up with the sky-pirates and hitch a ride back down to Earth, thinking eagerly of the new future available to them.
The final image of the film is of the titular castle floating in orbit above Earth, trailing tree roots. Free at last.
The Ohm are coming, and Lady Kushana is not ready.
Intricate schemes are colliding with ugly, messy reality.
The Ohm are the main insectoid inhabitants of the Toxic Jungle, and are often spotted travelling in herds beyond the forests’ fungal borders. They are huge, blue, trilobite-looking beings. Majestic, many-eyed, and strangely adorable, they are the film’s central representative for nature. As everything is in Nausicaä’s world, it seems unapproachable at first; hostile always primed for violence. Their huge shells of impenetrable carapace and countless chittering feet make them an intimidating sight. Yet they are not monsters. They are simply animals in a world unfamiliar to us.
They are not malicious by nature or intent; when Nausicaä encounters an enraged one early on in the film, she is able to calm it and return it back to its fellows unharmed. The only time the huge creatures move in opposition to man is when man has taken moves to provoke them.
Unfortunately for Nausicaä, Kushana, and the denizens of the Valley of the Wind, someone has done just that.
As Kushana’s God Warrior stirs to premature life and preparations are made for its razing of the toxic jungle, a cataclysmic stampede of Ohm approaches. Warriors of Pejite, bitter at their recent defeat at the hands of Tolmekia, have kidnapped an Ohm baby, and are using it as bait to draw a massive crowd of enraged Ohm towards Kushana and the Tolmekians.
The silhouette of the stampede covers the horizon from end to end, the ground trembling distantly at its approach.
They can’t fight this. No one can.
Each Ohm is larger and heavier than a tank, and the Tolmekians don’t even have very many of those. Their shells are nigh-impenetrable, their numbers staggering. They could trample every soul in the Tolmekian army and every citizen of the Valley of the Wind without losing speed.
This is where warmongering gets you.
As the Tolmekians begin to panic and Lady Kushana gets the bright idea of turning the underdeveloped, pitiful bulk of the God Warrior on the advancing Ohm, Nausicaä sets out to fulfil her destiny.
She flies out in borrowed clothes– pink instead of the prophetic blue– and is still hurting from her recent exertions, a days-long barrage of combat and captivity and heartache. But she is clearheaded, moving with the moral certainty she’s conducted herself with throughout the whole film.
She understands that to fight the Ohm is to fight a tsunami; fruitless, a fool’s errand. The only way to resolve this situation is by defusing the Ohm’s reason for their rage in the first place.
She intercepts the Pejitan stragglers holding the Ohm child captive and persuades them (read: threatens them at gunpoint) to turn their vehicle around, to take the child back to where it belongs.
All around her, chaos erupts. The premature God Warrior, an enormous and enormously pathetic mass of melting flesh (don’t look this up if you’re squeamish) opens fire once, twice on the Ohm, before collapsing beneath the weight of its half-formed bones. The Valley denizens huddle atop an old desiccated skyship, hoping to weather the stampede from higher ground. Kushana and the Tolmekians prepare to stand their ground and die defiantly, wastefully.
With so much panic and desperation in the air, it’s near-impossible for the Ohm to detect Nausicaä and their child. The stampede has gathered too much momentum, the hatred in the air too thick. The creatures trample over Nausicaä as she holds up the injured Ohm child, getting drenched in its blue blood.
Panic. Screams. Terror.
Then, light.
The stampede slows, then stops.
We see Nausicaä dead, surrounded by Ohm. The child has been recovered, the debt repaid, their anger satisfied. In response, the Ohm unveil something no living human has likely ever seen. Tendrils– golden tendrils– slink out from the Ohm’s great shells and lift Nausicaä’s inert form aloft. Her battered body is dressed in pink clothes stained blue by blood, held up to the sky on a nest of gold.
We hear a song, a voice for the mystical. Nausicaä, selfless hero from beginning to end, is returned to life.
The prophecy is fulfilled. Humanity has earned a new lease on life.
This tale ends not with the resolution to all of man’s cruelty, but with A resolution. Nausicaä was The One, and she acted as she needed to in her time to avoid catastrophe. She cannot by herself erase thousands of years of lingering environmental damage, nor can she absolve mankind of its eternally warlike nature– but she could do something good. Her people will live on for a while longer. Tolmekia will have time to reflect on its actions. The Ohm will return to their home in peace. With the destruction of the last God Warrior, nature once again reigns supreme over the world.
For her, in her time, that’s enough.
The boy’s name is Ashitaka, and he bears a curse.
He is not a chosen one. Not marked for great destiny as a saviour, nor the inheritor of a powerful weapon. In his time, in Muromachi-era Japan, the greatest weapon man has yet produced is a gun.
If Nausicaä, Sheeta, and Pazu can be said to have lived in worlds that ended long ago, Ashitaka lives in one currently ending.
The world is changing, all around him, all the time, and mankind is responsible for it.
They don’t yet have mastery over technology as the creators of Laputa and the God Warriors did, but already they are ruining the Earth. The grand forest Ashitaka travels through is being beaten back bit by bit, humanity taming the elements and claiming the world as theirs. The most blatant showcase of this is Iron Town, the film’s main setting.
Iron Town does not float above the clouds, nor does it bear any earthshaking destructive capability. It wasn’t built by a dead civilisation– in fact, it’s still being constructed as Ashitaka arrives.
It is a blooming industrial settlement built on an island at the centre of a river. It belches black smoke from its iron forges and has high, forbidding perimeter walls to fend off any who would dare strike at it, human or otherwise. At first glance it seems an offputting imposition upon the land, grey and unappealing compared to the gorgeous natural locales Ashitaka travelled through to arrive here.
As Ashitaka finds out, the reality of the place is more complex than meets the eye.
Because it’s true that the people of Iron Town have polluted the river and deforested the land surrounding their home, but those actions were done out of necessity, not any malice. They are not warmongers– one needs only to look at the hated bands of lurking samurai to see those. All the people of Iron Town want is to create a safe home for themselves in a forest that seems hostile and unfriendly. This is the story of civilisation, is it not? We stake our claim on nature and reap her goods to build homes that draw us further and further away from Her.
The people of Iron Town are not just sympathetic collectively, but individually. Ashitaka meets and befriends a variety of likeable characters around the settlement, from women working at the forges to men who guard its supply convoys. He eats with them, speaks with them, even works the bellows of the forge himself to form a better understanding of their lifestyle.
The first thirty minutes of the film was spent in awe of nature, Joe Hisaishi’s phenomenal score lending an air of mythic grandiosity to the primaeval forest Ashitaka journeys through. Now, in noisy, smokey Iron Town, we witness a place no less worthy of respect. In my mind’s eye I recall rugged green hills and the bustling Iron Town marketplace with equal admiration.
I recall also the two women at the centre of the film.
San, the eponymous Princess Mononoke, is a child of two worlds. Born to, and abandoned by, human parents, she has been literally raised by wolves. The curse of hatred struck her quick. Though she’s roughly the same age as Ashitaka, the rage in her veins has been exhorting her to violence far longer than it has him. Along with her lupine siblings, she attacks Iron Town’s supply lines and disrupts their deforestation efforts. Her rage is the righteous fury of the forest, striking back at the humans killing it.
San is our deuteragonist, aside from being the title character, but she’s not the character I think about most.
Lady Eboshi, head of Iron Town and all-round cool-looking woman, has Ambitions. She is not content to merely serve her settlement’s interests, nor is she a simple-minded tyrant out to wreak destruction on the forest with unrepentant force. She is a complicated character, with designs to shape the forest into a configuration she feels is best for humanity.
She is immaculately dressed and well-spoken, charismatic and polite without fail to Ashitaka, even as his ideals clash against hers and his cursed arm yearns to kill her. From her peoples’ reports and the conduct we personally witness, she’s by all means a great leader for Iron Town. The townsfolk themselves were partially drawn from sectors of society considered undesirable– brothel workers and lepers. Lady Eboshi liberated the disempowered and gave them a place to belong to, a place where they can work with dignity and contribute to the safety and prosperity of their fellow man.
If Iron Town was founded with good intentions, does it really matter that the forest around it cries out in pain?
Ashitaka isn’t sure, but Lady Eboshi is.
Lady Eboshi thinks she has it all figured out– the complicated web between violence, man’s exploitation of nature, and the progression of technology that underscores all three of the films so far discussed in this piece– and she has a grand and final solution to the ‘problem’ the forest poses.
She wants to kill a God.
You see, unlike Nausicaä or Laputa, this is not a story focused only on mankind and mankind’s mistakes. All three of these stories are about mankind and how we interact with the natural world. Technology wreaks havoc upon it, and we keep trampling the beauty of the natural world beneath our feet. That’s fine, and impactful, and well-expressed in those cases, but Mononoke decides to give nature a more active role to play in the proceedings.
The Ohm were silent sufferers, only able to express their pain through vengeful, voiceless stampedes, with Nausicaä serving as their outspoken advocate. The rugged landscapes and determined plant life of Laputa could only bear the pain in silence as Muska’s men shot, trampled, and ripped it apart in pursuit of their goals. The landscapes of both worlds are by and large silent– gorgeous, but empty. No flocks of wild animals roam those open vistas, no vibrant life inhabiting these worlds ruined by man.
In Princess Mononoke, the Earth speaks for itself.
The metaphysical concept of animism is taken to its extreme in Ashitaka’s world, lending the forest and its inhabitants speech and intelligence. Adorable kodama spirits chitter in the treetops; tribes of intelligent apes plan recourse against Iron Town’s destruction of their home; San’s family of wolves, headed by the God Moro, are a constant opponent of Eboshi.
And above them all is The Great Forest Spirit, said to embody the soul of the forest itself. It is reclusive, and inscrutable, and does not seem interested in answering the other forest spirits’ pleas for aid. It heals Ashitaka’s wounds after a night of violence, but refrains from ever directly intervening in events.
It is Lady Eboshi’s target, and before the film concludes, she will have succeeded in her crusade.
Ashitaka and San fall into a tenuous alliance after a dramatic meeting at Iron Town, and learn from each other about the sour complexity of the whole situation. San has completely denied her human origins, setting herself on a self-destructive path of violence against Lady Eboshi, while Ashitaka’s nature-happy ideals have been sorely tested by his newfound connection to Iron Town. Neither of them are happy, neither of them sure about their direction in life.
To live in this world, so cursed by violence and conflict, is to constantly search for their own personal truths. That cannot be found in solitude, or in ignorance. To find oneself, the film seems to argue, one must seek knowledge from all angles. As Ashitaka repeats throughout the film as a guiding mantra, the goal is to see with eyes unclouded by hate.
But of course, seeing is a far cry from acting. Merely comprehending the enormity of the situation does not get one any closer to resolving it. Truth can be paralysing, confounding. In the end, it’s easiest to cling to those we care about.
Ashitaka protects San and San links arms with Ashitaka as the climactic showdown between Iron Town and the forest crescendoes. Everyone on all sides moves towards who they feel most strongly about– Lady Eboshi proceeds unabated on her quest to kill the Great Forest Spirit; Moro clings to life just long enough to enact vengeance on Eboshi; the people of Iron Town group together and defend each other from their enemies; the cynical monk Jigo, having no human connections, chases the Forest Spirit’s head for a great reward. The forest shudders with gunfire and the roars of animals. Spirits die, blood is spilled, and the world changes irrevocably.
The end of Princess Mononoke is far less hopeful than Nausicaä or Laputa’s. The increased complexity of its world means that it cannot imagine an easy, neat ending for its characters. The curse passed down from Nago to Ashitaka was present in the rest of the forest, and in Nausicaä, Sheeta, and Pazu’s worlds too. Hatred is the uniting thread between different times and places, and moving past it is a nearly impossible task. When you subtract the chosen ones and the hidden legacies, happy endings are difficult.
But that’s what enchants me about Princess Mononoke– it refuses to take the easy route through. It shows us a world beset by conflict, and in denying us easy closure, it asks us to reflect on our own.
We may not live in the same broken worlds Nausicaä, Sheeta, Pazu, and Ashitaka do, but their concerns mirror ours today. The questions they seek to answer are the ones we must confront.
(I want to see with Ashitaka’s unclouded eyes, and I want to act with Nausicaä’s certainty. I want to create a world where children like Sheeta and Pazu don’t have to live in the shadow of war.)
The world has not ended for us. But make no mistake, it is ending. Our charge, as people and thinkers and masters of our own fates, is to figure out why this is the case, and to do something about it.
Written By Ryan Kong
