Thursday, April 8, 2010
Princess Mononoke
There were aspects of the film I missed the first time around. For instance, I thought the demon boar god was cursed by a god who was already a demon. When Ashitaka showed the little man the rock his people found in the deceased God, I thought it was something that grew inside of him. When watching the film a second time I understood the God was cursed by his own hatred and anger at humanity for creating weapons that destroyed nature. One of Miyazaki’s recurring themes is humanity vs. nature. The two always seem to come into conflict and are eventually resolved by the end of the film.
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I was definitely also unclear about what first caused Nago to become a demon. Talking more about the war between humanity and nature though also led me to think more about hatred as an all-encompassing "disease" of sorts. The first time I saw the film, I thought that it was only the iron pellet that caused Nago the pain and the transformation, and that also later on caused San's wolf-mother to slowly weaken and die. I don't know if there is resolution at the end of the film. I actually saw it as a strange sort of long-distance romance ending than anything else in terms of larger themes of humanity and nature and technology.
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