Princess Mononoke is an animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki and starring (in the English dub) Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Billy Bob Thorton, Gillian Anderson, Keith David, Minnie Driver, and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Ashitaka (Crudup) is a warrior-prince living in a village on the edge of a huge forest, and gets cursed by a boar-spirit infected with squirmy demon worms. Doomed to die from the curse, he accepts exile from his village (tough crowd, man) and travels to find the great spirit of the forest, hoping for a cure or at least clarity. He winds up stumbling into a war between Lady Uboshi (Driver), a ruthless warrior women trying to wipe out the animal-spirits of the mountain in her quest for iron; Jigo (Thorton), a greedy monk looking to take the head of the great spirit for the emperor; and the animal spirit-gods themselves, including Moro the Wolf-goddess (Anderson) and Okkoto the Boar-god (David).
That all sounds delightfully straightforward, but the movie does not rush. Like a like of Miyazaki films, it doesn't so much move slowly as it does take all the time it needs, and as a result, there's a lot of fun, gory action (Ashitaka being quite capable of decapitating a motherfucker with an arrow) interspersed with long sequences of travel, talk, and exposition. Also characteristically for the director, the "villains" have motivations, life, and feelings, and sure, they do horrible things, but they're treated fairly within the story (and none of the main characters die).
The titular Princess Mononoke is actually San (Danes), the human adopted daughter of Moro, but she's not any more important to the story than anyone else. The story is long, sprawling epic, and nowadays I think you'd see it as a miniseries rather than a single movie (but this came out in 1997).
The animation is beautiful, and the more adult themes and visuals are a nice shift from My Neighbor Totoro and so on. Miyazaki definitely has a signature style but you can't say he just does the same thing over and over. The English voice cast is also pretty impressive. Keith David in particular does a really amazing job calling what he thinks are his boar warriors to his side while he's dying of his wounds.
All in all, it's an evocative and moving film, probably one of Miyazaki's best.
My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: The Prophecy
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