Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki) (Patreon)

59/100

Second viewing (though first time subtitled rather than dubbed into English), last seen at NYFF '99. This was the first Miyazaki I encountered, and my contemporaneous review is so ignorant—I even pulled out the old "why don't anime characters look Japanese?" nonsense—that it's best consigned to the dust heap. Plus, I got very excited for a while rewatching Mononoke, thinking that I'd weirdly come full circle and finally found a Miyazaki I can love, right back where I started. But while the first 45 minutes or so—through San's attack on Irontown—struck me as atypically coherent and genuinely exciting, that assessment turned out to be predicated in part on my not fully understanding what was going on. I mistakenly assumed, for example, that the opening battle involved an ordinary wild boar that had been infected/possessed by a demon, not a boar god that had been demonically corrupted. When the film's animism cranks up to 11, it pretty much loses me, especially combined with Miyazaki's earnest environmental message (which is admittedly at least complicated by Lady Eboshi being almost as compassionate as she is rapacious). By the end, I was squarely back where I always end up with Miyazaki, feeling frustrated by what seem like purely random flourishes, e.g. the Nightwalker's decapitation unleashing a destructive flow of sentient goop. Having now seen almost all of his features (just Lupin III and Porco Rosso left to go), my gut feeling is that he's a great animator but a really bad storyteller. Since my knowledge of Japanese mythology is basically nil, however, what seems random and unsatisfying to me may well make perfect sense to others. Perhaps my ignorance has merely taken a different form. In any case, I've never been able to just roll with the weirdness, as most of my American peers have. They see a dazzling masterpiece; I see a prettier version of Miike's dumbfounding (to me) The Great Yokai War.