Sam wk6

Questions answered this week;

What are the underlying thematic of Princess Mononoke? How does it de-familiarize its historical setting, according to Napier (2005)?

Could Miyazaki's vision be described as in some sense religious (in as much as it conveys a sense of the sacred)?

Miyazaki de-familiarizing? The term aptly describes his efforts to dispel longstanding myths about Japanese culture, including those of it’s women too closely resembling subservient martyrs (those fragile little geishas!), and that of its intimate affinities and equilibrium with the natural world (compared to The West, by precedent criminally exploitative of the environment), a collectively peaceful communion with which implied in the decidedly feminine personification thereof; the passive, substantiating forces of ‘yin’, as if the Japanese were a nation of green-tea sipping contemplative monks (Napier, 2005).

Miyazaki offers a universe subverting these tenuous assumptions. Those of gender find relief in both the figure of Lady Eboshi (the female brute-capitalist) and her harem of opinionated ex-whores (not to mention the wolf-clan femme fatale herself, Princess Mononoke), and those of the Japanese being simpering nature-lovers  more poignantly remedied in Eboshi’s enactment of DOC nightmares and god-slaying, including the orchestration of petty bloodshed with neighbouring provinces over Irontown’s precious iron.

Napier (2005) also notes the film’s subversion of thematic conventions regarding representational norms of that (vaguely indicated) epoch in Japanese history. There are no patriarchal Samurai codes here, or even theatrically brandished swords for that matter; rather, the emphasis in Miyazaki’s mythic time period is on guns, a then-emerging technology of which Lady Eboshi is an avid enthusiast. This could be to give it’s conservationist idealism and Gaia-like threads of Nature vs. Man some modern relevance, to more closely resemble today’s world in which man’s sovereignty matches only his military might, the latter increasingly sophisticated with the advent of weapons technology.

Miyazaki’s pacifist stance on weapons of mass destruction and war in general is recurrent throughout his existing body of work; for example Howls Moving Castle in which the pandemonium of the London bombings is recreated with fictional nations warring over the ‘missing prince’ (who has actually been shape-shifted into a scare-crow) all of which is poignantly and yet satirically reminiscent of the events sparking World War One (though Ferdinand never suffered the magical-malady of Miyazaki’s own unfortunate prince).

Certainly, Miyazaki’s vision touches the ‘fantastic’, making allusions to godly or original forces predating the dominion of man and strangely dormant in the wake of his self-inflicted turmoil; but his themes are decidedly more spiritual than they are conventionally religious, paying no preachy reference to specific creeds or doctrines (except a humanist one?).

Princess Mononoke features a hierarchy of ‘celestial’ beings, gods and demons, the highest of these being the elusive and allusively Christ-like Forest Spirit, both giver of life and harbinger of death (Moro, Akoto). The face of the Forest Spirit, though described in the film by hearsay among different characters as being that of a man more closely resembles that of a goat (is this an incarnation of Pan?). What is more, it’s red eyes give it a ‘satanic’ look, and yet despite the demonization of the goat as the devils familiar and advocate Miyazaki’s creature as a symbol makes Base Nature, that Christian Evil, into a Good. If Miyazaki’s spiritual imagery is to be likened to any specific belief system (and here we must acknowledge that it is too universal for us to absolutely do so), then it could only be Paganism, in as much as it’s conceptions are vague, its codes barely existent and it’s aesthetic nearest to Mononoke’s polytheistic glorification of Nature.