(Break, followed by Pam leading the class in discussion about the manga)

For the last part here I want to tell you about the latest Miyazaki film coming to a theater here in Dallas this coming summer (At the time of this lecture, Mononoke was scheduled for a July release, it was later pushed back to late fall--MH). In 1994 Miyazaki announced that his next film would be his last one. He was approaching 60 and the strain was starting to take its toll. So in 1997 the final Miyazaki film premiered in Japan. Entitled Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) Miyazaki went back to medieval Japan to tell a mythic story about the struggle between the ancient gods of the wilderness and the encroaching humans. Within weeks it broke the all-time box office record for any film in Japan, a record that had been held for 15 years by E.T. You think the coming Phantom Menace lines will be bad? To accommodate the crowds theaters in Tokyo started showing the film at 7 am in the morning and still had people starting lines at 5 am to get in. And this was several weeks after the movie had premiered. At the time that Disney acquired the rights to the Ghibli films, Mononoke was still in production and Tokuma insisted that it be given a theatrical release in the US as part of the deal. Disney said yes probably thinking that a cursory release to the theaters would be enough. But a year later when they saw the box office records falling in Japan, Disney realized they had something really special on their hands. They turned it over to Miramax, their subsidiary which handles mostly foreign films, and Miramax started a two year process to do the best job possible of creating an English dubbed version. First they took the literal translation of the script from Ghibli and hired fantasy novelistand comic book scriptwriter Neil Gaiman to do a final polished script. As Gaiman put it, he wasn’t translating as much as he was rewording the lines to both keep the meaning and make the language sound natural to an English-speaking audience. Then they hired some the biggest names in Hollywood to do the voices: Minnie Driver, Clare Danes, Billy Crudrup and Gillian Anderson. In all the reports say they have spent over $3 million just on the dubbing job into English, an unprecedented amount. While no one expects it to be the blockbuster here that it was in Japan, we’re hoping that it will finally be the breakout film that brings anime to the US mainstream and puts it on the cultural map.

So what is it about? It defies a simple synopsis, but it is the first film of Miyazaki’s since Nausicaa to explicitly take on the theme of the natural world and the relationship between it and humans. In the first part of the Nausicaa manga and even more so in the film, the lines are fairly clearly drawn between Nausicaa and her vision of living with Nature against the efforts of the empires to conquer and vanquish Nature. Part of this Utopian view came from Miyazaki’s own political beliefs. He had been a socialist in his younger days and still believed in the possibility that someday, if people were properly educated and enlightened, society could reach such a ideal state. But as the 80s and early 90s passed, he and his views changed. He has said that watching the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into a bunch of warring states had discouraged him greatly, something that is particularly appropriate to mention tonight. [The NATO bombing of Serbia had just started the day before this class.--MH] As Miyazaki’s views became darker, the Nausicaa manga turned darker, and I’ll talk in more detail about that next week. Eventually he came to believe that there could never be a complete reconciliation between humans and Nature; there would always be struggle and conflict.

He’s been asked repeatedly if he would ever make a film sequel toNausicaa in order to tell the rest of the story, and he had adamantly said "no". But in a very real sense, Mononoke is a spiritual sequel to Nausicaa where he finally works out on film all the issues he presented in the final part of Nausicaa. According to Miyazaki the theme of Mononoke was the realization thatin the face of this endless struggle between humans and Nature, there were still beautiful experiences to have and wonderful things worth living for.

In spite of the word "Princess" in the title, Princess Mononoke is no Disney cartoon. Set in medieval Japan, it tells the story of Ashitaka, a young man who kills one of the boar gods of the forest and is cursed for doing so. In hopes of lifting the curse he travels to the home region of the boar god to find that the forest there is under attack from the humans. A new town has been built on the edge of the forest where iron is being smelted to make small hand-held cannons. The humans are slowly encroaching into this sacred forest to cut down the trees for the foundry, and so a war has broken out between the humans and the last of the animal gods of the forest. Fighting with the animals is a younggirl named San who was abandoned at birth in the forest and has been raised by Moro, a 300 year old wolf god. The people of the town call her the"Princess Mononoke". "Mononoke" is a Japanese word that doesn’t have a clear synonym in English, but it means the spiritual aspect or essence of a natural place or thing. In a sense San is the embodiment of the "avenging spirit" of the wounded forest. Ashitaka is the outsider who walks into the middle of this battle andtries to find a middle way between the two sides. Neither side is evil, each is doing what it sees as right and proper from its own point of view. The ambiguity of the situation may work against the film here inthe US. We don’t like watching a fight and being uncertain about which side to cheer for. The clip I’m going to show you is from the latter half of the movie when the Lady Eboshi, the leader of the foundry town, and her troops have pushed all the way to the sacred pool in the heart of the forest where the Shishigama lives. The Shishigama is the god of life and death who rules over all the forest and all the other animal gods. Eboshi has cut a deal with the representatives of the Emperor to kill the Shishigama and give them its head in exchange for the rights to the entire forest. Supposedly, anyone possessing the Shishigama’s head will become immortal. The scene starts with Eboshi uttering what I consider to be the most chutzpa-filled line in all of film history: "Watch closely. I’m going to show you how to kill a God." She thinks once the Shishigama is dead, the forest and its riches will be hers for the taking. As you will see, she is in for avery rude surprise.

(clip from Eboshi about to shoot to Ashitaka asking San to lend him her strength and the final image of the killing god’s ooze dripping into the forest)

As the old commercial from the 70s used to put it: "it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Well, that’s enough for tonight. I’ve just barely touched the surface of a lot of subjects, but I hope I’ve given you something to think about and gotten you excited about seeing the movie of Nausicaa next week. See you then!