The day has been dragging on; I feel my body protest for the lack of sleep and nutrition. Work was awful, having me run around all over campus multiple times. I’m looking forward to watch a film that has been recommended and praised multiple times. I buy my snacks; get comfortable…and then the people watching the film get to hear my repertoire of snores.
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| Watching this at 2am was pretty epic. |
That’s just outright embarrassing…
My body is pretty much energized for the rest of the night so I reluctantly set up my computer on my bed, grab a bottle of water, a pack of double-stuffed Oreos and my headphones and begin to stream Princess Mononoke at 1am.
130 minutes later I have a smile on my face and my eyes are heavy with sleep. I fall asleep thinking of Mononoke, the Nature God with its crazy head hybrid and Lady Eboshi.
While watching the movie…the second…conscious time, I couldn’t help but thinking…who is the antagonist in the movie? Is it Lady Eboshi? With her Iron Town elimination the natural and replacing it with technology? Is it the beheaded spirit of nature? Destroying everything around it and withering all life? All the characters seemed to have their own reasoning, their own thoughts behind everything they did. There are two sides to each character.
The one character I want to focus on the most is lady Eboshi. She seems to be an antagonist in the film, nevertheless you see her town and the way she treats her people and she doesn’t seem like an antagonist, but a main character. She’s destroying nature, killing animals and ultimately hoping to kill the spirit of the forest. But then you see her treating the lepers, taking care of them and showing them compassion when everyone else would reject them. She also gives women their place in society, allowing them to work and be valuable members of the community. She wants to murder Sai and then kill the spirit of the forest. But she also wants her people to prosper.
If Eboshi isn’t the antagonist…then who is? If it’s Eboshi then she definitely doesn’t fit the normal paradigms of an enemy.
One thing I know is that this movie raises awareness to nature, to our motives and the curses we all have inside of us.
But that’s enough rambling for today, I’m hungry.
Great plot...memorable characters and an AMAZING soundtrack.
“What have I become, my sweetest friend?” –Hurt, Johnny Cash
-Xavi
First off I love your recount of the viewing on Wednesday. I also really like your Johnny Cash quote. Good Stuff. I have to agree with you on lady Eboshi. She is defiantly a great example of a character that is hard to pin as ether good or evil. It is really hard to tell who the antagonist is in this film. I personally feel like every one but Ashitaka was sort of the antagonist because they all played a part by hating each other with such vigor. Im glad you enjoyed the film though, it is by far my favorite anima.
ReplyDeleteHaha, nice story about the screening. Your snoring = hilarious XDD But anyway, I also agree with you that it's hard to see who the true villain is in the anime. I don't know why, but something in me wants to say that Lady Eboshi wasn't the true bad guy. Can't explain it, but that's what I fee like. But I also think that every character in the film had their own parts to play in the destruction that was going on. Everyone had their own conflicts, both internal and external. San had to fight between her animal instincts and her human instincts, Eboshi and the forest animals were at odds, etc. It was all really confusing to pick the bad guy, but I think that's what makes the film so likeable. I like the ambiguous ending instead of the happy, let's flock in the flowers ending.
ReplyDeleteHahahahaha, great introductory paragraph, Xavi! Your falling asleep and snoring during the movie was definitely a highlight to an already memorable film! I also talked about the grey-ness the film portrays in its good and bad characters. In the case of Lady Eboshi, she has a dark side that involves ruling the world and wiping out anything that gets in her way. But she does so much good by giving ample opportunity to the outcasts of Iron Works. I think 'Princess Mononoke' is another example of how Japanese anime differ from Western films. Whereas our American films and shows may have heroes and villains, this film, like most anime, has "protagonists" and "antagonists," not good guys and bad guys. All of the major characters have flaws. This type of character development is more realistic because everyone in the world is not totally good or totally bad. I remember a few years ago when Will Smith commented about Adolf Hitler, something about how Hitler wasn't a totally bad person. Smith said Hitler probably thought he was doing a "good thing." I totally understand what Will Smith was trying to say, but he got so much backlash from his comments. The controversy surrounding his comments got so out of hand, and I definitely think people overreacted. No one in real life is totally evil, even Hitler. He probably DID think he was doing the world a favor, thus from his point of view he's a good guy, a hero.
ReplyDeleteLady Eboshi could be considered as a protagonist and an antagonist, it just depends in relation to what. You know, like how in calculus you can take the derivative in respect to x, and at the same time you can take the derivative of the same equation in relation to y, this yielding dx/dx and dx/dy (if I remember correctly). The crazy stuff that went down in that film is awesome, and just way cool. Like Kent said, some people believe that they're doing the right thing, but society says they're doing evil, but who gives society the right to say that? An example of that would be if a child was taught that 2+2=5, he's not lying, but he isn't correct in society either. The child in this case could be Lady Eboshi who was just trying to help the outcasts of society and help industrialize the human world.
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