Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Princess Mononoke
1997 · Hayao Miyazaki · Princess Mononoke on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the stain spreading on Ashitaka's right forearm. (performance)
The mark darkens and creeps as the film goes on, and Ashitaka keeps checking it, hiding it, testing what it lets him do.
Payoff: It is a clock and a compass at once, forcing him to act without ever letting him fully choose a side. In the reading: the interval. Ashitaka's cursed arm is what the reading calls the interval, a hesitation stretched into a whole epic.
Notice how often Miyazaki simply holds a shot doing nothing. (cutting)
Water drips, someone sits, a landscape is held still, and only then does the drama resume, cut against sudden bursts of violence.
Payoff: The stillness is not filler; it is what makes the eruptions of violence land as hard as they do. In the reading: temps mort. These stillnesses are what the reading calls dead time, gaps that let the coming violence land harder.
Watch the women working the ironworks bellows. (staging)
Their rhythm, the ox-drivers hauling iron, the bandaged lepers assembling firearms, all render Tatara as a working economy rather than a backdrop.
Payoff: You see how the town eats, which is why the people destroying the forest cannot be dismissed as villains. In the reading: the-gest. The bellows' rhythm is what the reading calls a gest, a posture that shows Tatara's social order without dialogue.
Listen for the countertenor voice singing the title song. (sound)
Hisaishi's score is otherwise thunderous and orchestral, elegiac in its main theme, but this one voice sounds unlike anything else in the mix.
Payoff: The strange register of that voice announces the film's world as sacred and not fully human-scaled.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the pauses as closely as the battles, since Miyazaki builds his argument in the stillness between them.