Princess Mononoke · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boar the size of a barn comes out of the treeline wearing worms. Thousands of them, whipping and coiling over its body, scorching the grass where they touch. Princess Mononoke was drawn almost entirely by hand, a famously enormous number of its drawings corrected by Miyazaki himself, and that writhing curse-flesh is one of the few minutes in the whole picture that required a computer, because nobody could draw it. So the curse arrives as a different order of matter, something the hand-made world has no vocabulary for. Ashitaka kills the thing. The worms brush his forearm. From that moment he has a clock inside his body.

Keep that arm in mind. Nearly everything strange and great about this film runs through it.

Gilles Deleuze, writing on cinema in the 1980s, had a name for images built this way: the impulse-image. It's his term for films where what moves people isn't motive or reasoning but drive — appetite, rage, hunger — erupting up through the social surface. He found it in Stroheim and Buñuel, and its signature is what he called the line of slope: an irreversible descent, a body or a world running downhill toward exhaustion and death. Ashitaka's arm is that line drawn on a person. The stain creeps. It gives him inhuman strength — arrows from that arm sever limbs — and it will kill him. Hatred in this film is not an attitude anyone holds. It is a substance, and it spreads.

Deleuze added that such worlds have two floors. There's the derived milieu, the specific place with its economy and its manners, and underneath it the originary world, older and pre-human, where the drives actually live. Miyazaki builds both with a seriousness animation had rarely attempted. Tatara, Eboshi's ironworks, is rendered as real labor: women walking the great foot-bellows in rhythm, ox-drivers hauling rice and iron up the mountain, lepers wrapped in bandages assembling firearms. You can see how the town eats. And beneath it, the forest — not an idyll, but the originary world proper, where the gods are proud and violent and perfectly capable of the hatred that turned that boar into worms. The film's moral difficulty comes from having drawn the first floor so well. The forest is being killed by people you can't dismiss.

The bellows are also a piece of what Deleuze called the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation before any dialogue states it. The women's walking rhythm tells you what Tatara is: a place where the discarded were given work and, with it, standing. No speech required.

Now the arm again. Bergson, whom Deleuze reads throughout the cinema books, described a living being as a gap — perception comes in, response goes out, and in between there's a delay where choice happens. Deleuze calls that gap a centre of indetermination, the interval. Ashitaka is that interval turned into a character. Exiled, cursed, aligned with nobody, he is a hesitation with a deadline, trying to see "with eyes unclouded by hate" while the poison keeps score. And here is Miyazaki's specific invention: he takes the interval, which in most cinema is a fraction of a second between seeing and shooting, and stretches it across a 133-minute epic without letting it collapse.

Because the equipment for a conventional epic is all present. Deleuze's large-form action-image is the classical shape: an encompassing situation presses on a hero until a decisive act transforms it, force against force — what he called the binomial. Mononoke has the cleanest binomial imaginable, iron against forest, and it inherits its staging from action cinema directly. The Tatara siege is Seven Samurai geography — mud, palisades, massed bodies flattened by long lenses into a single surging mass, what Deleuze would call a dividual, a crowd rendered as one affective unit. From Takahata's Horus, Prince of the Sun, on which Miyazaki did scene design, comes the whole community-defense structure with an antagonist you can't hate cleanly.

And then the payoff never arrives. The catastrophe is triggered by legitimate claims colliding, not by a scheme. Nobody is defeated. The ending offers regrowth without restoration. That's not the exhaustion Deleuze diagnosed in postwar neorealism, where a poor man simply cannot act effectively. Ashitaka can act. He declines to act on either side, and the film backs him. An action epic that refuses its own catharsis on principle — that is a genuinely new thing to have done with the form, and it's why the film feels adult in a way the genre rarely does.

What holds it together is the breathing. Miyazaki works in ma, the charged pause: water dripping, someone sitting, a landscape simply held while nothing advances. Deleuze called these stretches dead time, and he named the larger pattern respiration-space — the alternation of a vast, open milieu with the taut line of the action. The violence in this film lands because it interrupts stillness. The dread of the forest gods, materially present rather than symbolic, comes down from Kwaidan, which taught Japanese cinema how to hold a painted, artificial landscape long enough for it to feel inhabited.

One theoretical note worth making. André Bazin grounded film realism in the photograph's physical bond to what stood in front of the lens. Animation has no such alibi; a drawing is only ever a claim. Miyazaki pays for his reality in labor instead — the ox-drivers, the rice, the anatomy of the animal gods — and when he does use the computer, for the curse and for the Forest Spirit's dissolving transformations, he buries the seam inside the painterly surface rather than showing it off. In 1997, that was the road not taken.

The film's other quiet claim is political. Deleuze wrote about modern cinema in which the people are missing — where politics passes through a collective that doesn't exist yet, or no longer does. Ashitaka's Emishi are vanishing from history. Eboshi's town assembles a new people out of everyone the era threw away. Neither is a nation, and the film ends without producing one.

What it produced instead was room. It proved a drawn feature could hold tragedy, mutilation, and unresolved argument, and it cleared the path for Spirited Away to travel the world. Watch it again for the pauses rather than the battles. Count how often Miyazaki stops. Then ask what the film is doing with all that delay — and whether Ashitaka's refusal to choose is wisdom, or just the longest anyone has managed to keep the interval open.