(journal.animationstudies.org)
It’s such a different take from modern parenting and today’s anxiety filled culture.
There has to be a happy medium between "I can't let my kids play outside or walk to school" and "Pirates took them? No need to panic. It'll probably work out."
When I watched Mononoke, the scenes in the Iron Village completely befuddled me for a long time at first. This city both constantly establishes itself as a place with a deeply negative effect on the surrounding wilds. They're actively destroying the outskirts of the forest where a bunch of animal gods live, and yet at the same time, they're all nice, and oddly gender affirming and... The villain employs Lepers.
As in, they had nowhere else to go, so she took them in. And she has no problem taking a gun they built directly off their hands, completely unafraid. I grew learning that Lepers were being thrown out because everyone was afraid and they were highly contagious and no one knew what else to do, so having the villain, unironically, show the grace I learned belonged to "The modern world", was like a brick tossed directly inside my brain. She was the reason Ashitaka was dying, she was the reason the pig monster showed up. And yet, she was not a bad person.
Good art. Felt a lot of empathy for Ashitaka. Thought about it a lot, made me grow a lot. And all because someone in Japan, somehow, laser targeted me on my sensibilities on Leprosy. So random.
That’s the joy in most Miyazaki movies. Any other movie would have an obvious evil villain. Miyazaki gives all of his characters motivation that is immediately relatable. Sometimes characters that appear to be villains at the beginning are heroes at the end.
All of these things mirror the real world. Rarely is someone actually intentionally evil. They may have different priorities, goals, fears, and motivations, and those may produce behaviors or beliefs that seem bad, but without understanding the why or what, it’s easy to just assume their “bad” people. Ashitaka doesn’t take the bait and is kind, respectful, and generous to everyone who isn’t obviously doing something atrocious (like the samurai slaughtering peasants).
Princess Mononoke is easily one of my favorite movies of all time and my favorite Miyazaki movie.
Jigo lays a trap that sacrifices hundreds of his own men in order to kill a god.
I'd put both of them in the villain category. Before the battle, I wouldn't put either of them in that category, but the climax really makes them out to be awful people. Eboshi in particular hides behind smiles and buying up the contracts of prostitutes (to make them her slaves) and helping lepers until the climax when she completely abandons them, throwing them to the wolves in service of money.
She is absolutely a non-evil, non-villainous antagonist.
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Watching the movie again, I am amazed at how precisely Miyazaki captures the exact feeling of the sky and sea of the Adriatic in summer.
It start by making citations form Roffat, Takai and Okuda, to blindly classify Porco Rosso as an "anti war propaganda" movie. The article did not even discuss this classification.
- Is "Porco Rosso" anti-war or anti-fascist (or both)?
- Is it even propaganda?
The article cite "The Wind Rises" just to tell than this other movie also have the same themes (war, fascism, planes) but do not even even try to analyze if this other movie is "propaganda" too. At last make a paragraph to compare the two movies.
The article have around 30 citations (including 4 auto-citations) mainly to state the obvious to anybody who have watched the movie or read the Wikipedia page.
And finally the conclusion is something like: "i have see this movie and now is will now state the obvious about it".
At least, try to explain :
- Why "Le temps de cerises"?
- What about "The Princess and the Frog" in the story?
- What was the real meaning of "porco rosso", as an insult, during the fascism period in Italy?