Released in 1997, Princess Mononoke presented a sprawling, blood-soaked epic where the gods are dying and humanity is picking up the knife. It is a story that refuses the comfort of a moral high ground, forcing us to stand in the mud between two warring truths.
The story begins with a literal infection. When a boar god, driven mad by a shattered iron ball lodged in its flesh, attacks a peaceful Emishi village, the young prince Ashitaka is forced to kill it. In the struggle, the beast’s corruption seeps into Ashitaka’s arm, granting him superhuman strength but marking him for a slow, agonising death.
This is the thesis of the film: hate is a parasite. It is not an abstract emotion but a physical weight that grants power at the cost of the soul. Ashitaka’s journey is not a quest to find a cure in the traditional sense; he is searching for a way to exist in a world consumed by rage without becoming a monster himself. He is an exile, a man caught between the dying world of the gods and the rising world of men, tasked with a seemingly impossible mission: to see with eyes unclouded by hate in a landscape where everyone is blinded by it.
Let’s start with Lady Eboshi, the compassionate industrialist. In a lesser film, Lady Eboshi would be a one-dimensional villain. She’s be presented as a greedy industrialist cutting down the forest for profit. But Miyazaki gives us something far more challenging. Eboshi is a hero to the marginalised. She buys the freedom of women from brothels, giving them jobs and agency; she provides a sanctuary for lepers, treating them with a dignity that the rest of society denies them.
The tragedy of Iron Town is that Eboshi’s goodness for humanity is precisely what makes her evil to the forest. To create a paradise for the outcast, she must forge iron; to forge iron, she must burn the woods and kill the gods who protect them. Eboshi represents the cold, human-centric logic of progress. She isn’t a monster; she is a visionary who refuses to let her people suffer, even if it means decapitating a god to ensure their survival. We are forced to reflect on the uncomfortable truth that our own comfort is almost always built on the displacement of the wild.
Opposite Eboshi stands San, the “Princess Mononoke.” Abandoned by her human parents as a sacrifice and raised by the wolf goddess Moro, San is a creature of pure, reactionary fury. She is a human who has utterly rejected her own species, identifying so deeply with the forest that she views her own kind as a plague.
If Eboshi represents the cold logic of the future, San represents the primal, bleeding heart of the past. Her character actually feels like a mirror to Kiki; while Kiki struggled to find her place in human society, San fights to destroy it. Ashitaka’s role is not to tame her, but to remind her that beauty can exist in the overlap. When he famously tells her, “You’re beautiful,” it isn’t a romantic platitude; it’s a radical act of empathy. He is acknowledging her humanity at a time when she, and the rest of the world, have given up on it.
At the centre of the conflict is the Great Forest Spirit (Shishigami). It is a design that haunts: a deer with a human-like face and eyes that seem to look through time rather than at the person in front of it. Unlike the Western concept of a benevolent nature, the Spirit does not take sides. It gives life with one step and takes it with the next, indifferent to the wars of men or the pleas of the boars.
The Forest Spirit represents nature in its truest, most unromanticised form. It is amoral, not good or kind, but simply balanced. When Eboshi eventually attempts to kill it, she isn’t just hunting a creature; she is attempting to end the age of the sacred and usher in the age of resources. The transition is violent and chaotic, suggesting that when we lose our awe for the natural world and treat it as a mere obstacle to be conquered, we lose the very thing that keeps our own destructive nature in check.
Ashitaka is perhaps the most exhausted protagonist in the Ghibli canon. Because he refuses to pick a side, he is shot at by the soldiers of Iron Town and attacked by the wolves of the forest. He is a peacemaker in a world that demands a partisan, and he pays for it in blood. More than many other protagonists, he is very much defined by his restraint. Yes, he has superhuman strengths, but his power is also the literal cause of his inevitable demise. Every time he draws his bow or swings his sword with that cursed, pulsing arm, he is trading his future for this moment of survival.
His struggle reflects a profound truth: neutrality is not passive. To stand in the middle, absorbing the hate of both sides while trying to find a path forward, is the most violent and draining work imaginable. Ashitaka carries the weight of the infection because he refuses to pass it on to someone else. His true strength isn’t in his aim, but in his burden-bearing. He proves that seeing with unclouded eyes doesn’t mean life becomes clear or easy; it means you are cursed to see the pain of your enemy as clearly as your own.
Ashitaka acts as the film’s moral lightning rod; he is the only character willing to hold the iron of humanity and the fur of the gods simultaneously. He is an exile who belongs nowhere, yet takes responsibility for everywhere. Through Ashitaka, Miyazaki shows us that true courage isn’t found in winning a war, but in having the stomach to stand between two firing lines and refuse to leave until the shooting stops.
The film does not end with a tidy restoration. The Forest Spirit is dead, the old gods are gone, and while the mountains turn green again, the world has fundamentally changed. Eboshi vows to build a better town, and San returns to the woods, still unable to live among humans.
Princess Mononoke leaves us with a quiet, difficult compromise. It suggests that there is no happily ever after in the struggle between man and nature, only a series of choices we make every day to be slightly less destructive. Ultimately, we are left with the image of Ashitaka and San parting ways: two people who love each other but cannot live in each other’s worlds, committed to the hard work of living apart, but in peace.