Type: Movie
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 133 min
Directed By Miyazaki Hayao
Produced By Studio Ghibli
Year Produced: 1997
The To Aru Kagaku no Home Theater Miyazaki Marathon... and then some... continues, despite public protest!
This is a "festival" where I sit down at spend about a week and a half watching all of the Miyazaki movies that I want to. I didn't mention this last time, but I don't have any particular interest in Ponyo.
What's still to come are:
Monday of Next Week - Spirited Away (2001)
Tuesday of Next Week - Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
I've already reviewed Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, and Whisper of the Heart, so if you're interested in that, then check it out... back there.
During a more fantastic age in Japanese history (specifically the Muromachi Period), spirits were a more common sight than they are today. Sure, those soot gremlins out of My Neighbor Totoro appear randomly, but not around America.
In this time, everybody's heard of the "Spirit of the Forest", which is... the spirit of the forest, the very life of the woods of Japan, but that's not the point right now, the point is that there is a very small village in the extreme countryside of Japan that's having some kind of spiritual... scare I guess, although they could be freaking out about bandits or something like that.
Prince Ashitaka, the... prince of the village (and of the Emishi people (look it up if you care, this is semi-historical)) is riding out to the watchtower on Yakul, a red elk. He's going out there to find out what's got the village people so worried. On the way there, he passes his sister and her friends, telling them to return to the village quickly.
At the watchtower, he peers out into the forest and spots something moving behind the barrier placed there. As he and the old man on guard watch, a demon smashes down the wall and then... sneezes, I suppose. When it does, the things "skin" comes off in the form of a bunch of weird worms. It's a boar underneath... or at least until the worms fall back on top.
Achoo!
The demon spots Yakul and obviously sees a meal in it, and so charges towards the tower. Ashitaka manages to scare Yakul out of his stupor, but in exchange, he doesn't have the opportunity to get down, and so the demon rams and tips over the tower, so Ashitaka grabs the old man and hops to safety in a tree.
Ashitaka gets down, the guard shouting after him to watch that the demon doesn't touch him, less the curse be on him too.
Ashitaka gets Yakul and then dashes after the demon. When he manages to catch up with it again, Ashitaka tries to ward it off by... asking it nicely, since that's all you can do with a god/demon. But it doesn't work.
The two burst out of the forest, Ashitaka and Yakul dashing on, but the demon pauses and then notices Ashitaka's little sister. More food.
When it goes after them, Ashitaka gets in it's way, and when one of the little girls falls down, Ashitaka starts a fight with the demon, shooting it in the eye.
The demon gets seriously pissed, chasing after Ashitaka, and managing to grab onto his arm.
Ashitaka rips himself away, then fires another arrow, striking and killing the demon.
After the battle, all of the people run out to see what's left of the demon and their prince. The place where the demon grabbed Ashitaka is burned with some kind of evil mark now.
The wise woman is fetched and she tends to the boar god, asking it to pass on peacefully, but the boar's bitchy and doesn't agree, and actually curses all the human race. Wow. That's not very nice of him.
Later that night, the village elders all meet (along with Ashitaka. He is a prince, after all). The wise woman uses fortune telling to determine Ashitaka's fate. He's going to die. That mark on his arm will eventually consume his entire body and kill him. Kind of like cancer, I suppose.
Maybe because they don't like living with a cursed person, or maybe because of some ancient tradition, Ashitaka is forced/obligated to leave the village, which he does without complaining.
The only clue he's given is to go West. That's helpful. But wait! The wise woman reaches insider her robe and pull out this; a ball of iron, in case you're wondering.
Before he actually manages to leave though, his little sister runs out (defying village law), giving him a crystal dagger to remember her by.
This is important later.
And so Ashitaka sets out to the West to search for the answers that the wise woman was talking about, but he's going to find more than just answers. There's always been a shitload more questions than answers, believe me.
Like I said a couple of posts back, this was probably the first anime that I ever watched, and I'm pretty happy about that. I mean, it's got everything that a teenager needs; samurais, battles, blood... and that's it! We're easy to satisfy.
Miyazaki's naturalist theme is back with a vengeance, along with a humanitarian element that has been rather rare since Nausicaa (it was a lot more stressed in the manga, but you could still pick up on the small issues in the anime).
This portrays the natural element a lot more forcefully. It's presented as a battle, humans and technology vrs. the forest and spirituality. It's kind of sad how you can relate this to pretty much every one of the world's issues...
The music was nice. It wasn't to my specific style, but I found myself humming it quite a lot after I had finished watching it. Serious Japanese influences, mainly because this is a semi-historical film. The only thing in it that's not accurate is... you know, the flamethrowers. I don't think that you can do that with gunpowder.
... and if you can, please don't write a million comments protesting your insane knowledge of explosives and firearms, because I find it kind of creepy and... boring.
Actually, I listened to the Japanese version for the first time. It was really weird, amazingly. The Japanese version was a lot quieter than the English one. The Japanese voice actors were a lot more toned-down than the American ones, so that made is quieter, but there was also a lot of stuff said in the English version that didn't have a place in the Japanese one. That was kind of cool.
... and Moro totally sounded like a guy, only it's not. Kind of creepy, just like this.
Bwa ha ha ha ha!
It was my favorite one of all the Miyazaki movies, and in the unlikely situation that you actually agree with something that I've written here, you'll like it too. So watch it, if nothing else.
Coming up next!
Day 8: Spirited Away!
Alert!
If you don't like spoilers, or still want to watch the show now, you'd better stop reading!Ashitaka travels West. Along the way, he encounters a village that is under attack by some bandits.
When he tries to get through, they shoot at him mainly because he's riding through and might have money, you know how bandits are; assholes. At the opening of a side road, Ashitaka spots a bandit trying to hack a woman in half, but not doing very well. Nonetheless, it pisses him off and...
GUYAHHHH!
His arm starts to have a seizure. When he lets the arrow fly, it rips off the bandit's arms and leaves him standing there wondering why he suddenly feels so light.
When another bandit (this one on horseback) tries to stop him, Ashitaka fires back, taking the dude's head off. Cool. I remember this scene the best for obvious reasons.
I can see my house from here!
After managing to get through, Ashitaka stops and rests, discovering that the mark on his arm has grown more.
Ashitaka heads into a town where he tries to buy some rice using a gold nugget... but the keeper there doesn't really get the idea until someone points it out to her. Specifically this pudgy little monk named Jigo.
Voiced by Billy Bob Thorton in the English version. Cool.
The two have a friendly chat during which Ashitaka asks Jigo is he knows what the ball of iron is and where it came from. Jigo says that he doesn't, and that was that. The next morning, Ashitaka leaves before Jigo totally wakes up.
That night, in some different location, a Lady (as in Lord and Lady, I suppose, or it could be just a title) Aboshi is leading a caravan of rice up a slippery, muddy slope.
They are hoping that they won't be found out and attacked by the spirits that guard the area... well... that's a lie. Aboshi's kind of wanting too. She's got some kind of rivalry with Moro, the wolf-goddess that guards the forest in this area.
And lucky for her, they attack!
Along with two child wolves is the Wolf Princess, someone who looks remarkably like a human with a ceramic mask, but you can't really tell since they leave after they start getting shot at. And not with bow and arrow either! No way, Aboshi's moved out of the stone age and embraced weapons from the West! Rifles! Albeit huge, clunky, single-shot rifles, or should I say "sticks with a cannon on the end" instead?
Either way, the threat's passed, and everybody's calm. Until Moro shows up and slaughters like half the caravan. Aboshi pulls out a "space age" rifle (like a bazooka now) and shoots Moro in the chest.
Moro topples off the cliff and the caravan finally moves on.
Ashitaka's taking a shortcut down by a river when he finds a couple of bodies. He hauls them out of the water and then checks downstream for more, but doesn't find any human ones...
Instead, he finds Moro. Who kills him.
Well not yet. But he does find Moro, and watches as the Wolf Princess and the two wolf children kind of gather around her.
When he's found out, he gets up and asks them if they know any way to find the Spirit of the Forest.
The Wolf Princess tells him to fuck off.
Actually, they probably know where to find him, they just aren't telling him. What is this, some kind of frat?!
Ashitaka finds a new friend(s) when he returns to the bodies that he hauled out of the water. One of them's woken up, and there's a new visitor there.
When people tell me that they think Kodamas are cute, I just don't get it.
The Kodama is a tree spirit, and it signifies good luck. However Koroku (that's the human) thinks that they are evil and act like spies for the Spirit of the Forest. Ashitaka doesn't really know what to do with that information, so they just decide to go back through the "haunted forest" and find Koroku's town.
After a while, they manage to get through most of the forest, but decide to take a rest stop. Koroku warns Ashitaka that this is a bad idea. The place that he's decided to stop at is a place where god's hang out. It's their mall.
While Ashitaka's getting some water, he notices... something off in the distance. It's a herd of deer... and one freaky-looking one. Ashitaka's arm freaks out when the big deer looks at him, but quiets down when it goes away. Weird.
They finally manage to get out of the forest, and arrive at Iron Town, a fortress where Lady Aboshi has taken to mining all of the iron out of the ground and the mountains (hence the dispute with the forest).
When Ashitaka arrives inside the city, he is treated rather rudely, but Lady Aboshi still wishes to see him afterwards, so he is more or less forced to stay. He's also a chick-magnet in this place, so I'm sure that was very hard on him. Poor guy.
Yakul and the oxen don't care though.
At dinner time, the locals tell Ashitaka the story behind the feud between Lady Aboshi and the forest. Like I was saying earlier, there was iron in the mountains under the forest, so they tried to cut down the trees to get at the iron... and that's what inspired the conflict.
The locals at the time couldn't do anything about it, but then Aboshi came with her rifles and... flamethrowers.
She schooled the boars and effectively killed their leader Nago, who fled after being shot with a poisoned bullet.
When Aboshi calls Ashitaka, he confronts her with the evidence of his arm and the bullet that was found in the demon that he killed back home. I guess that demon was Nago.
Aboshi decides that Ashitaka's okay enough to show him her secret place... damn.
... oh! It's a garden. The fertile... augh!
It's actually a garden surrounding... a gun shop, more or less. A place where lepers are making guns for Aboshi's world domination.
After seeing this, Ashitaka's arm starts to spasm again, but he stops it from drawing his sword and killing Aboshi. Aboshi tells Ashitaka that the creatures of the forest are still trying to rebuild the forest, and then she offers an alliance with him. Kill the forest spirit and take the iron together. Ashitaka refuses and leaves the hut.
Ashitaka goes to the town bellows and starts pumping with the women to work off his stress.
As all this is going on, the Wolf Princess (San) and the two wolf cubs are sneaking up on Iron Town.
They hurdle down and smash against the wall, catapulting San up and over the ramparts. San dashes past the guards and heads for the center of town, and Aboshi.
Ashitaka notices that she's coming and tries to intercept her, but she gets past him too, so he follows.
When he reaches the center of town, Ashitaka watches as Aboshi and Gonza set up a trap for San. He tries to warn her, but San just continues on with her original plan.
And gets her head blown off.
Actually, she's remarkably okay. The ceramic mask absorbed the attack, leaving her face amazingly unhurt. Not even a scratch...
Ashitaka keeps the other villagers away from her as he tries to wake San, but when the girl wakes up again, she attacks him, then runs past him to fight Aboshi.
After seeing this, Ashitaka gets rightfully pissed off, and the mark on his arm grows again, feeding off the anger in his body. He starts to walk towards the battle, and the mark takes on a more physical image.
Ashitaka walks into the middle of the fight and stops both women, and when San bites him to get him to let go, his arm practically explodes in... blue, worm-thingies.
After pleading with the other villagers to stop the fight with the forest, Aboshi gets tired of hearing him preach, and tries to cut his arm off, but he whacks her in the stomach and knocks her out. Then he... I don't actually know what he did to San. Kneed her? Either way, she's out too.
She hands Aboshi over to some of the village women and loads San on his shoulders, claiming that he's leaving with her. One of the women with a gun tells him that he's not, warning him to stay, but Ashitaka turns around and walks away.
As he does, the woman trembles, and is startled into firing when another woman speaks.
The worst heart attack you've ever seen.
Mortally wounded, Ashitaka continues on, past everybody until he gets to the main gate. When he is stopped there because the gate won't be opened until morning, Ashitaka pushes against the door hard, managing to push the gate open.
Running down the hill are the wolf cubs, and Ashitaka convinces them to stay while he brings San to them. Ashitaka turns back and thanks the villagers of Iron Town before leaving.
Ashitaka and the Wolf Princess ride for a while until San wakes up and Ashitaka falls off. When San threatens to kill him, Ashitaka counters with the always surprising random "You're beautiful". Not that it's not true, but if you way it in that kind of situation, it's pretty unexpected.
San takes the passed-out Ashitaka to the pool of the Forest Spirit/Spirit of the Forest, leaving him laying there in the water with a sapling cutting embeded in the dirt just before his head.
Then the Forest Spirit comes. There are a couple things that I'll tell you about right here. As far as I'm concerned, the Spirit of the Forest and the Deer God are two different entities. Spirit of the Forest/Nightwalker by...night, and Deer God by day.
Spirit of the Forest
Deer God. So it's him you're praying to when you go "Oh deer God!"...
The Deer God heals Ashitaka's bullet wound, but not the mark that he actually came all this way to get healed. Kind of sucky.
Meanwhile, Jigo is staking out a mountain range for some reason, when he sees Okkoto, a boar god from another part of the country.
Fucking birds! Go away!
Okkoto's come all this way probably to fight for the Spirit of the Forest, and he's brought his entire tribe/clan with him for the fight.
When he wakes up again, Ashitaka realizes this fact and gets depressed, but that's okay because San's there to feed him... jerky that he can't actually chew. Mouth-to-mouth feeding; it's awright.
As they are eating, Moro and the boars meet, during which the boars ask Moro why San and Ashitaka are in the forest. When San replies that the Deer god healed Ashitaka, the boars have an aneurysm, shouting that the Deer God should have healed Nago, the original protector of the forest.
When Moro replies that Nago was afraid to die, the boars get angry at the dis and claim that the wolf clan must have eaten him, but then Ashitaka speaks up and says "No no no no. It was me who killed him. I'll just say this while I'm lying prone in the middle of a heard of boar demi-gods who hate humans."... what an idiot.
Okkoto comes out to be the walking lie-detector, but San thinks that he's about to eat Ashitaka, but when she figures out that he's blind, she, for some reason, believes him more.
Okkoto doesn't actually eat Ashitaka, but instead smells him arm.
"Hrm. Smells nasty. Must be a curse." is the ultimate conclusion. That and "Go away. If I see you again, I'll have to kill you.".
Thanks for the update.
When Moro asks Okkoto what he's going to do, he replies that the boars are going to put everything on the line for a suicidal charge with an understood 0% chance of victory or survival. The thing that he's banking on is the idea the humans will be impressed. Yeah, they'll be impressed all the time that they're cutting down those trees and mining the iron out, good plan.
While the gods are having the war council, the humans are having a war of their own. Aboshi is facing off with Osano's samurai over control of Iron Town. Too bad Osono's got no rifles.
Osano got his ass kicked to say the least.
On the way back to Iron Town, Aboshi spots Jigo waiting on a rock beside the road. The deal is this; when Aboshi was establishing her rule in the Iron Town district-area, she needed rifles and men to shoot them, and Jigo supplied them, but in return, he wanted help with something of his own.
The Emperor of Japan has offered a hill of gold to whoever can grant him immortality, and it is believed that the head of the Spirit of the Forest can grant such a thing. So if Jigo gets the head, he gets the gold, and that's what he want's Aboshi's help with. He wants Aboshi to kill the Spirit for him.
Aboshi voices her understanding of the situation and tells Jigo to call out his mercs that are hidden, and get them ready for the final battle with the boars.
That night, Ashitaka and Moro have a rather enlightening chat when Ashitaka figures out how San came under the care of Moro, and about how the boars are going into suicidal mode. Ashitaka tries to convince Moro to "free San", and to stop the boars, and this is what she did.
Ate him.
No, not really, though I'm sure the idea passed though her head.
Moro tells Ashitaka to leave in the morning.
That morning, Ashitaka is led out of the are by one of the wolf cubs, and he asks it to deliver his sister's crystal dagger to San in exchange for her care. The wolf cub takes the dagger to San, who's having a conversation with Moro.
Moro's officially decided that this battle is the epitome of retarded and is refusing to take part in it, but San has decided to go to ride with Okkoto to be his eyes.
On his way to... nowhere, Ashitaka is engulfed in a squall. When the clouds part and the rain stops, Ashitaka can hear gunfire in the distance.
Osano's attacked and laid siege to Iron Town in Aboshi and the men's absence. The women and lepers are holding them off with their rifles, but they need Aboshi to route the samurai. Ashitaka agrees to take the message to her on the frontline of the battle that is happening.
On his way there, he is seen as a messenger for Aboshi (and rightly so), and is chased by Osano's samurai. As he tries to flee from them, Yakul is shot in the ass. Incredibly pissed, Ashitaka kills three of the pursuing samurai before they finally leave.
When Ashitaka finds the battlefield, the battle's long over. Turns out that the men of Iron Town were just used as bait to lure the boars in while Jigo's soldiers dropped grenades down on top of them and pretty much blew them to hell and back.
Aboshi's already gone into the forest to go hunting along with Jigo and his men, not hers. Ashitaka tells the men to return to Iron Town.
In the slight distance, Ashitaka can hear the sounds of struggling. When he investigates, he finds one of the wolf cubs trapped under a dead boar. When he tries to help it out, Jigo's men try to kill him, but the villagers of Iron Town knock them out and then help haul the boar off the wolf.
Ashitaka tells the wolf to take him to the Spirit of the Forest, or at least that pond. That's where Aboshi'll be.
Okkoto's been owned.
Maybe owned is an understatement.
The guy's dinner.
They (here meaning San, Okkoto and the other wolf cub) are traveling to the pool of the Spirit of the Forest to get Okkoto healed.
As they travel, out of the woods come a bunch of floppy boars. They're actually dudes in boar skins using the smell to mask their own (because Okkoto's blind, this would have worked better if San wasn't there). They're Jigo's men, hoping that they will lead them to the pool of the Spirit of the Forest.
Okkoto smells his fallen warriors and charges through, believing that they have been revived from the dead. He demands that that Spirit of the Forest come out and give him the strength to defeat the humans.
En route there, San tries to get Okkoto to chill, but he won't. When Okkoto finally stops, he begins to turn into a demon, consumed with hate.
As San tries to get Okkoto to stop, one of the men in the audience slings a rock into the back of her head. San knocks out and is wrapped up in the worms. Okkoto gets back up and starts towards the pool of the Spirit of the Forest.
Meanwhile, Ashitaka's managed to find Aboshi, on her way to the pool as well. He tells her what's going on at Iron Town and then tries to tell her one more time to give up on hunting the Spirit of the Forest. Ashitaka runs off after saying that, but Aboshi can't leave because of her previous engagement with Jigo, so they press on as well.
Ashitaka finds the pool of the Forest Spirit, with Moro lying apparently dead in it, and then Okkoto. He tells Okkoto to stop so he can get San back, but Okkoto's... a demon, and has lost his ability to comprehend.
Ashitaka sees San's legs kicking out, and jumps on Okkoto, trying to rip San out of the mess, but Okkoto's got and itch and eventually flings Ashitaka off and into the pool.
Moro wakes up after Ashitaka falls on her, then confronts Okkoto herself. Moro chomps through the worms and pulls San out. Ashitaka wakes up and almost gets stepped on by the Deer God.
Suddenly, Aboshi... shoots the Deer God in the neck, but that doesn't stop it. The Deer God gets back up and keeps walking towards Okkoto.
Ashitaka follows it onto land, taking San from Moro's mouth and diving into the lake with her to wash off the sludge.
The Deer God, being the supreme being that it is, takes life away from both Okkoto and then Moro (Okkoto because he was a demon, and Moro because she was just this side of dead anyway).
After this, the Deer God begins to change into the Spirit of the Forest. This being the best/only time to kill it, Aboshi dashes out and tries to assassinate the Deer God, but it busts some growing magic on her rifle, until she uses brute strength to fire, at which point, she blows the Deer God/Spirit of the Forest's head off.
Biff
Without it's head, the Spirit of the Forest is nothing more than a god of death or, more specifically, a mass of extenuating circumstances. What it touches once dies/is brought back, it's second touch is ultimate death as far as I know. I figured this out when the blob touched Moro, reanimating her head which wiggled forward and bit off Aboshi's arm.
And now it's searching for it's head, which Jigo's taken to collect the gold.
All around San and Ashitaka (and Aboshi and Gonza), the forest is dying, being sucked of life by the rouge god. San has a breakdown and when Ashitaka tries to get her to calm down, she stabs him with the crystal dagger.
San calms down again and agrees to help Ashitaka get the god's head back to him.
They make a pass by Iron Town, telling them about the rouge god and about Aboshi and the men. As they are leaving, the sludge comes over the mountains, sweeping through Osano's camp and over Iron Town, sealing up the ironworks and essentially destroying the entire place.
All this time, the Spirit of the Forest has pretty much found its head.
It's been chasing Jigo and the other pallbearers around for quite a while now. They are waiting for sunrise, which will theoretically kill the Nightwalker, and then everybody's happy.
Ashitaka and San head off Jigo and manage to get him to stop. Only problem is that the entire area around them is surrounded by that sludge.
Ashitaka and San take the head out of the basin and offers it to the god to make it at peace.
Return it, or keep it as the best trophy ever!
The Spirit of the Forest takes back it's head, cleansing Ashitaka and San of the curse mark (that San... contracted when she touched the head). Then it fell on what was left of Iron Town.
In the end, the entire area was turned back into a new forest. Aboshi decides to try and find a more honest career, as does Jigo and his remaining man.
Ashitaka decides to go and help the villagers rebuild Iron Town, but San can't forgive the humans (what's that make Ashitaka then?), so she decides to stay and help the new forest, but since they'll live so close, they'll be able to visit each other all the time.
Happy End.
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