I'm sure you're very good at what you do, Doctor Fell

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2001)

Disney animation has linear detail, economical drawing, and extremely sophisticated motion. In a word, it's classical. Japanese animation has vertical detail, heavily etched backdrops that verge on being overdesigned, but rudimentary motion. Japanese animation is baroque. (Disney cartoons tend to have better draftsmanship, but this is inessential to the difference in style.) The styles could hardly be more fundamentally opposed, and you like either one or the other. It's hard to have a strong taste for both. To lay my cards on the table, I like the Disney style: I consider it more subtle and versatile, and at its best it lives and breathes like no other kind of animated image. Still, the Japanese style has its strengths.
It's essentially a static art: silence and stillness are what it conveys best. It's interesting to compare "Mononoke" with "The Emperor's New Groove". The latter film is unusual for Disney in that silence and stillness are used with surprising frequency, but the effect is always unstable: stillness is a kind of dissonance, something requiring resolution. The moments of silence and stillness in "Mononoke" are consonant and complete in themselves. There are some lovely static tableaux in which the dialogue - if there is any - has as much time as it needs to breathe.
The Japanese style is also good at conveying a sense of place. (Disney can do this also, but neither as quickly nor as economically.) Usually it's an urban place. Think of definitive anime, and most Westerners think of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell", which are very urban indeed. (My personal favourite in the genre is "The Crimson Pig", which, if not quite so urban, is heavily technological.) "Mononoke" is different. Most of the action takes place in the untamed, and I mean untamed, wilderness; now and then we enter a village. Surprisingly, even these settings are solidly realised. A single drop of water falls from a pine tree and lands on someone's face, and at once we feel that we are in the middle of a dense, damp, green forest.
The story is deeply weird, in the best Japanese tradition - in particular, in the tradition of this particular director - and intensely sad. The hero's quest is fulfilled, in a sort of a way, but the film does not end in triumph. Instead of thinking "good, X happened", we think, "oh well, at least X happened". -I must admit I was surprisingly unmoved. Something about "Mononoke" distanced me; it may have been the facelessness of the central hero, it may have been the overall style; if the latter, it may have been entirely my fault, which is why I'm unwilling to commit myself to any kind of criticism. All I know is that, much as I admired parts of "Mononoke", I am unable to love it.