A Film Animal Lovers Will Love: Respect Nature For It Can Destroy You.

Rating: 9/10 (24 September 2006)

Princess Mononoke is a grand, beautifully animated, heartfelt epic. It's a historical fantasy adventure, it's a melodrama, it's a race against time. Its pace is wonderful, taking us climactically through the all-embracing, outspread scope of the story. It has heart, it has violence, it has visual beauty, it has internal conflict.
What I like the most about Princess Mononoke is beyond all of these wonderfully delivered elements of a great movie. It's a movie about compassion and understanding towards animals. Yes, these animals are represented by gargantuan, violent beasts, but the movie is about human headstrong influence vs. animal outlook, sense, and behaviorism. It's about how astonishingly much more acute and attuned an animal's understanding is of the world's natural order than that of a human's.
I think Princess Mononoke, while being a beautifully made action-adventure, it's an important film, especially for Miyazaki's younger fans. It's important that they take the message of the film seriously.