Perfect, but...

Rating: 10/10 (18 September 2004)

... despite much has been made of Neil Gaiman's dubbed lines, you should absolutely watch it in Japanese with subtitles. The dubbing actors seem not to completely understand the intonations their characters' lines require, which, to me, made the first 20 minutes rather confusing. It was only when I switched to Japanese that it all seemed to make sense. Don't ask me why, like I said I guess it's intonation. Furthermore, it's always daft not to see a movie in its original language. And that goes for anime too, unless you still believe it's not real film.
But this is! OK, we've seen the story about nature vs humans before (after all, is that not what the Arthur / Merlin / Morgana / Mob legends are all about?), but what makes this one stand apart is 2 things: 1. no one is all good or all evil; 2. the visuals are stunning and testify of an imagination unbound by logic. These 2 points are crucial, for it is there that most Disney films or plain Hollywood films go wrong - one could say that they're made by 5 year olds. But no, it's just the reverse! Most Disney animation and Hollywood stuff is made by 'soundly reasoning' adults with an emotional life not reaching beyond love and hate, motivational insight not going beyond revenge (or getting laid) and an imagination enslaved to logic. This film isn't, and as a consequence some call it 'difficult'. And not suitable for children. Let me tell you, 5 year olds have, with their boundless imagination, no difficulty getting into this.
This film is just so good it's hard to believe someone just sat down at a table, wrote the thing and then drew it on a piece of paper.
** Addition ** I've recently read the Nausicaa anime, and it becomes even clearer now that Mononoke is Miyazaki's re-take on his Nausicaa film (which was premature even in its full-length format), with Nausicaa split in two over Ashitaka & San. However, though this is obviously Miyazaki's second best (after Laputa), it remains difficult to pour all the complex musings about man's relationship to nature in 2 hours (the Nausicaa manga is over a 1000 pages long and took him 13 years; when it was finished he made Mononoke). Hence, some things (like Ashitaka helping out Eboshi even after she's done such evil deeds) have left some viewers bewildered. In all, I found the persona of Nausicaa (in the manga) more fit, in her responsible role as a princess, to convey The Message than the split version here. Still, the very idea about man & technology vs. nature and the question of "is anything ever over" (ewige wiederkehr, the cycle of life) is at its most nuanced here. In any case, image-wise, I doubt you'll ever see anything as beautiful as this.