Lush anime from Miyazaki-sensei

Rating: 9/10 (9 June 2001)

Mononoke Hime is nearly the ne plus ultra (look Mom, I can use big words!) of anime--certainly the animation is the best to date from Miyazaki (he supposedly created 80,000 himself). The story is like a beefed-up remake of the Nausicaa movie (sans flying) and Shuna's Journey (sans flying saucer-like god machine). The characters are complex, with no one acting out of evil (though there are scenes of violence that culminated out of anger, usually Ashitaka's).
The best part, though, is when San "kisses" the food into Ashitaka's mouth, which works for me on two levels. First, this is the first real act of kindness anyone has directed towards Ashitaka since his own sister broke the ancient customs to give him her jeweled dagger. Secondly, the Japanese are a really restrained society, and, supposedly, traditional parents won't kiss or embrace in public or even in front of their children (trivia: the concept of kissing was imported to Japan by Dutch missionaries (don't ask me why they showed them) in the 1500's--before that, the Japanese did not kiss).
I have only two complaints about Mononoke Hime, one major and one minor. The minor one is that, as with kissing, gunpowder (and by proxy guns) was introduced to Japan by European travelers (which shows just how isolated a culture Japan was at the time), not by the Chinese. Of course, there were no god beasts, either--this is a fantasy version of the past, not meant to be accurate (I'm sure an anthropologist would likely have something to say about the iron town, as well). The major thing: the two pigs who get cursed. I'm sure they're supposed to appear grotesque and disgusting, the way Miyazaki must imagine hatred to look like, but the snake things and the Super-Soaker blood is too over-the- top to be anything but ridiculous, ruining the tone of any scene they are in.