The Ticket
The ticket was just a slip of paper with Japanese text on it, pressed into my hands by someone I’ve long since forgotten. This was AnimagiC 1999—Germany’s first major anime convention—and I was somewhere in the middle of it feeling, for possibly the first time, that I was in exactly the right place. The paper said: Mononoke-hime. In the cinema. Original version with German subtitles. My heart stopped.
By that point something was clearly happening with anime in Germany. Sailor Moon had ended its run with a finale that genuinely gutted me, Pokémon and Dragon Ball were everywhere, and the magazine AnimaniA had become the bible for every Japan-obsessed teenager who spent their weekends drawing fan art and arguing about subtitles versus dubs. But Princess Mononoke—the Miyazaki film that had already torn through Japan and was being held back from wide Western distribution—felt like something else entirely. Like contraband that had found its way into a convention hall in Germany and was now being offered to a room of eighty-odd people.
The film follows Ashitaka, a young warrior cursed by a dying demon boar, who travels west to find the source of a corruption spreading through the ancient forest. What he finds is a war. On one side: Lady Eboshi and her irontown—a settlement of freed sex workers and lepers who’ve carved a livelihood from the mountains by destroying them. On the other: the forest gods—boars, wolves, and San, a human girl raised by wolves who has chosen her adopted family over her species. There are no villains in the way most animated films understand that word. Eboshi is not evil; she’s a pragmatist who’s built something real and knows exactly what it costs. The forest is not innocent. Everyone is trying to survive something. Miyazaki made a film about the actual, irreducible complexity of environmental destruction and then wrapped it in an adventure story so propulsive you barely notice you’re watching a morality play without a moral.
Joe Hisaishi’s score does something I’ve rarely heard before or since—it pushes forward and pulls back simultaneously, giving every scene both its urgency and its grief. The main theme has physical weight to it. And then there are the kodama, those silent little forest spirits with their rotating heads, simultaneously adorable and genuinely unsettling in the way that only Japanese folklore manages. Everything in that forest feels old in a way European fairy tales rarely achieve.
My mother sat next to me and fell asleep within ten minutes. I remember noticing and feeling something close to pity, but mostly I was too far inside the film to spare her much attention. When it ended I sat still for a moment, not wanting to return to the convention outside, to the noise and the cosplay and the crowd. Something had shifted. Not just that the film was technically impressive—though it was. Not just that the story was affecting—though it was. It was that the whole thing felt earned in a way most films don’t. Every shot, every relationship, every moment of violence had been thought through. You could feel the consideration behind each frame.
Disney—specifically Miramax, the Weinstein operation Disney owned at the time—acquired the North American rights and famously pushed to cut the film for Western audiences. Studio Ghibli’s producer Toshio Suzuki reportedly sent back a samurai sword with a note: no cuts. Whether that’s exactly how it happened, the film was eventually released intact, retitled Princess Mononoke, with Neil Gaiman rewriting the English subtitles. It was largely ignored at the North American box office. The distribution resistance never fully worked, but it made a dent, and the film that deserved the widest possible audience got a limited one—reaching most people years later through other means.
No matter how many Ghibli films came after—and several of them are extraordinary; Spirited Away alone would be enough for any director’s legacy—Princess Mononoke occupies a different place. Partly that’s circumstance: being handed a ticket by a stranger at a convention in 1999 is a specific kind of initiation that no later film could replicate because I came to everything else at the wrong speed. But I think it’s also the film itself. It has a scale that Miyazaki hasn’t quite returned to. The stakes are genuinely mortal, the world genuinely finite, and the ending doesn’t give you what you want so much as what you need to survive the not-getting.
I still put it on occasionally and feel whatever it was I felt in that room in 1999—smaller, somehow, and more awake.