2024
Van der Linden, Martin. Shadowing the brutality and cruelty of nature: On history and human nature in Princess Mononoke.
In John L. Hennessey (ed.). History and Speculative Fiction (pp. 225-244). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
"In the Japanese animated movie Princess Mononoke (1997), humanity’s relationship with nature is commented upon historically by the movie’s director Miyazaki Hayao. Against the backdrop of Japan in the Muromachi period covered with ancient forests and inhabited by marginalized societies in conflict, the movie functions as a speculative fictional tool for Miyazaki to communicate and demonstrate an important historical and historiographic idea to the audience. Going against the romantic and nativist notion that humanity has lost its historical connection and harmony with nature, a major narrative theme in Princess Mononoke is the idea that the relationship between humanity and nature has throughout history always been cruel and brutal, and humans have never been able to fully live in harmony with nature."
2022
Whitehurst, Katherine. Negotiating East and West when representing childhood in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
In Noel Brown (ed.). The Oxford handbook of children's film (pp. 523-543). New York: Oxford University Press.
"This chapter explores how the figure of the child gives insight into the construction of the Japanese nation and culture in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001). The chapter outlines how Eastern and Western ideologies intersect in Spirited Away and argues that as the child navigates varied cultural expectations to seek a resolution, the child becomes the embodiment of utopic social change within an imagined Japan. The chapter demonstrates how the child in Spirited Away serves as a site to question past ideals of the nation, to resist neoliberal greed, and to project a hopeful future that sees Japan re-craft the interplay between Japanese collectivist values and Western individualism in the wake of neoliberalism."
2019
Cheng, Catherine Ju-yu. Nature and the smiths in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Tamkang Review, 49(2), 27-48.
"Hayao Miyazaki is a keen observer of ecological problems. What he bears in mind and tries desperately to deliver, through his animated films, is a simple but critical message: to survive by coexisting with other beings. Following the steps of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an earlier work that depicts a way to survive nuclear bombing, Miyazaki's animated film Princess Mononoke deeply conveys the human aspiration to survive. However, the film ends with a seemingly harmonious but uncanny equilibrium, a kind of a draw between nature and the human. We are in the dark regarding what will happen next. Princess Mononoke leads the audience to ponder the future: when ecological crises have become daily fare and when the uncanny balance between nature and the human has reached a critical turning point, how can humanity survive? This question leads us to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of ecophilosophy and the smiths (metallurgists). The dilemma faced by the smiths in Tatara town epitomizes what human beings encounter in their daily lives. On the one hand, humans subordinate themselves to the state apparatus, whether politically, economically, or culturally, and have a tense relationship with it; on the other hand, they exploit nature regardless of the consequences such as the incessant ecological catastrophes (global warming, depletion of ozone layer, and many others). Princess Mononoke, though criticizing humanity, still portrays a sustainable coexistence of nature and mankind, showing how nature and humans are already entwined and how the smiths, though often forced by the empire to follow its orders, possess the ability to turn their arborescent space into a mediating holey space where real communication and affect can take shape. In a way, this Deleuzian route solves the conundrum of the conflict between nature and the human since the smiths function as the mediators that can unlock the fixed relationship between nature and humans."
Louro, Hime Ivo, & Sousa, Ana Matilde. Troubled gardens: Nature-technoculture binary and the search for a Safe Operating Space in Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime.
In Maria Paula Diogo, et al. (eds.). Gardens and human agency in the anthropocene (pp. 216-234). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
2018
Denison, Rayna (ed.). Princess Mononoke: Understanding Studio Ghibli's Monster Princess. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Pizzuno, Daniela. Can faithfulness to the original text betray the target public? The adaptations of Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke) in Italy. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 4(1), 61-76.
"Over the past few years audio-visual translation in ‘dubbing countries’ has been experiencing a significant shift from the traditional domesticating approach to a foreignizing approach that focuses more on faithfulness towards the source text rather than to the target readership. The Italian rendition of anime is a case in point: while appreciated by an increasing number of viewers, both serial and stand-alone anime, have either suffered a limited distribution or a highly homogenizing adaptation, in many cases through the employment of English as vehicular language. The first Italian dubbed version of the popular Studio Ghibli masterpiece Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke) (Miyazaki, 1996) is a clear example of the latter. The version distributed by Buena Vista International in 2000 as Princess Mononoke was adapted from the North American version, which included radical modifications aimed at providing a context with which the spectators would be more familiar. A second version, distributed by Lucky Red in 2014 under the title Principessa Mononoke, was re-adapted from the original Japanese script in order to improve fidelity to the original and was re-dubbed with a new voice cast. However, numerous viewers have criticized the unintelligibility of most of the dialogue. This article analyses the differences between the two versions and investigates whether the visibility of the translator can be seen as an obstacle for the understanding and enjoyment of films for the target viewership."
2015
Abbey, Kristen L. "See with eyes unclouded": Mononoke-hime as the tragedy of modernity. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2(3), 113-119.
2014
Judah, Tara. Princess Mononoke: Transgressing the binaries that bind. Screen Education, 74, 52-61.
"For a film with a strong moral voice about the damage that human societies do to the natural world, Princess Mononoke contains a surprising level of ambiguity elsewhere. Tara Judah explores how Miyazaki's refusal to employ binaries enhances the film's treatment of gender and morality."
McHugh, Susan. Animal gods in extinction stories: Power and Princess Mononoke.
In Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian, & Andrew Smyth (eds.), Representing the modern animal in culture (pp. 205-226). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2013
Thevenin, Benjamin. Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 4(2), 147-170.
"Eco-cinema for children is a growing sub-genre of film that attempts to introduce environmental issues to young audiences. The conventional approach employed by many of these films from Bambi (Algar et al., 1942) to The Lorax (Renaud and Bauda, 2012) is to use a melodramatic narrative structure in which heroic nature is pitted against harmful humanity. The use of melodrama makes sense given the narrative tradition’s revolutionary roots and its accessibility to wide (and young) audiences. However, the efficacy of such an approach is debatable, especially in regards to its positioning of the audience as passive consumers rather than active participants. Given the understanding of film viewers as ‘active audiences’, this issue of the subjectivity of the child spectator is especially important. The following article engages in a comparative analysis of the conventional approach to eco-cinema for children and a new nature narrative, principally demonstrated by Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997). While including certain elements from melodrama, Mononoke is able to more effectively represent some of the complexities of environmental discourse and subsequently encourage more critical, active participation among its young viewers. Finally, the article argues that Princess Mononoke initiated a new trend in nature narratives for children, and that films like Wall-E (Stanton, 2008) continue to demonstrate the efficacy of eco-cinema for children that artfully balances complexity with accessibility."
Whitley, David. Contested spaces: Reconfiguring narratives of origin and identity in Pocahontas and Princess Mononoke.
In Benjamin Lefevre (ed.), Textual transformation in children's literature: Adaptations, translations, reconsiderations (pp. 7-20). New York: Routledge.
2012
Smith, Michelle J. & Parsons, Elizabeth. Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox's Fern Gully (1992). Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 26(1), 25-37.
"Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children's films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children's entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki's film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against Fern Gully's ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature."
2011
Yoshida, Kaori. National identity construction in Japanese and American animated film: Self and other representations in Pocahontas and Princess Mononoke. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, article 5 in 2011.
2010
Geortz, Dee. The hero with the thousand-and-first face: Miyazaki’s girl quester in Spirited Away and Campbell’s monomyth.
In John Perlich & David Whitt (eds.). Millennial mythmaking: Essays on the power of science fiction and fantasy literature films and games (pp. 67-82). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Leavey, John. Possessed by and of: Up against seeing: Princess Mononoke. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 5(2).
2009
Pike, Sarah. Why Prince Charles instead of ‘Princess Mononoke?’: A response to the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77(1), 66-72.
2008
Denison, Rayna. The language of the blockbuster: Promotion, Princess Mononoke and the daihitto in Japanese film culture.
In Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (Eds.), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (pp. 103-122). London: I. B. Tauris.
Kim, Eunjung, & Jarman, Michelle. Modernity’s rescue mission: Postcolonial transactions of disability and sexuality. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 17(1), 52-68.
Than, Thy. Nature & man reflected in animation. Animatrix Magazine, 15, 55-62.
2005
Denison, Rayna. Disembodied stars and the cultural meaning of Princess Mononoke's soundscape. Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, 3.
2004
Kraemer, Christine Hoff. Between the worlds: Liminality and self-sacrifice in Princess Mononoke. Journal of Religion and Film, 8(1).
2003
Lane, Michael. Princess Mononoke. Triumph of the Past.
2000
Napier, Susan. Mononokehime: A Japanese phenomenon goes global. Persimmon: Asian Literature, Arts, and Culture, 1(1), 90-93.
Ortabasi, Melek-Su. Fictional fantasy or historical fact? The search for Japanese identity in Miyazaki Hayao's Mononokehime.
In Douglas Slaymaker, (ed.). A century of popular culture in Japan (pp. 199-228). New York: Edwin Mellen.
