12/99
While the Disney promotional juggernaut powered its animated joyride Toy Story 2 to record-busting Thanksgiving weekend grosses, Disney's "independent" subsidiary Miramax released an animated film that might easily have been mistaken for an art-house release. A foreign film, opening in one location with none of the usual hoopla, it would be easy to miss Princess Mononoke. And it would be a shame, since this is one of the few animated films since the best of the Disney golden age decades ago to qualify for classic status—not just animated classic, but classic, period.
Though I have no particular objection to calling the film a cartoon—in spite of purists who would sneer at anything but the accepted term, animé—this is an instance in which the word cartoon does seem limiting in more than one aspect. It feels like the work of a mature sensibility, its style and substance more likely to be appreciated by those of high school age or beyond, though not completely without value or appeal to children (it contains more violence than many parents would prefer the nippers to see). Its scale and ambition are epic and complex, with characters possessing a welcome sense of ambiguity and imperfection. As much as an animated adventure it is a beautifully realized fantasy, more richly imagined, dramatically compelling, artful and mythic than George Lucas's cinematic Happy Meal from last summer. This one has stars, wars, phantoms and menace, but assembled to create an exciting story rather than a shopping list. And, best of all, no Jar Jar.
Director Hayao Miyazaki creates a universe with the kind of sweep and detail that will appeal to fans of the sagas of Tolkien and Frank Herbert, and expands beyond his own more Disney-like, family-friendly Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Set in a primeval, mystical world where humans and animals are able to speak to each other, where gods and demons walk the earth, where the spirit population is as real as the human and animal populace, and where things are on the brink of earth-shaking change, Princess Mononoke concerns the quest of the young warrior Ashitaka (voice of Billy Crudup), who seeks the source of the demonic force that has infected and, he is told, will eventually kill him. His search will lead him to Iron Town, a fortress-like mining community headed by Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver) and engaged in ongoing conflict with marauding samurai bands and clans of wolves and boars from the nearby Forest of the Gods, led by the giant wolf Moro (Gillian Anderson) and her adopted human daughter San (Claire Danes), also known as Princess Mononoke. Matters are complicated by a fortune-hunting monk, Jigo (Billy Bob Thornton), out to score the bounty on the head of the forest spirit that has a deer-like presence by day and a gigantic, liquid, luminous, benign Godzillian presence by night.
From a startlingly vivid opening image of Ashitaka riding his red elk through sun-dappled woods and the early attack of a giant boar perpetually consumed, as if in flames, by teeming worms that shift their shape from careening beast to sinister insect, the imagery is gorgeous and vital. And not only is most of it hand-drawn the old-fashioned way, rather than computer generated (when they are blended, it's seamless), more than half the drawings were done by Miyazaki himself. His creations are expressive but never cute, and sometimes downright majestic, as well as so precise in even the most miniscule detail that a big-screen viewing is a must.
It's also notable for what it lacks, including uninspired musical numbers, cuddly comic sidekick critters and attempts at contemporary hipness and humor (the Japanese script is ably translated by comic-book creator Neil Gaiman). Aside from Danes's whiny line-readings—she sounds like a petulant puppy, not a wolf gal—the cast doesn't let the material down, and Miyazaki never compromises his intense, sometimes ferocious vision for the sake of kid-friendliness. One of the rare recent fantasies with a genuine sense of wonder, and one of the few recent movies with a real sense of integrity, this grand, thoughtful and eloquent work makes a lot of today's "grownup" live-action films look like cartoons.
And, speaking of cartoons, you may have heard there's a new James Bond movie, titled The World is Not Enough. Well, "new" isn't exactly the most accurate word for a film so bound by formula that it defeats the best director yet to tackle 007. Michael Apted is the respected director of features like Thunderheart and Coal Miner's Daughter,, and the even more respected documentarian of the 28-Up series and Incident At Oglala but he can't lay a finger on Bond. In fact, the perfunctory attempts at a human touch or personal motivations simply induce sluggishness, so that this outing actually seems less successful than its brisk if mechanically non-stop predecessor Tomorrow Never Dies.
At least that film had a formidable Bond femme in Hong Kong's Michelle Yeoh, who seemed to have a greater grasp of English than this film's vacuous Denise Richards as Nuclear Physicist Barbie. Vying for Bond's attention is the slightly more competent but still lightweight Sophie Marceau. The promising villain played by Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle, a terrorist with a bullet in his brain that severs sensory connections as it slowly kills him, could have made for a playfully menacing reflection of Bondian cool, but Carlyle is underused and Pierce Brosnan doesn't have the necessary Connery-bonded edge to make it pay off. The plot is a variation on Auric Goldfinger's Fort Knox caper (though for the first half of the movie, the plotting is indecipherable), but otherwise this is just fool's-Goldfinger, completely lacking in the nimble blend of suspense, humor, gimmickry, girlpower, and nifty villainy. Still stuck in sluggish, overstuffed Roger Moore mode, the series needs to get lean and mean again.
Put in a call to Russell Crowe, get back to basics, and renew the nearly expired license to thrill of this 003 on the 007 scale.
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