Saturday, February 13, 2010

Princess





It has been a long while since the last time I watched Princess of Mononoke but I thought this anime connected to Hogarth’s ability to personify the grotesque to emulate a story or poem. Disney also did the same with the film Princess of Mononoke. Princess of Mononoke is an allegory on the balance between humans and nature.
To give you a little plot summary I have included Doug Short from Disney explanation of the plot of Princess of Mononoke. The story begins with the main character Ashitaka being infected with an incurable disease by a possessed boar/god. “He is to die unless he can find a cure to rid the curse from his body. It seems that his only hope is to travel to the Far East. When he arrives to get help from the deer god, he finds himself in the middle of a battle between the animal inhabitants of the forest and an iron mining town that is exploiting and killing the forest. Leading the forest animals in the battle is a human raised by wolves, Princess Mononoke.” (http://www.imdb.com/SearchPlotWriters?Doug%20Short%20{doug_short@studio.disney.com})
The allegory of the relationship we have with nature throughout this movie is a caricature itself because of the illustration that the iron mine represents how us humans in reality destroy nature and if nature had a say they would fight back like they do in the movie. Part of the nature of caricature is to make you think about things that you may not normally be concerned with and this movie does that in a very interesting way, similar to Avitar. Hogarth’s scenes of satirical battles including outlandish figures and grotesque monsters combined with the ‘ordinary’ figure directly links to this films ability to caricature beasts to have humanistic abilities and humans to have animalist capabilities but still be rendered as humans.

1 comment:

  1. I have never seen this movie, and I am wondering if it is anything like Ferngully? Along with allegory I would say that morality is definately incorporated. The characters and animals look exaggerated in limbs; and looks like a film full of imagination due to.

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