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Princess Mononoke Character Analysis

Decent Essays

Introduction

Portrayal of characters is an essential element that contributes to a good story-telling, be it film, poem, drama play, or animation. Whether it’s film or animation, the different characters featured in the scene plays an important role that brings up the story from the beginning to the end. According to Aristotle (1999) character is the second most important element as they relate to the action, which is the main object of representation, and character must go through the plot that is the most important element.

For this particular essay, I will be discussing on a particular animation, Princess Mononoke. This 2D animation was produced and directed by Hayao Miyazaki in August 1994, and was released by Studio Ghibli of Japan in July 12, 1997 (animenewsnetwork.com 2015). According to O’Brian (2014), …show more content…

However, the title itself offers hints of mononoke.

Okayama (2015 p. 112) explained that the word mononoke consists of three apparent parts: mono ( “body or creature”), no ( “belonging to”), and ke (“spirit”). The word Mononoke itself is to define the unusual identity of the wolf Princess as a half-human, half animal. If translated, the meaning of the title is to symbolize the spirit of the forest, the vengeful spirit of a princess.

The keywords in this movie are ‘spirit’, ‘nature’, and ‘coexistence', the spirit of nature that battles against humanity. It is where the spirit of the forest possessed the wolf Princess to take revenge on the humans, but then there’s Ashitaka who believes in the coexistence between nature and humanity, which captures the audience’s attention in knowing the final outcome of the relationship between the Princess and Lady Eboshi of the iron town (Rathke 2015).

Bruce Block theory on story and visual

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