Today we watched Princess Mononoke, one of Hayao Miyazaki's best fables about man versus nature. I had never seen this before, but the girl had, many years ago.
Like Shigeru Miyamoto, another great Japanese creator, Miyazaki has long used nature as a main source for his seemingly inexhaustible creativity. You can point at almost any Miyazaki film and see how important nature is to the story he is trying to tell, from Nausicaä to My Neighbor Totoro, from Pom Poko (which he neither wrote nor directed, but was his idea) to Princess Mononoke, and beyond. Nature, and humanity's role in it or against it, is the central idea in most of his stories.
Princess Mononoke begins with humanity in opposition to nature. Lady Eboshi, probably the most interesting character in the whole film, is strip mining the forest, killing all the animals, gods, and spirits who get in her way. She doesn't care about any of them; she only cares about the iron under the ground. She's cutting down entire forests. But she also saves lepers and prostitutes, and gives them jobs and a home in her Iron Town. The population of Iron Town is fiercely loyal to her. She's saved them all from hard, mean lives, after all.
Near the end of the film (which I won't discuss in too much detail because of spoilers), Lady Eboshi does something truly heinous and directly causes some really bad stuff to happen. But at the very end of the film, we are supposed to believe she has learned her lesson, even as she suggests she is going to continue doing what she was doing "better than ever".
It's difficult to truly hate Lady Eboshi, and it's even harder to say she's the villain of the piece. Yes, she's in direct opposition to the title character for pretty much the entire film, but she's not a wholly bad person. From her viewpoint, she's just making sure her people can survive, and even thrive. Why should these enigmatic gods and spirits get in the way of giving her people better lives?
Ultimately, the correct answer is that everything is better when man and nature coexist and work together, as is always the case in a Miyazaki film (and most likely real life too).
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