KBT Presents: PRINCESS MONONOKE

Come out at 8:15pm for drinks before an 8:30pm show.

Noticing the the heavy Asian content of KBT screenings, I am looking this week to remedy a gap. There has been no Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki film screened. Princess Mononoke, with no hyperbole, is quite possibly the best animated movie ever made. It is a fantasy film, and action film, an environmentalist cautionary tale and a character drama. A boy-prince from a remote village of tribes people gets attacked by some sort of demon leaving his arm scarred and diseased. The village elders tell him to head west in search of a cure for the disease. When the prince leaves he encounters a complex world outside his village with a group of people trying to eke out a living by mining, but at war with the forest creatures for destroying their old-forest. The emperor has designs on the iron works as well. The animals of the old forest are bigger and smarter than ordinary animals, able to converse with the humans. Also, the wolves have adopted an orphan girl who fights on the side of the old-forest. She and the boy-prince become mediators in the war of progress vs. tradition. Sumptuously animated almost completely by hand, it is gorgeous to look at, and epic in scale. Disney, who owns the North American rights to distribute all animated pictures from Japan’s Studio Ghibli (who produced this film in 1997), layed down an excellent English dub track with Hollywood actors (Clair Danes, Minnie Driver, Gillian Anderson, Billy Bob Thorton and Billy Crudup) and a voice script adapted by graphic novelist, author and soon to be filmmaker Neil Gaiman.