I don’t know what to tell you, you want a nice clean morality tale and that’s not what this movie is. It’s a movie with environmentalist, materialist and pacifist themes about the dawning of modernity. That’s Miyazaki and the Japanese left’s general outlook due to their specific history.
So what, the gods slaughter the lepers, workers and prostitutes in Iron Town and then what? Keep killing any humans that encroach until the gods are too weak and get overrun with even worse humans?
It’s only through the stewardship of Ashataki that the gods stand any long term chance for survival. Ashataki represents sustainability, rejecting both Malthusian anti-humanism and industrial destruction and profit seeking. He is the only character unclouded by hate and their own short-sighted interests, he is the only one who can synthesize the humanism of Eboshi with the environmentalism of Princess Mononoke.
Miyazaki movies very often rehabilitate the enemy and come to a resolution that is much more complex. Sounds like you want the Disney moralist ending and not the messy dialectic of history
look, don't get me wrong, it's a classic, I get it. I watched it years ago, loved it. Now I'm making my way through the Ghibli catalog on HBOMax and there's some real bangers, some eh. But whatevs. Like don't think I hate it or anything. I just think that a lot of the love it gets in leftist spaces is based on nostalgia.
Sure, the humans are victims of society, and ideally, we'd get a movie about them going off and fighting back against that society, but we don't we got a movie about how in order for them to survive they have to destroy the environment around them... but there's no reparations for the environment as the victim in the ending. There's no real environmentalist lesson that it gets applauded for. There's a Deus ex machina rebirth and a throwaway line about how the deer god never really dies. Humanity gets to go back to doing whatever they hell they want and we're just told that everything's going to be okay because the protagonist that couldn't stop them from killing the deer god is going to make sure they stay on the up and up. I don't want to keep debating it, call it disneyfied or whatever, that's just my take on it.
I think even if everything you said is true (i don’t agree that it is) your entire premise of judging the quality of art and film by how well it aligns with your ideological predisposition is fundamentally flawed and lib-brained. Based on the erroneous assumption that having art with good politics will fix anything in the real world, instead of just reflecting and crystallizing the world.
The Chapos talk about this a lot, if directors and artists start listening to critique like this you get a lot of bad art with “good” messages
Yeah I don’t think we are on the same page at all. I just got done explaining how this movie uses dialectic materialism and not idealist concepts like rights or morality.
This movie is a beautiful reflection of the themes and beliefs of the Japanese left post-USSR. I don’t know what more you want really, you want it to fit in a nice perfect box
I don’t know what to tell you, you want a nice clean morality tale and that’s not what this movie is. It’s a movie with environmentalist, materialist and pacifist themes about the dawning of modernity. That’s Miyazaki and the Japanese left’s general outlook due to their specific history.
I mean, I want justice.🤷♂️
So what, the gods slaughter the lepers, workers and prostitutes in Iron Town and then what? Keep killing any humans that encroach until the gods are too weak and get overrun with even worse humans?
It’s only through the stewardship of Ashataki that the gods stand any long term chance for survival. Ashataki represents sustainability, rejecting both Malthusian anti-humanism and industrial destruction and profit seeking. He is the only character unclouded by hate and their own short-sighted interests, he is the only one who can synthesize the humanism of Eboshi with the environmentalism of Princess Mononoke.
Miyazaki movies very often rehabilitate the enemy and come to a resolution that is much more complex. Sounds like you want the Disney moralist ending and not the messy dialectic of history
look, don't get me wrong, it's a classic, I get it. I watched it years ago, loved it. Now I'm making my way through the Ghibli catalog on HBOMax and there's some real bangers, some eh. But whatevs. Like don't think I hate it or anything. I just think that a lot of the love it gets in leftist spaces is based on nostalgia.
Sure, the humans are victims of society, and ideally, we'd get a movie about them going off and fighting back against that society, but we don't we got a movie about how in order for them to survive they have to destroy the environment around them... but there's no reparations for the environment as the victim in the ending. There's no real environmentalist lesson that it gets applauded for. There's a Deus ex machina rebirth and a throwaway line about how the deer god never really dies. Humanity gets to go back to doing whatever they hell they want and we're just told that everything's going to be okay because the protagonist that couldn't stop them from killing the deer god is going to make sure they stay on the up and up. I don't want to keep debating it, call it disneyfied or whatever, that's just my take on it.
I think even if everything you said is true (i don’t agree that it is) your entire premise of judging the quality of art and film by how well it aligns with your ideological predisposition is fundamentally flawed and lib-brained. Based on the erroneous assumption that having art with good politics will fix anything in the real world, instead of just reflecting and crystallizing the world.
The Chapos talk about this a lot, if directors and artists start listening to critique like this you get a lot of bad art with “good” messages
evangelical "art" has entered the chat
And I think you're being dismissive of the environment's rights in a movie that's lauded as a big environmentalist champion. Everybody loses.👍😁
“Rights”
Yeah I don’t think we are on the same page at all. I just got done explaining how this movie uses dialectic materialism and not idealist concepts like rights or morality.
This movie is a beautiful reflection of the themes and beliefs of the Japanese left post-USSR. I don’t know what more you want really, you want it to fit in a nice perfect box
Lol, no clearly not. I want it to match up to what leftists keeps fauning over it for, and I don't think it does. That's all.
I think you need to circle back around to the film with eyes unclouded by liberalism
Lol alrighty. Take care.
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