Princess Mononoke

A young warrior named Ashitaka is cursed by a dying demon god and travels west to find the source of the corruption. What he finds is a war: the ironworks of Lady Eboshi against the gods of the forest, humans carving civilization out of wilderness, San - raised by wolves, feral, fighting for a world that is losing - positioned between them as something that cannot be negotiated with.

Miyazaki has been making films about the relationship between humanity and nature his entire career. Princess Mononoke is the one where he stops resolving it cleanly. There is no villain. There is no ending that restores what was lost. Eboshi is not wrong - she employs outcasts, she gives women agency, she is building something. The forest gods are not wrong. The environment is being destroyed and the people destroying it are trying to survive. The film holds all of this simultaneously without blinking and without offering the audience a position that lets them off the hook.

Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it one of the great films. It remains the most morally serious film Studio Ghibli produced. The 1997 fansub community had it before the Miramax theatrical release butchered its runtime for Western distribution. The full version is what belongs in an archive. This is it.