Princess Mononoke comes to the big screen at Centro Pecci Cinema on Sunday 6 December at 10:30 am, as part of the Animiamoci film series. Screened in Italian.
Hayao Miyazaki's most adventurous and seemingly most canonical film was the one that made him definitively famous in the West, even among the general public. It was also the first film distributed in America by a major studio.
Following a fight with a demon-possessed animal, Prince Ashitaka is infected with a deadly curse. He sets out to discover its origins and seek a cure from the great Beast God, the only one capable of healing him. Arriving in the region from which the beast originated, he discovers a war between humans and a primitive form of forest animals: giant, sentient, and aided by what they call the Ghost Princess, a girl raised by wolves who has renounced humanity. On the other side, humans, led by Lady Eboshi, who runs her village of blacksmiths with love, justice, and compassion, want to work the mountain and fell trees to extract iron (a source of wealth). In the midst of this, a group of monks tries to incite humans to kill the Beast God and steal its head, which, it is said, will grant eternal youth.
"It arrived in Italy in a very poorly translated edition that altered the meaning, the language, and some sentences, simplifying it to make it more understandable for children. Now that Lucky Red has acquired the rights, it returns to the cinema, retranslated and re-dubbed. The result is beyond imagination, and in many ways it can be described as a different film, far removed from much we think of as Miyazaki (certain dialogues are shockingly brutal) and endowed with a refined spoken register that changes the overall tone.
So, even in Italian, we can finally appreciate this adventure film in which death seems constantly ready to strike with great violence and in which the concept of conflict is explored in all its possibilities (men against men, men against nature, animals against animals)." (Gabriele Niola)
