“You cannot alter your fate. However, you can rise to meet it.”

Princess Mononoke opens with a wide shot of a forest shrouded in fog as voiceover narration informs us of a time in which gods and demons roamed the world. As the camera tilts down into the brush, we see a tree fall to the ground and catch a glimpse of our first demon as it races through the woods. A close-up focuses our attention on the demon’s feet, which are covered in what can only be described as large, writhing, purple-grey worms. The demon lumbers forward with its writhing outer flesh killing everything in its path; as nature wilts underneath the demon’s touch, a stirring, melancholic, symphonic score swells on the soundtrack.

Prince Ashitaka, leader of a nearby clan, anticipates its impending arrival. He climbs to the top of the village watchtower and waits. As the demon reaches the edge of the forest, the sunlight over the prince’s face dims. The grass below him, at first half-illuminated, falls completely under shadow. We see writhing worm-flesh squirm in and out of the cobblestone wall guarding the town. Then, the demon breaks out.

The demon at first appears to be an otherworldly mass of fat worms with two glowing red eyes. But as the beast erupts out of the wall, we see a close-up of its face… and it is revealed that underneath that mass is a great, massive boar struggling to rid itself of the demon that encompasses him. He succeeds for only a brief moment before the mass envelops and consumes him again.

Ashitaka shoots the boar and it dies; filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki lingers on the fallen, raging god’s body as it melts into a bloody skeleton. Its final words wish suffering upon all humans. It is a stark and foreboding demise.

Touched by the demon, Prince Ashitaka is himself doomed to die and must exile himself from his tribe. Determined to give meaning to the rest of his life, he heads west to find the source of this demonic curse and rid the world of it.

Throughout his journey, he never gives in to despair. Though he has been marked by hatred and rage, he never allows it to overtake him. His demonic arm writhes throughout the film in moments of danger, pushing him toward violence. But Ashitaka’s defining characteristic, which ladders up to the one of Princess Mononoke‘s most obvious themes, is that he never allows the rage that is part of him to consume him, even when it could be justified.

“You cannot alter your fate. However, you can rise to meet it.”

As he heads west, Ashitaka is made wholly aware of the power of the demonic rage and hatred that has touched him as he is forced into a battle against his will. It isn’t verbalized, but it becomes apparent in this scene that he is disgusted by the violent power of the demon that is now part of him, and from that moment on, he chooses to only utilize its viciousness in necessary self-defense.

This battle takes place in rice fields as samurai launch a surprise attack on a village. It’s shockingly brutal stuff — they lop off opponents’ arms with one fell swoop of a spear — but it’s presented with much greater detachment than the violence that the demon boar inflicted upon the grass in the opening scene. We see the samurai’s attack from afar; the shots are wide and the action is largely stylized and bloodless. As Ashitaka’s arrows begin to fly and sever limbs, we see the violence in closer views, but visual emphasis is placed as much on the writhing of his demonized arm as on the brutality that he inflicts. The score is not melancholic here, as it was when we watched part of the forest die; this battle lacks musical accompaniment until the end of the scene, and even then there is no sadness to the music, only suspense.

That more attention is given to the destruction of nature than to the ending of human life in these opening scenes is key to understanding the story’s thematic perspective. Human life is established as fleeting and insignificant. When nature is driven into darkness, however, that is true cause for despair.

It’s a heady, philosophical opening in spite of all of the violence. The protagonist is condemned from the beginning, and the discussions about curses, gods, demons, and nature leave us with much to ponder.

Ashitaka has been cursed with rage and hatred, which he believes will eventually consume and kill him. He takes this as a noble challenge to do good with the time that he has left. Other people that he meets on his journey do not feel the same way about their burdens, but it’s hard to blame them. This is, after all, a dangerous era for the average human being to live in.

The first person that Ashitaka reveals his condition to outside of his own tribe is a wandering, self-centered realist named Jigo. Jigo’s response to Ashitaka’s affliction: “So you say you’re under a curse? So what. So’s the whole damn world.”

It’s a line of dialogue that is both world-building — the whole world is under some sort of curse or other — and character developing — Jigo is an intensely practical man who doesn’t beat around the bush. But it’s also more than that: it gives us a lens that we need to understand the humans of the film, who become the story’s primary antagonists.

“So what. So’s the whole damn world.” Do what you can to survive it, protect yourself, and take care of your people.

That mentality is core to who Lady Eboshi, the primary antagonist in Princess Mononoke, is. In her first scene, we watch her accompany a tribe of men and oxen down a muddy mountain in the pouring rain. Her first line of dialogue is, “The sooner we get this rice home, the sooner we eat.” She leads from behind, watching her caravan intently to make sure that her people make it back home alive. To her people, she’s a hero.

As massive white wolves and a ferocious, masked woman attack the caravan, Lady Eboshi fearlessly leads their defense. She shoots Moro, the mother of the wolves, off of the cliff with a blast of fire, but doesn’t celebrate this victory. She merely carries on with her people’s mission. “Let’s get the living home,” she says matter-of-factly as the men continue down the mountain with their much-needed food.

In many ways, we are meant to root against Lady Eboshi. She is, after all, the woman who launched the iron ball into the boar god and created the demon that condemned Ashitaka to death. She burned part of the beautiful forest down in order to create her own sanctuary.

But she’s not a black-and-white villain. She has made a home for outcasts and misfits in Irontown and selflessly protects them from all outside threats. The village takes from the natural world only to build a better life for themselves. Women are empowered in her town, and lepers are given shelter. “The world hates and fears us, but she took us in and washed our rotting flesh and bandaged us,” one of them tells Ashitaka. The ends, it can be argued, justify the means; where else would the lepers go? What else would these women — many of them former prostitutes — have to do in order to survive outside of Lady Eboshi’s protection?

“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed,” a leper says. “But still, you find reasons to keep living.” Those reasons to keep on living often come at a cost. Lady Eboshi is willing to pay that cost, and for that, others suffer for her people’s gain.

Her characterization is a bold narrative choice that adds complexity to the story’s themes. Without these shades of grey, Princess Mononoke could easily be misconstrued as merely an environmentalist film. It is one, to some degree, but it is also thematically richer than just that.

Contrast Lady Eboshi’s introduction with our introduction to San, who is the Princess Mononoke that the movie is named after and can therefore be posited to be the “heroine” of the story. She is wild and ferocious. She attacks Lady Eboshi’s men on that muddy mountain, not the other way around. When we first see her face, it is smeared with blood. Over time, we learn to appreciate her loyalty to her family, her diplomatic attempts to save the boars from themselves, and her protectiveness over Ashitaka. But it is painfully clear that she is just as recklessly loyal to her own tribe as Eboshi is to the people of Irontown, and that blind loyalty to tribe has consequences. A lack of empathy for the other side leads to devastation, no matter which side you’re on.

Ashitaka understands this. He becomes a spokesperson for the movie’s themes — a voice of reason and empathy for all characters as they begin to lose themselves to hate. In an early scene in Irontown, a villager proudly recounts the story of Lady Eboshi’s bold defense of the village from a boar attack that left part of the forest in flames. When Ashitaka doesn’t react to their story with any glee, they ask him what’s wrong.

“I was just thinking about the boar god. I was thinking how he must have died filled with hate.”

Hate leads to war. In spite of Ashitaka’s plea for unity, humans and animals find themselves in battle with one another. This fight leaves a hideous path of destruction on the innocent nature over which they both lay claim. Both sides are at fault. The pride of the boar tribe is their ultimate undoing, just as self-absorption and greed becomes the undoing of Lady Eboshi. These traits fuel their hatred and rage for the other side.

“That brainless pig. I’m the one he should’ve put a curse on, not you,” Lady Eboshi says earnestly to Ashitaka. But that is not how the story plays out.

Hatred and rage is symbolized as a flesh-eating, communicable disease in Princess Mononoke. This is fitting. It spreads exponentially, like a virus. Eboshi was responsible for the boar god becoming a demon. The demon boar god then rampaged and caused death and destruction upon innocent lifeforms. Its tribe plotted revenge. This caused a war. At every stage, innocent life was caught in the middle, suffered, died, and then often plotted its own revenge.

In contrast, there is a stoic order to nature, which is embodied in the film by The Forest Spirit. We first see the Spirit of the Forest silhouetted against brilliant rays of sun. The grove that it calls home is peaceful. Pure, innocent Kodama tree spirits with cute bobbing heads and curious expressions live and play above a pond filled with healing water. At night, The Forest Spirit towers above its kingdom and keeps watch over all. The wolf god Moro warns us, “The Forest Spirit gives life and takes life away. Life and death are his alone.”

Chaos comes from meddling with this natural order and giving in to hatred, rage, and violence to distribute death on our own. All beings who do so are guilty, and all beings are capable of causing disorder.

“There’s a demon inside of you,” Ashitaka says as he stands in between the sparring Lady Eboshi and San. “It’s inside both of you.”

It’s visibly inside of him, too. He actively chooses to ignore it.

There is both brutality and beauty in the end. Both sides foster their own demons and suffer their own losses.

The peace and tranquility of the spring that the Forest Spirit calls home is devastated by war; the Forest Spirit’s life is destroyed by the selfishness of men. In the midst of this devastation, we witness brave sacrifices and characters going to great lengths to save those they love from harm and to rid the world of the writhing demons of hate.

And then, flowers and grasses grow over the fallen trees and wreckage almost as soon as the fighting stops. Ashitaka and San come to understand and love each other, though they are destined to live apart. Lady Eboshi promises to build a better society for her people, one that respects the natural order around her. They will likely fall back into some of their old ways, but we have reason for hope.

Before the battle, Moro mocked Ashitaka for wanting to build a life with San. “How could you help her?”

“I don’t know. But at least we might find a way to live,” Ashitaka replied.

The spread of the demon within Ashitaka ceases in light of his efforts to restore order to nature, broker peace between tribes, and do all that he can to minimize his footprint on earth and the damage that he causes to others. Life may ultimately be suffering, but if we’re looking for a way to live, Princess Mononoke posits that as a good place to start.

Miyazaki also wants us to know that it isn’t too late for us to bring good into the world; we can all choose to be better. Nature is resilient, and order can be restored if we are at peace. That’s why the flowers grow back so quickly after the war, and why the movie ends not on a shot of Ashitaka and San, but on a shot of a forest grove after the battle, with a tiny Kodama forest spirit emerging from destruction to shake its head at us.

It is these kinds of visual metaphors, along with imaginative world-building and empathetic storytelling, that make Princess Mononoke such a beautiful, compelling film.