Princess Mononoke

Yeah.

I don't know if I ever talked about this job on on the show, but like I basically I wrote a review for the student newspaper about Princess Mononoke because that was had just come out and I had kind of become the guy that covered it.

It

was weird.

It was – I was working for my college newspaper and Disney was kind of doing this big push for Princess Mononoke.

So I ended up being like – I saw Princess Mononoke like eight times because I had to watch it to do the review in the newspaper.

Then I ended up getting sent to the junket.

which involved me watching it again so then I had to write about like that thing and then I ended up they did a special screening like where they had it like you know in the original Japanese and I had to go to that and write about that so I became my school newspaper's Princess Mononoke guy which apparently for a short time was a beat And then I got contacted because of that by this website and they were like, we're going to we are going to it's an anime review website.

how long was the original

Uh, I think it was an hour, like 37, like they cut a ton from it so much so that, um, when, uh, Miyazaki went into a meeting to negotiate like a future project, I think it might've been Prince of Mononoke.

Um, he was furious and left the meeting, uh, cause he's just like, oh, this is the guy.

And, uh, he said two, two days later, they sent him a katana with the words, um, no cuts.

I don't know.

No, no, that's fine.

I think if you want the archetypical example of the themes you're talking about, I guess Mononoke is the one that you'd point to.

And

And that was amazing.

I thought that was beautiful, and then I saw Princess Mononoke.

Mo-

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I think, and, and, and Howl's Moving Castle, it's almost, it's almost underrated in terms of Miyazaki's films as well because, you know, it, it, I guess it's sitting up alongside things like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke and, you know, it, it's, it does kind of fall to the wayside in terms of when people are talk, sort of talking about his films.

But that's, that's gotta be maybe top three or four for me in terms of his work.

Then in 1992 he did Porco Rosso.

1997 he did Princess Mononoke.

2001 he did Spirited Away.

2004, Howl's Moving Castle.

Uh, in terms of kinda success box office and commercially-wise, it's no surprise that his highest grossing film was Spirited Away, uh, with 395 million worldwide, this is in US dollars.

Then it's The Boy and the Heron, then it's Howl's Moving Castle.

Um, the first big real, real, real success was Princess Mononoke, which I think became one of the highest grossing films in Japan when it came out.

Um, and it's weird to think that My Neighbor Totoro actually was a complete box office bomb, but it made a lot of money down to merchandising- Mm ... which I think we will get on- Right ... later on as well, down just to the, uh, the character that is on the Studio Ghibli, uh, logo.

Spirited Away.

Mononoke no Hime.

I mean Princess Mononoke.

Yes, I watched that.

And for any listeners that heard last year's 1999 retrospective, it was really funny because Brendan and I had a conversation early on in the year, and of course, as it tends to happen, life gets in the way and you sometimes forget these conversations.

But I do remember bringing this up to Brendan early on because another great example of this is Princess Mononoke.

Mm.

You look that up on IMDb-

... it's a 1997 movie because i- that's when it had its Japanese release, I believe, or again, some festival release.

So you look that film up on IMDb, it's 1997, but it got its n- its US release date in 1999.

So when you look up top 10 lists for 1999, Princess Mononoke is on a lot of them because that's when it was shown to people [laughs] here in the US.

And so I wanted to have that conversation with Brendan, and at the time I think he wanted to look at it as a '97 movie for whatever reason, kind of breaking our rules, but that's my memory of the conversation, so I didn't really consider it.