(This post is for those who have seen Princess Mononoke)
After Ashitaka and a monk meet, the scene changes to the next one, where Eboshi’s troops encounter with Moro and her sons, god of wolf, on the bare mountain.
Then, I have a question:
Have you thought of why Eboshi and Moro fought on the bare mountain? or, why the mountain is so ruined, and the river muddy brown?
There is a clear reason:
It’s not just because Miyazaki, the director, wanted to animate a cool gun fight in the hard rain. The reason is related to what Eboshi has been doing: manufacturing iron.
Eboshi’s village is being strongly supported by their ability of producing iron. Thanks to the iron, they are able to keep independent from other samurai’s influence.
However, to produce iron in medieval time requires a myriad of mountain sand because the process of producing iron is to extract iron from the whole sand by using the difference of melting point between iron and sand. As you saw in the movie before, they have to heat tons of sand around-the-clock through this process. Where are the tons of sand from? Here is the reason. They dig in the mountains to get sand. This is not only fiction, but also a historical thing. Indeed, there are some mountains whose shape was changed due to iron manufacture. Furthermore, how do they keep the fire to make iron? They need a lot of wood as well. Both are obtained from destroying mountains. The mountain loses tree and earth, so it can no longer keep water into it. As a result, when it rains on the mountain, rivers become a muddy stream.
Thus iron and forest can’t flourish together.
That’s why Eboshi, the human who produces iron, and Moro, a god who inhabits the forest, have to fight on the ruined mountain. That is the thing that Miyazaki implied in the shot scene.
As long as human beings want to be human beings, they had to kill god of forest to make forest in human hands at one point. In the last scene, it seems that the forest recovered its greenery, but it obviously is not the original ancient forest where god of wolf and wild boar inhabited. Those gods lost their power and came mere forest animals. The forest came to be controlled by human, and no longer refusing human entry. The last scene indicates the end of ancient times and the dawn of the human’s age. And Miyazaki must have mixed feelings about that.
Thank you for the correcting this long post, Kenji, Rebien and Coolguy.
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