Deforestation In Princess Mononoke

Finding a way to present environmental issues to the general public can be a rather taxing process. For most, it needs to be presented in a certain medium in subtle undertones of a larger theme. Hayao Miyazaki was able to find a strong and impressive middle ground in his film Princess Mononoke, where he could combine the issue of deforestation with a tale of fantasy in order to captivate his audience. While the film does a strong job of presenting the issue of deforestation, it tends to play down the consequences that go hand in hand, electing to replace these issues with more supernatural ideas. Deforestation involves weakened environments due to a lack of moisture and carbon, industrialized societies with high demands for natural resources,

Through the concept of Japanese folklore and magic, Miyazaki presents the issue in a way that allows his audience to sympathize and understand the negative effects of deforestation without overwhelming them with science-heavy facts. In Japanese mythology, spirits are usually bound to a particular area, much like the gods in the film, who were bound to different forests. Part of that also involves the idea that when someone attacks or damages the area, the spirits will feel it or, in some cases, take injuries themselves. In the case of Princess Mononoke, when humans began cutting down trees in the forests in order to have fuel to make their weapons, the spirits linked to the forest could feel the disruption and attempted to retaliate accordingly. However, this only led to a corruption that began to spread and turned the gods into demons. Subsequently, when these corrupted gods touched something, it was destroyed. Early in the film, for example, a boar god appears on the outskirts of the protagonist Ashitaka’s village, corrupted by the iron of a bullet forged by humans and covered in demons in the form of snakes. Every step he takes kills the grass beneath his feet, a physical manifestation of the spread of corruption. While the creators took artistic liberties to present the issues to their audience, the message is still

In Kent Redford and Steven Sanderson’s article “Extracting Humans from Nature,” they argue that forests are no better off with indigenous people, who are typically assumed to be more closely in tune to the environment, than they are with large-scale populations. “While conservationists may hold the unrealistic expectation that native Amazonians will preserve land ceded to them in the same state in which they received it, indigenous peoples expect to be able to use these lands to assure their physical and cultural survival,” ensuring that no matter the circumstance, forests are always as risk (Redford & Sanderson, 1363). Princess Mononoke hinted at this throughout the film by showing the distress that not only the first-world civilizations led by the Mikado inflicted, but the distress the lesser civilizations that are still trying to industrialize cause as