Following last month’s ‘Princess Mononoke’ Miramax soundtrack review and building towards next month’s Mononoke Australian premier, we will be reviewing an amazing book cataloguing and studying the amazing world, artwork and characters of Mononoke Hime, Japan’s most successful film of all time.

The introduction by respected Japanese culture critic, Mark Schilling, examining Hayao Miyazaki’s undisputed title as the Walt Disney of Japan through his unique film history, as a story-teller, a man driven by a determination to bring quality and respect to an amazing medium and as an icon to prove to many, including me, that dreams can come true. From his first movie, ‘Nausicaa: of the Valley of the Wind’ he has struggled hard to bring his visions of free-hearted fantasy to a reality and has succeeded each and every time. Now Japan’s most successful director has sealed his place in history (if he hadn’t already) with Mononoke and seems like he will never stop, I pray, as he continues with his latest masterpiece that is in production. But Mononoke was Miyazaki’s last foremost active role in the animation of his films having personally signed and frequently personally redrawn every single cell in the 135 minute film. As age catches up with his body, but never his immortally young, wise and talented mind, Miyazaki has taken more of a back-seat role in his latest movie, settling into the role of director, working foremost with the perfection of the key frames with the key animators of his Studio Ghibli. For this reason the delightfully insightful book of 224 pages is guaranteed to have every cell image on its pages touched at least once by Miyazaki if not completely drawn. This immediately makes it very special as his last personally perfected, and totally Miyazaki masterpiece.

Its full of post-production drawings, portrait quality backgrounds of sheer natural beauty and wise eyes on a simple but always incredibly effective character frame that marks Miyazaki’s unique and highly successful drawing style.

While the indent of the spine wrecks some of the images, all are of immaculate quality showing the true depth, beauty and cinematic detail and precision as it is meant to be seen.

Following the introduction resides some of the poetry that was written by Miyazaki to give to Joe Hisaishi for designing the film’s image album. For those of you who aren’t sure what an image album is, it is a collection of musical composition pieces written by a musician to accompany the post-production sketches and story layouts of an anime to help establish the atmosphere of the movie for the producers that will be financing the film. Joe Hisaishi has designed all the music to Miyazaki’s movies and again triumphed with his music being action charged and emotionally thick, as are Miyazaki’s poems.

The foreword by Miyazaki tells of his desire to make a movie studying the world of feudal Japan beyond the stereotypical view point of samari domination and instead looks at the reality of all the peasant life that this film is based on. He has again succeeded in creating the most real depiction of ancient Japanese life-style in film since his screenplay for ‘Whisper of the Heart’ that was praised as the most accurate representation of Japanese modern society ever put to film. This can be found littering the book as the artwork shows his famous attention to detail not only with the artwork, but as well as the lives, society and history of every character and event that takes place.

The majority of the book of is dedicated to the art of Mononoke, concept drawings, storyboards and continuity drawings by Miyazaki, background art drawn by, Jisan Yamamoto, Naoya Tanaka, Yoji Takee, Satoshi Kuroda, and Kazuo Oga as well as character sketches by animation director Masashi Ando. Studio Ghibli did not image process some of the cell drawings that appear in the book and thus they differ from those used in the film giving a much broader rang of appeal to the behind the scenes nature of the book. While little text is written with the images, a sub explanation for each image is supplied on each page. The art section is separated mainly into its separate chapters to follow the procession of the movie’s plot from its beginnings of Ashitaka gaining the curse of the rampaging demon god to the pitched battle between the humans and the animal gods.

This was Studio Ghibli’s first use of CG in a movie of any kind, moving from the traditionally painted cells of Ghibli’s high-quality movies they succumbed to the digital age, using its possibilities to its full potential and digitally coloring around 10 percent of the cells. Detail’s on the processes used and steps taken are all reviewed and studied towards the end of the book.

A large collection of layout drawings from the movies last scene soon follows all completely done by Miyazaki and astoundingly beautiful in their drawing. Changes in the story are all listed in the 33 pages of layout drawings.

All pages are in color on a beautifully preservative paper and safely guarded by a decorative hard-cover. I have waited over 2 years to see this movie since its first release in Japan, refusing to see it until the opportunity to view it in its full cinematic glory on the big screen. And as its Australian Premier approaches at an increasing rate, this book is an excellent landmark for anime’s growing popularity world-wide and a homage to one of the greatest creative mind’s this world will ever see. Not long to go now, Sydney’s Japanime film festival, I am now ready to witness the majesty of Princess Mononoke!

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