Mononoke Hime is a 1997 art film directed by the well renowned Hayao Miyazaki and produced by the equally as distinguished Studio Ghibli; the film was the studio's last feature length production to be mostly cel-animated, and was a massive commercial success in Japan, breaking a number of domestic box office records.

The film tells the story of a young Ashitaka, the last Emishi prince, who in fighting off a boar-god-turned-demon to protect his village contracts a curse that will cut his life short. Directed to do so by the village elder, he journeys to the west to discover the cause of the demon's emergence, and hopes to also find a cure to his ailment. Without wanting to spoil the film for any considering watching it, I shalln't delve further into the plot - but what I will say is that Mononoke Hime is a very mature telling of a world which clearly has 'good' and 'evil' in it, but wherein neither is well-defined. It won't insult your autonomy of thought, it will simply tell you a story and let you decide for yourself what to think and how to feel about the characters and their actions.

Mononoke Hime uses a combination of hand-drawn cel-animation, minimal CGI, and a modest amount of inked-and-painted cel-animation, which would go on to be used in all subsequent Ghibli films. First and foremost, this film is beautiful; there are a number of large-scale landscape shots in the film, all of which have been wonderfully rendered in their mediums, as have most of the backgrounds even in the more action-focused scenes - and speaking of those scenes, the animation quality is consistent for the full run of the film, of a high calibre with a few moments of particularly captivating animation sprinkled throughout.

In terms of audio, the sound design of the film is exceptional - the team behind this clearly knew when and where to use ambient sounds to create atmosphere, but almost more importantly, they knew when not to. Most of the sounds in the film go completely unnoticed unless you pay very close attention - which is exactly what ambient sound should do - and this attention to detail only goes to complement the voice acting work done by the cast of the film. If I had to choose a weakness of the film, I would probably say that the score of the film barely doesn't live up to every other aspect of this - but I also know that this would be a very unpopular opinion, and that the Mononoke Hime OST is a favourite amongst a number of fans. And of course, this isn't to say that the OST is in anyway lacking, just that it's an exceptionally good soundtrack accompanying a masterpiece of a film.

Score aside, the film is not perfect; there are a sparse few moments in the film where it feels like parts of the animation are rushed, and when the old man Osa speaks (bedridden, in the back of Eboshi's garden), I wish they had given him more time; even though speaking is clearly meant to be difficult for him, his part felt a little rushed, and noticeably so, and I genuinely believe an extra second or two in that segment would provide the impact the scene was surely intended to have.

But having voiced my criticisms of the film, I really must stress that they are very, very minor criticisms, and mainly made just to observe that even the best of films are not perfect - after all, films are art, and thus inherently subjective. But as far as my subjectivism goes, it would be very difficult to make this film any better than it already is - and for its most miniscule of shortcomings, I'm electing to abstain one point from a perfect score.