Princess Mononoke

The Japanese habit of populating their stories with characters of indeterminate moral status is something that has interested me for a while and I've commented how, in the pyschological horror genre, it adds an extra layer of enigma that usually works well.

I'm not so sure it works so well here though. One of the Disney team assembled to handle the dubbing for the anglophone market observes on the extras disc that Miyazaki's film has "many themes, not the least of which is Man's relationship to Nature". Indeed, there seem to be many different, complex and often ambiguous themes and characters, yet the message that emerges from them isn't really that much more sophisticated than the one that trumpeted itself from Michael Jackson's Earthsong video.

This won't stop me being a fan of Miyazaki - Even with the very best modern CGI Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy still failed to match the 'fantasy' tableaux that Studio Ghibli has taken to such great heights. I still can't wait to see Howl's Moving Castle.

Perhaps the problem is simply that I saw Spirited Away first. That is an animated film that I can watch all or part of over and over again for the sheer pleasure of visiting its imaginary backdrops. Princess Mononoke shares Spirited Away 's visual inventiveness, unpredictable story trajectories and astounding landscapes improbably constructed out of the same raw material as our own natural and material worlds, but somehow it's not a place I will hurry back to.

"Too messy" V also concluded. It is also quite brutal in places, perhaps unnecessarily so. I would have thought most under-10s would tend to be even more traumatised by it than I was by the fairly comparable Watership Down in '78!