On the formal achievement of Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997) as an environmental epic.

Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki's most formally ambitious film: it asks its viewer to hold in mind simultaneously the competing claims of industrialization and nature, of human survival and ecological preservation, without resolving them into a moral hierarchy.

The visual world of the film is the argument: the forest spirits are enormous and real; the humans' desire to smelt iron and clear land is also understandable and human. Neither side is wrong in any simple sense. The film refuses the moral simplicity that its environmental subject might invite.

Miyazaki's formal treatment of the forest — the way it moves, the way it responds to being damaged — is the most sophisticated visual treatment of nature as a living system that animation had produced. The Great Forest Spirit and the kodama (the white tree spirits) exist in a visual register of genuine strangeness that is not cartoonishness and not photorealism but something specific to what animation can be.

The ending refuses catharsis: the world is damaged, some things are lost, and what remains is not the world that was but something that can grow. This is a harder emotional conclusion than either tragedy or triumph, and it's the conclusion that the film's honesty demands.