However, the bulk of the reason for watching it with Japanese audio is that the English voice acting for Jigo the monk, a major role in the movie, is just awful. The shoddy translation is especially disappointing after having just watched Whisper of the Heart, which has great dialogue throughout. A lot of the dialogue is oddly repetitive as well, with lines like “Shut up! Stop that noise! I’m trying to do accounts so be quiet!” and “Yup, I suppose, yeah.” Watching it with subtitles shed some light on things that sounded a bit odd the first time around. Part of the problem is some odd choices in translation - even the English name of the movie, “Princess Mononoke”, is a bit misleading*. You’ll find no general judgements here on the virtues of subs versus dubs, but in the specific case of Princess Mononoke, I really have to recommend watching it in Japanese with English subtitles.
PRINCESS MONONOKE ENGLISH DUB ANY GOOD MOVIE
To be blunt, the English dub for this movie is not great. Unfortunately, Princess Mononoke is not a perfect movie - at least, not in the form I first saw it in. If you rescue society’s outcasts and treat them like real human beings, but you put them to work in support of something terrible, are you a good person or a bad person? This is the kind of question that Princess Mononoke will leave in your brain, like a grain of sand in an oyster. People have conflicting interests and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that really comes across here. Instead, the murky morality feels like a natural extension of the well-written characters. This movie really leans into gray morality and the idea that violence taints all parties involved, but that message could have come across as cynical or preachy if the characters felt like they only existed to demonstrate this idea. Like most Ghibli movies, there isn’t an obvious villain to be defeated unlike most Ghibli movies, that’s because most of the characters are villains in one way or another. Princess Mononoke also features a large cast of fully realized characters.
This film represents director Hayao Miyazaki at the top of his game. Every scene is replete with striking imagery. There’s one or two effects (ok, exactly two digital effects) that haven’t aged particularly well since 1997, when I’m sure they were groundbreaking, but on the whole this is a beautiful movie. On a technical level, the animation is astounding even by Ghibli standards.
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