Princess Mononoke: Fantasy, the Feminine, and the Myth of “Progress”Susan J. Napier Chapter1434 AccessesAbstractIN HIS INTRODUCTION to Movies and Mass Culture, John Belton asserts that “movies assist audiences in negotiating major changes in identity; they carry them across difficult periods of cultural transition in such a way that a more or less coherent national identity remains in place, spanning the gaps and fissures that threaten to disrupt its movement and to expose its essential disjointedness.”1 This is an ambitious statement, but it seems an appropriate one in many cases. Despite their use of traditional tropes of endurance and nobility, the final vision of both Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen is that of a fragmented national identity, a major characteristic of which is a deep sense of loss of a structured, patriarchal past. In the case of these two films the fragmentation is implicit, but in the next film to be considered, Miyazaki Hayao’s 1997 epic Princess Mononoke (Mononokehime) the sense of a broken heterogeneous world is stridently manifest. Princess Mononoke problematizes archetypes and icons, ranging from the notion of the emperor’s untouchability to the traditional iconization of the feminine, to create a genuinely new vision of a Japan at the crossroads of history. The film also emphasizes loss, even privileges it. In contrast to Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, however, Miyazaki’s work deals with the loss of a Japan that existed before the patriarchal system, a Japan in which nature, rather than humans, ruled. In some ways one might characterize the film as a violent, indeed apocalyptic, elegy for a lost Japan at the same time that it offers an alternative, heterogeneous, and female-centered vision of Japanese identity for the future.