Princess Mononoke

I am more convinced than I was before than Miyazaki is easily among the best animation directors of all time. By today's standards, the art is a bit simple, but it's still well done, creative, and beautifully animated. The story is an interesting fantasy tale with fully developed characters and no hard and fast lines of good and evil. People oppose each other, but none of them are outright bad, they just have conflicting goals. The art and story combine in an extremely inventive film that is, from what I've seen, his masterpiece.

What makes me say this is that is I've never seen such a good combination of whimsy and badassery. I always knew Miyazaki was capable of the former, but not the latter. He still has the humor, scenery, and feel of a pleasant fantasy, but the main characters are capable of some truly awesome and brutal action scenes. The male protagonist is amazing in battle and he knows it, but he's not arrogant, he's just sure of himself. It's a really fun movie to watch.

I watched it on DVD, and it apparently didn't have the original Japanese audio track, which is unfortunate. On the bright side, the dub wasn't bad at all. I don't really care about fame of the actors in animation, but the popular actors used for all the roles generally fit their parts and don't get in the way. I've heard the dub is generally faithful to the original script, and the dialogue avoids clumsy-sounding lines to match the mouth movements as much as possible, so it didn't really detract from the experience. Whatever language you want to watch it in, Princess Mononoke is a great movie.