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Director Trademark (1)
Director Hayao Miyazaki personally corrected or redrew more than 80,000 of the film's 144,000 animation cels.
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Disney/Miramax, which released the film in North America, was contractually obligated not to edit any footage out for its North American release. They asked to, but were refused. Although they kept their end of the bargain in not editing the film, they did release it into far fewer theaters than promised and expressed surprise that it had made little money at the box office.
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Contrary to what some may think, the English-language dialogue in the American version is not a direct translation from Japanese to English. One only has to turn on Literal Japanese-to-English translation subtitles on the region-1 DVD to see that dialogue was paraphrased into comfortable American English.
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When it was announced that the Miramax/Buena Vista region-1 DVD would only contain the English-language dialogue track adapted by Neil Gaiman, there was enough fan protest to convince Miramax to delay the release in order to include the original Japanese-language dialogue.
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Princess Mononoke replaced E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as the biggest grossing film of all time in Japan until Titanic.
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Hayao Miyazaki had intended to this be be his final film before retiring. Its great success led him to do another, Spirited Away. He made some more films in the years after that.
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Mononoke means angry or vengeful spirit. Hime is the Japanese honorific word that means princess, which, in the rules of Japanese grammar, is placed after a person's name instead of before, as is the custom in many Western languages. When the film's title was translated into English, it was decided that Mononoke would be left as a name rather than translated literally.
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While Princess Mononoke was acquired after it was released in Japan, its American release was delayed for almost two years, allegedly because of a negative reception at a St. Paul, Minnesota test screening.
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With a runtime of 134 minutes (2 hour and 14 minutes), it is the second longest animated film ever made after Final Yamato (165 minutes).
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Japanese mythology tells that dogs/wolves are always male-voiced, and cats are always female-voiced, regardless of sex. For this reason, a man, Akihiro Miwa provides the voice of Moro the mother wolf. His casting is perhaps an in-joke to his career as a female impersonator.
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Neil Gaiman, in Anglicizing the script, chose to simplify some plot elements to provide a cultural context for phrases and actions not well known outside of Japan. Specific terms like Jibashiri and Shishigami, for example, are changed to the more general Mercenary and Forest Spirit. On the English language DVD, the subtitle options have a literal translation of Hayao Miyazaki's script in addition to Gaiman's adaptation.
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Princess Mononoke won the 1997 Grand Prize for Animation at the inaugural Japan Media Festival; held by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs.
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Director Trademark
Hayao Miyazaki:
[pigs]
The tribe of boars, one of which is the demon Ashitaka fights in the beginning.
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