Princess Mononoke is a 1997 Japanese animated historical fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Set in the Muromachi period of Japanese history, the film follows Ashitaka, a young Emishi prince who journeys west to cure his cursed arm and becomes embroiled in the conflict between Irontown and the forest of the gods, as well as the feud between Lady Eboshi and a human girl raised by wolves named San. Produced by Toshio Suzuki, animated by Studio Ghibli, and distributed by Toho.
As with most of Miyazaki’s previous films, Princess Mononoke‘s score was composed by Joe Hisaishi. According to McCarthy, the score’s development involved a much closer collaboration between the two than on previous works. Hisaishi first composed an image album – a collection of demos and musical sketches that serve as a precursor to the finished score – which he shared with Miyazaki and Suzuki. The unused title The Legend of Ashitaka appears here as the title of the opening theme. With their input, the demos were then worked into the final score, performed by the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra.
Tokuma Shoten released the image album in July 1996 and the soundtrack album in July 1997. The vocal theme song performed by the countertenor singer Yoshikazu Mera was released as a single before the film’s release and became popular with Japanese audiences. A third version of the soundtrack, arranged for symphony orchestra and performed by the Czech Philharmonic, was released in 1998. All three albums were issued on vinyl records in 2020.
The vocal theme was re-recorded for the English dub by the American vocalist Sasha Lazard. Denison argued that this was a part of Miramax’s efforts to remove the film’s Japanese elements, but she also acknowledged that the score deviates substantially from a typical Hollywood-style compositional approach. For example, leitmotifs, which are commonly used to represent characters or settings, are instead used in transitional moments between more significant narrative events. McCarthy wrote that the film complements the scenes featuring music and dialogue with a liberal use of silence and ambient sounds to augment the tension of certain moments, a significant departure from American scoring approaches.
The musicology scholar Stacey Jocoy highlighted the emphatic use of brass instruments to accompany the film’s epic story. Hisaishi employs Japanese pentatonic scales in conjunction with Western tonalities, and Jocoy analyzed the melody featuring this scale in San’s theme as symbolic of her desire for “peace and beauty”. The contrasting cluster chords – which she found similar to those of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) – are used to represent San’s aggression.
