The Beautifully Unnerving Gaze of “Evil Does Not Exist”

This sense of dark awe is the sort of veneration that Japanese have toward certain forests and natural objects—in short, it’s an animistic primitive religion. Many places have a “forest that shouldn’t be entered.” Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes

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Hmm, where were we? Ah, yes, he was talking about how movies can be built or deconstructed because of Killers, which has the elliptical, episodic structure of many of his other films. Less narrative, more atmosphere, more information by way of anecdote, by way of scene, by way of character. “What I had hoped to do, and I didn’t do this intentionall... See more

That is precisely why it is important to make this film as we enter the chaotic times of the twenty-first century. Princess Mononoke does not purport to solve the problems of the entire world. The battle between rampaging forest gods and humanity cannot end well; there can be no happy ending. Yet, even amid the hatred and slaughter, there are thing

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It would be easy to solve the problems of human beings were we to label those who decimate forests and destroy nature as evil, base, and savage. On the contrary, the tragedy of human beings is that the people who try to push forward the most virtuous parts of humanity end up destroying nature. Unless we look at this aspect of the human experience,

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