How was Princess Mononoke released in America?

Princess Mononoke opened in Japan in July 1997 and became the highest grossing film in Japanese box office history at the time, a position it held until Spirited Away. Its subject, a war between a mining town and the gods of a cedar forest, with no side the film will call evil, made it the least exportable Ghibli film on paper and the one whose Western release would set the terms for everything after.

The North American release came through Miramax in 1999, under the Disney Tokuma arrangement. Studio Ghibli's side enforced the fidelity condition that had become policy after the Nausicaa edit of the 1980s: no cuts. The often retold story of a sword sent to the studio with that message is part of the release's legend, but the verifiable core is simpler: the film was released complete, subtitled in arthouse runs and dubbed in wider release, at a length and darkness unusual for an animated feature in America at the time.

The English dub script was adapted by the novelist Neil Gaiman, hired to render the Japanese dialogue's registers, gods, curses, leper colonies and all, into speakable English without flattening them, and the cast included Gillian Anderson, Billy Bob Thornton and Minnie Driver. Critics treated the release as an event, Roger Ebert among its champions, and while the American box office was modest beside Japan's, the film's reputation there has never stopped growing.

On disc, Mononoke is the hinge title between eras: Miramax and Disney era DVDs, the later GKIDS editions, and Japanese editions across every format. Collectors comparing versions should check the subtitle translation and the dub together, since this is the Ghibli film where English wording carries the most interpretive weight, and where the documented Japanese poster art and the Western adventure style covers differ most sharply in promise.