Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse

Opinion  I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.…

Exclusive: Letter to PM signed by retired supreme court justices among others says lack of action will imperil international legal system

The UK must impose sanctions on the Israeli government and its ministers and also consider suspending it from the UN to meet its “fundamental international legal obligations”, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, including former supreme court justices, have said.

In a letter to the prime minister, they welcome Keir Starmer’s joint statement last week with the leaders of France and Canada warning that they were prepared to take “concrete actions” against Israel. But they urge him to act without delay as “urgent and decisive action is required to avert the destruction of the Palestinian people of Gaza”.

Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every other country on the planet somehow constitutes an emergency, and enough U-turns to make a ballerina dizzy — it is easy to lose sight of a basic fact: even a modest and predictable tariff is still a modest and predictable act of foolishness.

Let’s start with a simple truth about a complicated world. Everybody has to trade with somebody. Attempting complete self-sufficiency would, in the very best-case scenario, produce a Robinson Crusoe existence in which every waking minute had to be devoted to piercing coconuts or repairing the treehouse roof. The worst-case scenario would be to die simultaneously of starvation, exposure and an infected scratch.

A vivid example of this truth is The Toaster Project, the brainchild of conceptual artist Thomas Thwaites. Two decades ago, Thwaites decided to make a simple toaster from scratch. He found himself thwarted at every turn: iron smelting proved impossible without a microwave oven, starch-based plastic was eaten by hungry snails and nickel could be obtained only by purchasing commemorative coins. “I realised that if you started absolutely from scratch, you could easily spend your life making a toaster,” he told me. His toaster eventually cost about £1,000. It did not work.

The second truth about trade is that it’s beneficial even if you’re trading with someone who is better than you at everything. A classic example: your housemate can cook a meal in 30 minutes or do a load of laundry in 40 minutes. For you, cooking takes 90 minutes and laundry takes an hour. A Trumpian view of this interaction is that you’re doomed: the housemate is better at both cooking and laundry, so will do both while you do neither. A trade deficit! Sad! (Although exactly why this turn of events would be to your disadvantage is unclear.)

But if you offer to do three loads of laundry if your housemate cooks three meals, then both you and your housemate are getting clean clothes and home-cooked food for less effort. This, the principle of “comparative advantage”, is that rare idea in economics that is important, true, and far from obvious.

The third truth about trade is that, ultimately, it isn’t about all the stuff you get to sell. It’s about all the stuff you get to buy. Yes, jobs can give us a sense of meaning and purpose, but we do not do them in exchange for gold star stickers. We do them in exchange for money that we can spend on stuff.

The fourth truth about trade is that while deficits might not mean much, bilateral deficits mean nothing at all. The FT has a huge bilateral deficit with me: they send me money every month but they do not complain that I am failing to spend my salary on copies of the FT Weekend. Meanwhile, I have a large bilateral deficit with my local cheese shop, but it would be strange to insist that they bought more copies of my book How To Make The World Add Up. I’m not spending money at the cheese shop in the hope that they will buy my writing in return. I’m spending money in the confident expectation that what I will get in return is cheese.

At this point all the self-proclaimed Tariff Men who are still reading this might complain that I am cheating, because I have been talking about local trade rather than international trade. But economically speaking there is no difference. That is the fifth truth about trade: tariffs are imposed at national borders not for economic reasons but because national borders are an administratively convenient place to do so.

They are also culturally and rhetorically convenient. Politicians who otherwise wouldn’t dream of boasting about increasing taxes are happy to boast about increasing tariffs because tariffs seem to apply to foreigners. (The sixth truth: a tariff is nothing more than a tax.) Tariffs are actually a tax not on foreigners but on people who buy things from foreigners, but nevertheless that is an easier message than — say — taxing people from Birmingham who buy things from Manchester.

This is a question few Tariff Men have asked, let alone answered: if it is such a splendid idea to tax goods coming from Mexico into the US, why isn’t it a good idea for the government of Houston to tax imports from Dallas? Or to tax imports from Central Northwest Houston to East Downtown? In a modern economy something must be taxed, but transaction taxes are needlessly distorting, whether they are levied on a national border or somewhere else.

The seventh truth about trade is that it is often used as a scapegoat. There are many problems that look like they are caused by trade but are actually caused by something else. For example, the decline in US manufacturing jobs feels like it was caused by competition from China, and some of it was. But much of it was caused by competition from robots — which is why many of the jobs have gone but US manufacturing output keeps rising.

There are plenty of problems for which tariffs seem like they might be a solution — from encouraging a homegrown defence industry to discouraging the emission of greenhouse gases — but in almost all cases, there are better, more focused and less wasteful alternatives.

Yes, you may wish to support a homegrown industrial cluster, or to tax carbon dioxide emissions, or to diversify sources of energy. But pursuing complex economic objectives with a trade war is like trying to perform neurosurgery with a hammer. Even a skilled brain surgeon would struggle to produce a positive result — and I’m not sure the current team in the White House have yet earned that distinction.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 April 2025.

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Anyone hoping that the marginalization of the Labour left would lead to rational, liberal policy has been badly disappointed by Starmer's recent remarks (pdf) on immigration echoing Enoch Powell and speaking of "incalculable" damage. "Disgraceful and damaging" says Simon Wren-Lewis; "untethered from reality" says Jonathan Portes; and "a moral, political and economic embarrassment" says Ian Dunt.

I want to suggest that there's a causal link here. The absence of leftist voices in mainstream political discourse is a cause of dishonesty, lies and stupidity in policy-making. I'm not going to try to persuade centrists of the merits of leftist policies, but to do something else. In politics we must ask not only "what is the right policy?" but also "what type of political culture or ecosystem is conducive to good policy-making?" My argument is that the demise of the left has created an ecosystem hostile to good policy.

Old stockbrokers had a saying: "it takes differences of opinion to make a market". And the loss of some opinions has led to a worsening political market.

Here, I'm using "left" in a particular (idiosyncratic!) way, to mean a left that pushes for economic policies for workers and customers against the interests of the rich. The absence of such a left is in small part its own fault. Pretty much the only idea many leftists have now is a wealth tax. But even if this would work (which as Dan Neidle argues is doubtful) it does not address our main economic problems: how to reallocate jobs; and how to raise productivity. What has been forgotten is any interest in economic democracy. That's a big loss.

I don't much blame leftists for this: there's no point writing recipes if you don't have a kitchen. Nevertheless, it is something intelligent non-leftists should mourn.

Starmer's talk of the damage done by migration echoes Reeves' embarrassing drivel about there being "not a huge amount of money" and "maxing out the credit card". Neither seem to believe in logic or fact. Contrast that with New Labour, which based its policies upon evidence and research. Working tax credits were modelled on the US's earned income tax credits; the minimum wage upon the work of Card and Krueger; Bank of England independence upon research by economists such as Alex Cukierman; and Brown's interest in endogenous growth theory was influenced by economists such as Paul Romer and Philippe Aghion.

Of course, this evidence was incomplete. But New Labour at least looked for it. Blair used to speak a lot about "evidence-based policy-making." His epigones do not. Why the difference? It's because Blair and Brown had to appeal across the political spectrum, so they needed evidence*. New Labour faced competition from the left, and competition keeps people on their toes. Reeves and Starmer, on the other hand, feel the need to appeal only to a few newspapers so any drivel is good enough.

It's not just Labour that has been degraded by the decline of the left. So too has the Tory party. Trades unions taught generations of their opponents a valuable skill: how to negotiate. As they shrank, so too did that ability. The result was that the Tories were unable to negotiate Brexit, falling instead into a childish tantrums of "I want, I want a fairy unicorn". Had they been formed by dealing with unions rather than by appealing to their nannies, they might have done a little better.

Conservative constituency associations used to be dominated by businessmen accustomed to recalcitrant unions. That taught them that it was difficult to bend the world to their will. That lesson has been lost, and so Tories have voted for the fantasies offered by Truss or Badenoch.

For much of the 20th century strong unions had other benefits. One is that they imposed a modicum of justice and efficiency onto corporate management. They helped rein in bosses' pay (pdf) - for fear that big boardroom pay rises would provoke workers' demands for similar - and in doing so might have helped discourage rent-seeking and jockeying for the top job. And insofar as they raised workers' pay, unions compelled firms to look for ways to raise productivity growth; this was faster even during the strike-riddled 70s than it has been in recent years.

Allied to the genuine fear of communism, unions did something else. They forced governments to focus upon avoiding recessions and upon improving economic growth, because these were ways of helping to shore up the legitimacy of capitalism - and, from capital's point of view, a better alternative to redistribution.

The loss of these pressures, however, has led to the triumph of what Joel Mokyr has called the forces of conservatism, constituencies hostile to economic growth. For example, financiers and rentiers like the low interest rates and resulting high asset prices that are the consequence of stagnation; lawyers and accountants support the complicated tax system that diverts effort to compliance or avoidance; incumbent companies oppose competition; little Englanders like the trade barriers erected by Brexit; and landlords don't want taxes to be shifted from incomes to land. And so economic growth is strangled.

Politically, it's pointless to debate economic policy, because policy is determined not by ideas but by interests. Good policy doesn’t require merely technical know-how. It requires the right material conditions, the right power bases. It is these, rather than technical know-how, that are lacking. And the demise of the left is one reason for this.

I'm not saying that intelligent policies can come only from the left. What I'm saying is that a strong left creates the political space for such policies from anywhere on the spectrum. Would Starmer have spoken about immigration in that way if he'd been fearful of the left of the Labour party?

Here, though, we come to a vicious circle. The absence of a significant left contributes to economic stagnation, and stagnation in turn fosters the far-right. Since Ben Friedman's work we have lots of evidence that weak economies lead to reaction and illiberalism. Thiemo Fetzer for example has shown that austerity boosted support for Brexit; he and his colleagues have shown that shop closures encouraged support for Ukip; and Diane Bolet and colleagues have demonstrated (pdf) that pub closures have a similar effect.

A stronger left could act as a circuit-breaker here. It would offer an alternative account of our economic decline and better remedies for it than Farage's Truss-on-steroids fantasies. The absence of this, however, gives us the grotesque sight of a Labour PM pandering to the far-right.

My point broadens. Dan Ariely has shown that belief in conspiracy theories is more common among the victims of poor economic performance**:

The feeling of being hard done by is prevalent among the misbelievers I've met, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining the recurring theme of "the elites" that we find in many common conspiracy theories. If you're convinced that you're at a disadvantage, someone else must have an (unfair) advantage. If you're suffering unusual hardship, someone else is getting off easy. If you're lacking control, someone else must be controlling things. (Misbelief, p67)

Again, a healthy left would help correct this. It would provide other, better explanations for why people feel at a disadvantage, and (because any serious left must be committed to some form of economic democracy) offer people more genuine control over their lives. Without this, however, we see the rise of fruitloop conspiracy theories.

There's an analogy here. You might not like Wetherspoons or McDonalds. But they offer something even if you never go into them; competition from them forces other pubs and restaurants to up their game. Similarly, you might not like a strong left, but it too would force other parties to do better. That's competition. And who can possibly be scared of competition?

* It might be no accident that Blair's gravest error was the Iraq war, which was the result of ignoring both the evidence and the voice of the left.

** Ariely doesn't mention Andrew Tate, but I suspect his case might fit our point.

Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.) If he is just a toddler having a full-blown meltdown, then the best strategy is to ignore him. Put on the noise-cancelling headphones and pick up a good book. If he’s a face-eating leopard, best to stay alert.

Unfortunately, this begs the question. If we don’t stay alert, how can we distinguish between the leopard and the toddler? Laughing and turning your back might be the appropriate response, but try that at your peril. Trump is a master at hijacking the way our attention works; we did not evolve to tune out loud, unpredictable activity in the vicinity.

It may be helpful to start with that, then, “in the vicinity”. Trump certainly seems to be in the vicinity: he’s on every TV screen, at the top of every homepage, in every social media feed. But his proximity may be an illusion. To be sure, if you are seeking a safe abortion in Houston, hoping to receive life-saving HIV medication in Kampala or fighting on the front line near Donetsk, then what Trump says and does matters very much indeed. Yet, every day I find myself talking to people who are as immune as anyone can hope to be from the actions of the most powerful man on Earth, yet spend more time thinking and talking about him than about their own spouses.

Some of the reasons for this are endlessly rehearsed. Traditional and social media both thrive on outrage and on unpredictability. Trump is guaranteed to deliver both. But switching off your phone and going for a coffee with someone is no guarantee of a Trump-free zone, because your coffee date will inevitably start talking about how terrible it all is.

This is particularly true if you don’t know them very well. One of the strange facts about human conversation is that it rarely exists to transmit new information. Instead, people instinctively grope towards topics with which everyone is familiar. Studies of groups making decisions, such as panels of recruiters considering candidates, find that people often fail to bring novel information to the table. Instead we chat about what everyone already knows. It’s the same with small talk. Rather than learning something new and interesting about where to find new knitting patterns, how to train for a half-marathon or the best places to visit on a weekend break in Copenhagen, you will find yourself nodding along as you both agree that JD Vance seems to be a terrible fellow altogether.

In Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, Hoff learns a lesson when he tries to convince Winnie-the-Pooh to listen to the radio. “That thing?” responds Pooh, sceptically. “Certainly,” Hoff responds. “How else will you know what’s going on in the world?”

Pooh suggests going outside instead. When the radio is finally turned on, the news is troubling: “Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles . . . ”

With the radio switched off again, Pooh is unconvinced that he has learnt anything of practical value. The birds are still singing. It’s still a nice day.

It’s a passage that delights some and infuriates others. Confronted with the enormous suffering of people you’ve never met, paying attention instead to the birds and the sunshine in your own small patch of the world is something you can only get away with if you are a fictional bear of very little brain.

An angry, sorrowful Pooh might be more socially acceptable, but would not resurrect any victims of the multi-plane pile-up.

When people solemnly declare that this is no time for complacency, what exactly do they suggest as a response? Voting makes a difference, especially if you happen to be an American citizen. So does political organising. But if your idea of resistance to Trump is actually just a combination of doomscrolling and self-induced insomnia, maybe you should pay more attention to the birdsong and the sunshine.

In his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman offers a sanity-saving perspective. The realm of national and international events is important, but it is not a place in which to live. It’s a place to visit. It’s fine to go there, and perhaps go there often, but after you have voted or organised or donated or volunteered or whatever it is you feel you should do (and many people do none of these things), then come back to the world of your immediate surroundings.

Some people have no choice, of course. Whether or not they are interested in geopolitics, geopolitics is interested in them. But most of us can choose, and perhaps we should try to focus a little more often on our immediate surroundings and communities. Not only is it more pleasant, but the chance of making a positive difference to the world is much greater if you start closer to home.

A few years ago, the writer Austin Kleon highlighted a passage from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Leonard and his wife, Virginia, would listen with horror to the speeches of Adolf Hitler. One day, “suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’” Six years later, they were.

There have been worse leaders than Donald Trump — much worse — and Hitler was not defeated by being studiously ignored by those whose lives he did not touch. But if there is a time and a place for stubborn resistance, there is also a time and a place to plant iris.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 April 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Column The SF Path to Higher Consciousness

Princess Mononoke: Three Cheers for the Adversary?

A complex, multifaceted antagonist is just one of the things that makes this movie a masterpiece.

By Dan Persons

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Published on May 7, 2025

Credit: Studio Ghibli

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Credit: Studio Ghibli

I’m not sure now if the Popeye cartoons I watched as a kid taught me the right lessons. I’m not talking here about the genuinely great Fleischer Popeyes or the slightly less-great Famous Studios Popeyes. Those cartoons did teach valuable lessons, even if eating spinach every day didn’t spawn battleships in my biceps (better off, anyway—probably painful). No, I’m talking about the Popeyes that were produced under the aegis of King Features Syndicate in the 1960s, the ones done in Czechoslovakia (look it up), or by the likes of the Bozo the Clown guy. You know, the crappy ones.

There was a trope in those cartoons that, if memory serves, cropped up a few times: Brutus (not Bluto—that was the result of a weird rights mix-up; you can look that up, too) would do something seemingly nice for Popeye—offer him a drink of water or something (it was spiked, obviously)—and Popeye would walk away, saying, “Gee, he’s not such a bad guy after all.” And all of us six-year-olds would sit in front of the TV, thinking, Popeye, you sap, don’t you see he’s playing you?

This is not an uncommon thing in film storytelling, where the audience, given their outsider advantage, is ahead of the protagonists in understanding what’s going on. (I don’t think it happens as much in written fiction, where we’re often looking at the narrative from someone’s viewpoint.) Handled correctly, it can actually provoke empathy for the characters. But let the audience get more than two steps ahead, and you wind up with the situation where an entire theater full of spectators is yelling at the screen while the cheerleader, having just hooked up with the school’s lead quarterback, goes alone into the basement with a faulty flashlight. We, the savvy youth of America, could see right through Brutus—so what the flip was wrong with Popeye?

Given the restricted economics of televised kids animation in the ’60s (which probably hasn’t changed all that much over time), you can understand why creators, rushing to push their product out, would rely on a child’s binary view of the world to avoid complicating the job for their crew. Brutus is a dick, has always been a dick and will always be—why add to the workload by dragging in nuance? (Let me just take a moment to point out that there’s a distinction between the classic Popeye cartoons—which were created to entertain theater audiences of all ages—and the King Features versions, which were deliberately crafted to shovel into after-school kid-vid blocks.) And yes, sometimes a bastard’s good side is a façade, so developing a child’s critical thinking muscles should never be discouraged. But neither should we convey the lesson that the bad shall always be bad, or that they might not have redeeming qualities.

Hayao Miyazaki gets it. Across a fifty-plus year career (which he repeatedly insists he’s retired from, and to which he repeatedly returns), the Japanese director has taken the tools of fantasy and made his tales entrancing enough for younger audiences while evoking an expansive understanding of human nature. While he’s gone as far as to create animated features—such as Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988)—without any adversaries at all, even when opponents do appear, as with the air pirates of Castle in the Sky (1986) or the witch Zeniba in the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001), they can just as often manifest admirable features as not. Maybe it’s just that Miyazaki made his directorial debut working on the Lupin the Third TV series (and went on to write and direct the much-beloved feature adaptation, 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro) and discovered that good-bad people were more fun than bad-bad people. Whatever his motivation, even when his films feature real, honest-to-gosh villains, it’s the antagonists bestowed with elements of grace that tend to stick in your mind.

Nowhere is that more true than in the stunning historical fantasy, Princess Mononoke (1997).

Miyazaki loves to reach back into the past for his tales, frequently setting them in a vaguely defined, imaginary Europe, with an admixture of pre- and post-war technologies. Not so with Princess Mononoke, which is set definitively in Japan sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, albeit a fantasy Japan in which boars and wolves tower over humans and can communicate telepathically, where red elk are viable transportation options, and where gods, monsters, and playful spirits with rattling, gourd-like heads haunt the forest.

It’s a monster that actually gets the story moving: A rampaging, wild boar suffering under a curse that turns it into a roiling mass of thrashing pseudopods. When the young Emishi prince Ashitaka (Billy Crudup voicing the English dub; Yôji Matsuda for the Japanese) kills the beast, he winds up infected with the curse, and must exile himself from his village in order to discover the source of the malignancy. His only clue is a crudely cast iron ball—a bullet, in fact—dug from the monster’s side.

Ashitaka’s investigation leads him eventually to Irontown, a fortified village and foundry set in the center of a forest and led by Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver/Yûko Tanaka). Business may be booming for the community—especially since Eboshi’s main product is munitions for the latest innovation in war tech: rifles—but it doesn’t come without risk. Not only is the leader of a band of samurai eager to commandeer the installation, by force if necessary, but the forest creatures are none too happy about the smoke-belching chimneys and the ruthless deforestation. While the woods’ giant boars are planning an attack, Eboshi sees a more daunting adversary in San (Claire Danes/Yuriko Ishida), aka Princess Mononoke (roughly translated as “Princess Monster” or “Spirit Princess”), a young girl raised by giant wolves, who has been staging guerilla attacks on the town’s supply runs, and who is determined to kill Lady Eboshi.

If you’ve seen promotional materials for Princess Mononoke (including the trailer above), you’ve likely seen one of its more indelible images: San, standing beside her wolf-mother, mouth smeared in blood and delivering a formidable death-stare. It’s not the image you’d expect from the filmmaker who invented the benevolent woodland god Totoro. Then again, this film’s forest god, Shishigami, looks much less like a grinning, roly-poly, stuffed animal come to life; instead, we glimpse an eerie deerlike creature with a placid, human face that at night morphs into a ghostlike, humanoid giant (Miyazaki emphasizes the deity’s uncanniness by having the soundtrack go completely silent whenever the creature is on screen). From start to finish, Princess Mononoke features Miyazaki in a darker mode, with more explicit violence, copious decapitations and dismemberments, and an ending that, while it doesn’t go full-on apocalyptic, also doesn’t attempt to reset this world to its earlier incarnation.

That adult level of storytelling extends to how the director treats his characters. While the Emishi (a people who once existed in the northern realms of Japan’s main island) are portrayed as isolated and relatively primitive, they are in no way helpless innocents—a startling moment at the beginning of the film has a young villager pulling a machete against the boar monster, ready to stand her ground. A travelling monk, Jigo (Billy Bob Thornton/Kaoru Kobayashi) is affable and friendly, but is also devious and greedy, out to leverage Lady Eboshi’s munitions to claim a bounty the Emperor has placed on Shishigami’s head. (Literally. He wants that noggin.) And Ashitaka may not be well-versed in the complexities of modern-day commerce—he pays a village vendor with a gold nugget far more valuable than the goods bought—but he is able to read Lady Eboshi more accurately than the woman might desire, seeing how her ambition interferes with her more honorable impulses.

And yes, one of the more surprising things about Princess Mononoke is how it refuses to cast Lady Eboshi in classic villain mode—this despite her angular design that’s typical anime shorthand for Not a Good Person. There is a severity to the woman, as when she dismisses as dead two villagers who fall off a ridge during one of San’s attacks, and in the way she sadistically toys with the girl when they finally confront each other in battle.

Then there’s the issue of the ecological nightmare Eboshi is unleashing. Environmental concerns run through many of Miyazaki’s films, although rarely in a stridently overt way—you get the play of a lush, bucolic country life against the urban world in My Neighbor Totoro, or the “Stink Spirit” spawned of rampant pollution in Spirited Away. Following that pattern, Lady Eboshi could have been drawn as the greedy capitalist willing to run roughshod over the environment so long as the Mon (the standard currency at that time) keeps rolling in. That’s clearly an aspect of the woman, but it’s not the only one.

Miyazaki is careful to counterbalance the Lady’s darkness with a considerable amount of humanity. The craftspeople at her rifle works are lepers that Eboshi rescued from their outcast status; the women working the forge are former prostitutes she bought out of slavery. They all praise Eboshi for the respect she gives them, and for providing them with the dignity of honest work. It could be dismissed as another form of exploitation, but in the context of the times, we can see that their lives are infinitely better for the Lady’s intervention. (It’s also implied that the women are free to take lovers as they please, returning agency to their sexuality—something Ashitaka gets a sample of as they drool all over the handsome prince.) And while it isn’t stated explicitly in the film, I get the sense that Eboshi is some kind of exile herself, maybe just from her determination to stand as an equal in a male-dominated society. Her empathy for outcasts may well stem from her own outcast status.

This complexity of character creates an interesting tension in the film. Lady Eboshi is not a paragon of good—her ambitions have tainted the harmony of a forest; her products bring death and destruction; and it was a bullet from her foundry that inflicted the curse upon the giant boar who then cursed Ashitaka. She doesn’t hesitate in joining forces with Jigo, using a more advanced rifle to kill the forest god, thereby triggering a calamitous deluge that destroys Irontown.

And yet, we can’t hate her. It’s clear she cares for and respects those who work for her (she even apologizes to the men she left for dead once Ashitaka has rescued them). Her establishment of Irontown is done not purely out of greed or a thirst for power, but a desire to stand as her own person, and by extension to raise up those who serve her. She is a distinctive example of nobility—not a perfect person, in fact, a person possibly wrong in most of what she is doing—but she is more than her negatives. When Ashitaka expresses concern for Eboshi’s welfare during the film’s cataclysmic finale—a cataclysm Eboshi had a direct hand in—it comes as no surprise. From all we’ve seen, the Lady has earned it.

Princess Mononoke ends on an ambivalent note. The scoundrel Jigo, thwarted out of his Emperor’s bounty, squats on a precipice, grins, and declares, “You just can’t win against fools.” Shishigami regains its head, but vanishes from the Earth, marking the end of an era of harmony between nature and humanity. And Eboshi promises her villagers that they will rebuild a “better” Irontown. What that means—whether a further despoiling of the forest in the ongoing quest for more efficient ways to kill, or something more in accord with nature and more beneficial to humanity—is left open for interpretation.

Either way, we don’t grieve over her pronouncement. We might even root for her. Princess Mononoke portrays a world on the cusp of mammoth transformation, moving away from the realm of magic and mysticism to one of science and enlightenment. (Okay, okay, all you Tolkien fans can sit down now.) The revolution may come on the heels of improved ways to deliver mortality, but it might also lead to a better, wiser world. In encapsulating the good and bad of progress in the form of a complex, ambitious, yet empathetic woman, Hayao Miyazaki once again demonstrates that humanity is not divided into pure good and pure evil. Even the worst of us must be regarded through understanding eyes, just as we must always examine the motivations of our own acts.

Hayao Miyazaki followed up Princess Mononoke with Spirited Away (2001), which deservedly won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Still, as good as that film was, I regard Mononoke as the more towering achievement, both for its gorgeous animation and the maturity of its themes. What do you think? Are there Miyazaki films that you hold in higher regard? Are there other animated films you feel better confront the world with nuance and insight? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. And let’s not give into any villainous impulses while doing it—we’re better than that.[end-mark]

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