Princess Mononoke started as a different film. A feudal-Japan take on Beauty and the Beast, with a young woman and a protective animal companion, closer to something warm than to the film that opened in Japanese theaters in 1997. The artwork for that earlier version has been sitting in drawers and out-of-print books for three decades. Iwanami Shoten is putting it in one place on December 3.
The book is the seventh volume of the Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series, which collects the director’s concept illustrations and planning sketches. This entry runs 184 pages and holds 258 pieces of artwork, 90 of which have never been shown in public before. Price is 6,000 yen, roughly 38 dollars.
Two films in one book
The scope is the interesting part. It is not a making-of for the finished movie. It tracks two different Princess Mononoke projects side by side, the one Miyazaki was developing in the early nineties and the one that eventually reached cinemas, and lets you see where the split happened.
Miyazaki began the Beauty and the Beast idea after finishing Porco Rosso in 1992. In 1993 he wrote text onto some of those concept illustrations for a book also called Princess Mononoke, published by Tokuma Shoten, then Studio Ghibli’s parent company. That book has been out of print for years. The new volume brings the drawings back with the notes attached.
The turn in 1995
Then he changed his mind about the whole thing. The story he was building felt old-fashioned to him, and while working on the animated music video for “On Your Mark” in 1995 he concluded that being bound by the past was the wrong approach. What came after that shift is the film people know: Ashitaka’s curse, Iron Town, the boar gods, the forest spirits, and a conflict with no clean villain.
Anyone who has watched Ghibli documentaries knows this pattern. Miyazaki starts somewhere soft, gets bored or dissatisfied, and rebuilds the project around a harder question. What makes this book different is the evidence. Most of those abandoned drafts stay in studio archives.
The 90 unseen pieces are the reason to care, and not only for completists. Concept art from an early stage shows what a director thought a film was before the script existed, which is usually more revealing than the polished key visuals released later. You can trace which designs survived and which did not. Longtime Ghibli followers have had a good year for this sort of thing, with Joe Hisaishi taking a residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the other reminder that the studio’s back catalogue keeps generating news.
The Oda signature
There is one odd detail that will sell copies on its own. The book carries a personal endorsement from Eiichiro Oda, and his signature is printed on the obi, the paper band wrapped around Japanese books. Oda does not attach his name to much. A One Piece-sized co-sign on a Miyazaki art book is the kind of thing that moves units.
What buyers outside Japan should expect
This is an art collection with Japanese text, published by an academic-leaning house, not a translated hardcover with commentary aimed at a Western audience. Buyers outside Japan should assume they are getting pictures and production notes in Japanese, and that shipping will add to the 6,000 yen.
For context on how much of this material exists: the Image Board Series has been running long enough to reach seven volumes, each devoted to one project’s planning artwork. That is a lot of paper for ideas that mostly never made it to screen. It also says something about how Miyazaki works, since a director who sketched 258 images for one film is not improvising.
Why the lost version is worth a look
The finished Princess Mononoke holds up because it refuses to soften its conflict. Humans need the forest to live. The gods need it to survive. Nobody in the film is lying about what they want, and the ending does not pretend the problem is solved. Reading that back into the Beauty and the Beast version is the appeal here, because the gentler film sounds like it would have been easier to like and much less interesting.
The book goes on sale December 3 through Iwanami Shoten’s website, priced at 6,000 yen.
Source: SoraNews24, citing PR Times.
Featured image: Concept artwork from Hayao Miyazaki’s early planning for Princess Mononoke, reproduced in the Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series volume 7, via SoraNews24.
