Character · Princess Mononoke
Ashitaka
A prince rides west with a curse in his arm that will kill him, and which grows stronger the angrier it makes him.
In Otakana the clue reads: Cursed prince riding a red elk
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Princess Mononoke
- Letters
- 8 · Normal
Ashitaka is the last prince of an Emishi village hidden in the north, the remnant of a people the Japanese state drove out centuries earlier. He kills a boar god that arrives at his gate maddened and rotting, and the contact leaves a mark on his right arm. The mark gives him inhuman strength. It is also spreading, and when it reaches his heart he dies.
He rides west on Yakul, a red elk, looking for whatever drove the god mad. What he finds is a war: an ironworks town stripping the mountain for ore, and the forest gods fighting back with everything they have left. Miyazaki refuses to give him a side. Ashitaka spends the film trying to see with eyes unclouded by hate, which mostly means getting hit by both parties.
Princess Mononoke opened in 1997 and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history until Titanic took the record a few months later. Miyazaki storyboarded it while the script was still unfinished and personally retouched an enormous number of the cels. Yoji Matsuda voices Ashitaka in Japanese; Billy Crudup took the English dub, from a script Neil Gaiman adapted.
Spelling ASHITAKA
ASHITAKA is eight letters and four beats, a-shi-ta-ka, with three A's sitting in the odd positions and nothing silent anywhere. Once you know it ends in KA the vowel pattern does most of the remaining work. The SH is one Japanese sound written with two English letters, which is the only place a guess tends to go wrong. Nothing here is dropped from the Japanese.