Character · Princess Mononoke
Moro
Three hundred years old, the size of a house, and she raised a human girl more or less out of spite.
In Otakana the clue reads: Three-hundred-year-old wolf god
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Princess Mononoke
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Moro is a wolf god, one of the last of the old animal deities still able to speak, and she has watched humans take the mountain a valley at a time for three centuries. Her contempt for them is total and entirely unhurried. She does not rage about it. She lies on a rock and explains, in a flat voice, exactly how this war is going to end.
The girl the villagers call the wolf princess was thrown to Moro by human parents fleeing from her, and Moro raised the child among the wolves. She insists this was not kindness. Then, late in the film, she describes San in a single line as her poor, ugly, beautiful daughter, and the whole performance turns over in front of you.
Miyazaki cast Akihiro Miwa, a singer and stage performer whose career in Japan was built on refusing every category offered to him, and the voice lands at a pitch and a slowness no ordinary casting would have found. Gillian Anderson took the role in the English dub. Moro has perhaps ten minutes of screen time and owns every scene she appears in.
Spelling MORO
MORO is four letters and two syllables, mo-ro, with an O in both. That symmetry is the hint: find one O and the other is almost certainly waiting across the row. Japanese writes it with no long vowel to drop, and the R is the Japanese R that English ears hear somewhere on the way to an L, so MOLO is the miss. Otherwise there is no trap here.