The Wolf Vanguard: From Hayao Miyazaki's >Princess Mononoke< (1997) to Amar Kaushik's >Bhediya< (2022)

[Image courtesy: wikimedia]

Just the other evening, during a Studio Ghibli marathon at home, my cinephile husband watched Mononoke Hime, or Princess Mononoke (1997), for the first time. Since he is also an ardent fan of horror in all forms, Amar Kaushik’s Stree-Bhediya-Munjya universe plays almost constantly in our household. Watching Miyazaki’s wolf-gods and forest spirits, he suddenly asked, “Don’t you think this is quite similar to Bhediya?” I mention this domestic moment not to be sentimental, but to ensure that he loses the opportunity to accuse me later of plagiarising his idea! :)

I do not know whether Amar Kaushik is familiar with Miyazaki’s filmic universe. Yet the resemblance between Princess Mononoke and Bhediya is striking, even if it is not a matter of direct influence. Both films are ecological fables. Both are concerned with the violence of human encroachment into forested worlds. Both oppose a model of progress in which land, animals, trees, and rivers are reduced to resources. Most importantly, both imagine the forest not as a passive backdrop, but as a living moral presence.

In Princess Mononoke, San is a human child raised by wolves. She identifies with them, fights beside them, and refuses to accept human claims over the forest. In Bhediya, local vet Anika is revealed as the yapum, a female werewolf guardian who can switch between human and animal form. These women are not merely romantic figures placed within an ecological drama. Rather, they are the ethical centres of their films. Their loyalties are not to development, profit, or conquest, but to the forest as a living community.

The male outsiders, Ashitaka and Bhaskar, are crucial to this structure. Both arrive from elsewhere and must learn to see differently. Ashitaka enters a conflict between Irontown and the forest gods, while Bhaskar tries to convince local inhabitants to ensure the execution of a massive road-building venture. In both cases, the male protagonist’s transformation depends on his encounter with a woman who already belongs to the more-than-human world. Through San and Anika, the forest ceases to be territory, but becomes kin, memory, and responsibility.

This comparison becomes richer through Nakao Sasuke’s idea of “shiny-leaf culture” (Yoshioka 2008), also known as broadleaf evergreen forest culture. Nakao traced a shared ecological-cultural belt stretching from the Himalayan region and North-East India through southern China, Taiwan, and into Japan. This idea deeply grounded Miyazaki’s environmental imagination. It allowed him to think of Japan not as an isolated archipelago, but as part of a continuous Asian flora spectrum.

Seen in this light, Princess Mononoke is not only a Japanese tale rooted in Shinto beliefs, kami, and sacred landscapes. It also participates in a broader pan-Asian ecological imagination. This makes the comparison with Bhediya especially suggestive. Set in Arunachal Pradesh and drawing from Apatani folklore, Bhediya belongs to another point in this ecological continuum. Both films suggest that ecological violation is not merely environmental damage; it is also a moral and spiritual disorder.

There is also a productive irony in the presence of wolves. Wolves have long been extinct in Japan, while North-East India is not the natural habitat of the Indian grey wolf, though rarer Tibetan wolves may appear in some remote Himalayan regions. In both films, then, the wolf is not merely zoological but an ethical symbol.

What connects Princess Mononoke and Bhediya, finally, is not just the figure of the wolf, but a shared insistence that the forest is alive, vulnerable, and capable of response. Across two different cinematic traditions, the wolf becomes the forest’s memory, anger, and warning. Both films ask humans to abandon the fantasy of mastery and to rediscover their place within nature, not above it.

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