Week 8

 Visual beauty of Mononoke

This week I wanted to talk about colors and visuals since it is what I made an essay on in one of my courses and what better series to talk about than 2007's Mononoke, and no, it's not the Ghibli film.

Before Mononoke series was made there was a quite popular Japanese show called Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, it is a show where each episode has a different Japanese horror story and in this particular show one episode got so popular because of the main character, the style and concept of it that they made a spin-off series from that one episode. The character that got so popular was, Kusuriuri or simply, "The Medicine Seller"

(On the right)

Mononoke is a series where our mysterious Medicine Seller journeys to different places to kill Mononoke, creatured that are something inbetween demons and ghosts. In order for him to exorcise the Mononoke he must first investigate and find out the Truth, Reason and Form of the creature. To explain this better, Truth means what has happened for this Mononoke to form, Reason is why it keeps on existing and Form is what type of a Mononoke it is.


After all the requirements are met Kusuriuri usually transforms into his "Other self" to fight the Mononoke.

What made this show so popular in Japan back during it's run and how it has still stayed in it's fans mind after so many years is probably both the stories it tells as well as the visuals. 

I am not going to look too deeply into the actual stories in the show and whether the stories are well written since there are multiple stories, but what I will say on it is that the main character's odd appearance, mystery of their background, and open interpretation of each story is probably the reason why it is so well remembered. It forces the person watching to really think hard on all the pieces we are given and sometimes you need to know a bit of Japanese culture in order to understand the show better.

Notice the shape of the rain drops or is it snow?

Talking about Japanese culture we come to the visuals. The show's visuals are very abstract, very colorful and very intriguing. Here is an example of how many patterns the show might have in a scene.

Very busy image isn't it, but still somehow it just works and looks beautiful. 

Note how at the bottom the color scheme is cold tones with accents of yellow and red and as we go up it changes to warmer tones. Reds and yellows are few of the higher wavelengths we can see and naturally irritates us more than color blue. This is why blue is more soothing and red more interesting and pops out more to us. Well in this scene the color yellow guides our eye towards the top of the frame. On top of this the black mass contrasts with everything around so naturally our eye looks at it. 

(c) Gunnar Optiks, Maximizing Work Performance

The story is based in Japan and the style is very heavily inspired by Japanese culture like Noh (能) masks and the colorful paper door artwork. Depending on the episode there are even cuts in which sliding doors close in order to separate different acts in the series or clever use of japanese umbrellas or Hyoshigi sound in between frames to bring unease to the scene.

The work also has a gritty texture put on top of everything to make it look more paper-like, very unique to the 2007s I imagine. Though because of it's experimental, complex and textured style it is very hard to look at if it is not in very good quality, preferably HD quality which is quite hard to find online currently.

I just wanted to bring to everyone's attention this unique series that has stayed in my memory for many years now and I hope you give it a try.

Opening of Mononoke

Opening to the Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Stories episode with Kusuriuri

Also artwork I did of the main character a year or so ago