The Japanese poster for Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 animated feature “Princess Mononoke.”

“Princess Mononoke” was the first movie by legendary storyteller Hayao Miyazaki I ever saw. I watched it as a pre-teen girl on VHS, on a tiny TV with a built-in VCR in my childhood bedroom. After I saw the forest die the first time, I cried for hours—for the Earth, for humans, for the trees and the kodama. I’ve seen it dozens of times in the two decades since. After every viewing I come away with this: What an absolute epic.

“Princess Mononoke” is a myth about the dawn of modernity, of one way magic left this world. in a story about industrialization’s deleterious effects on the environment and the Gods and the Ways of Old, Miyazaki tap-dances along the ideological tightrope of condemning the senseless destruction of nature for the sake of progress while simultaneously acknowledging the positive change this progress can bring for humankind, particularly women.

I’ve always loved the women of this film. Miyazaki’s women are real. They’re people as much as the men. They populate the world, they live alongside the men in the ways people do, they have their own inner worlds and stories. They are brave and smart and flawed and whole. They show up powerfully right from the opening of this film. When the demon boar is bearing down on the three young village girls, they don’t scream: they run from danger swiftly, deftly, and when they are cornered, they face the beast; Ashitaka’s fiancée, Kaya, draws her blade.

Kaya. Toki. Moro. San. The Lady Eboshi. Women in conflict, but not because women can only exist together in a story if they’re fighting—not because women hate women. In “Princess Mononoke,” conflict between two women is central to the story and the outcome of it all: San vs. The Lady Eboshi; Nature vs. (Wo)Man. They are the leaders of their respective worlds, worlds at war. “Mononoke” is a political drama as much as it is a fantasy epic.

As the foundations of the economy and the rule of law shift beneath this feudal world, the women of Mononoke gain footing amongst the quaking. The Lady Eboshi breaks new ground, literally; Toki and the other women of Irontown are freed from lives of slavery and sex trafficking to find home and community, to learn to defend themselves against the forces of greed in this violent man’s world.

Throughout this film, Miyazaki grapples with similar dualities: Ashitaka works both sides because it’s honorable for him to do so; San, a human girl raised by wolves, thinks humans are inherently bad for animals, but she comes to recognize the love between Ashitaka and his faithful steed Yakul; the Lady Eboshi fearlessly, impudently curses Nago and cuts off the Deer God’s head, but she also saves lepers because she is too modern-minded to believe in the stigmatic superstitions about their illness being a “curse.” Good and bad: Eyes unclouded.