Princess Mononoke Trivia
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49 free Princess Mononoke trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Princess Mononoke arrived in 1997 as the most expensive animated film Japan had ever made, and it paid the bet back by becoming the country's highest-grossing film of all time. Hayao Miyazaki had been sketching a princess living in the woods with a beast since 1980, but the story that finally reached screens was something else entirely: a cursed Emishi prince, a girl raised by wolves, a leader who shelters outcasts while felling a forest of gods, and a deer-like spirit whose head is worth an emperor's reward. This quiz covers the whole story of the film: the Yakushima research trips, the 144,000 cels, the first digital ink-and-paint at Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki's one-word tagline and his decision to rename the film, Neil Gaiman's English script and the Miramax fight over cuts that never happened. Fifty questions run from easy identification to details only the sternest Ghibli fans will know. Play through them in sets of ten and see how much of Muromachi-era Japan you remember.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the title Princess Mononoke, what does the Japanese word "mononoke" mean?
A spirit or monster
A spirit or monster. It is a description, not a name: the townspeople use it for San because she runs with the animal gods of the forest and fights like one of them.
Q 02In which period of Japanese history is Princess Mononoke set?
Muromachi
Muromachi. Miyazaki chose the era because charcoal-hungry furnaces were then stripping the forests, the moment when people began to feel they could master nature.
Q 03Ashitaka, the young prince who rides west to cure his cursed arm, belongs to which people?
Emishi
Emishi. Their real defeat by the Japanese court lay some five centuries in the past; Miyazaki imagined one last clan surviving in a hidden village.
Q 04San, the girl the townspeople call Princess Mononoke, was raised by which animals?
Wolves
Wolves. Her parents threw her at a wolf god's feet as they fled the forest, and instead of eating the baby the god raised her as a daughter.
Q 05Who produced Princess Mononoke and led its marketing campaign?
Toshio Suzuki
Toshio Suzuki. When the American distributor pressed for a shorter film, it was Suzuki who handed its boss a samurai sword with the message "No cuts".
Q 06Which company distributed Princess Mononoke in Japan?
Toho
It opened on 260 of the country's 1,800 cinemas with record queues.
Q 07What is found lodged inside the demon boar that Ashitaka kills at the start of Princess Mononoke?
A bullet
A bullet. It had shattered the boar god's bones and driven him mad with pain, and finding out where the shot came from is what sends Ashitaka west.
Q 08Which short film did Miyazaki direct during a break from Princess Mononoke?
On Your Mark
On Your Mark. Stuck on the feature's story, he made this music video for the rock duo Chage and Aska instead, then returned to Princess Mononoke in April 1995.
Q 09Who composed the score for Princess Mononoke?
Joe Hisaishi
Joe Hisaishi. He first recorded an "image album" of musical sketches, issued a full year before the film, and reworked those demos with Miyazaki into the final score.
Q 10Asked why he has come to the west, Ashitaka says he wants "to see with eyes unclouded by" what?
Hate
Hate. The line sums up his part in the film: cursed by one side and shot by the other, he refuses to choose between the forest and the town.
Q 11Which studio handled the English dub and North American release of Princess Mononoke?
Miramax Films
Miramax Films. Disney gave the film to its art-house label rather than its family brand, and the contract with Ghibli barred it from cutting a single frame.
Q 12Which fantasy author wrote the English-language script for Princess Mononoke?
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman. He expected to say no until he was flown to Los Angeles to watch the film on a big screen; then he turned a literal translation into lines actors could say.
Q 13Which director was reportedly the first choice to write the English script for Princess Mononoke?
Quentin Tarantino
Q 21Which blind boar god leads the clan's doomed assault on the humans' town?
Okkoto
Okkoto. He would rather die fighting than watch his kind shrink into dumb game for hunters, and the humans use that pride to draw the boars onto their guns.
Q 22Who beheads the Forest Spirit during its nightly transformation?
Lady Eboshi
Lady Eboshi. "I'm going to show you how to kill a god," she tells her gunners; the deed costs her an arm, and she ends the film vowing to build a better town.
Q 23Miyazaki first sketched ideas for Princess Mononoke in 1980, just after directing which debut feature?
The Castle of Cagliostro
The Castle of Cagliostro. The 1980 picture boards found no backer, so he published them as a book and reused some of their ideas in My Neighbor Totoro.
Quentin Tarantino. By the eventual scriptwriter's account, Tarantino told the studio boss he was the wrong man and named the novelist who got the job.
Q 14What is the name of the boar god whose corruption curses Ashitaka?
Nago
Nago. With his last breath he tells the villagers they will all suffer as he has suffered, and the mark left on Ashitaka's arm begins to prove him right.
Q 15Which monk advises Ashitaka to seek the Forest Spirit in the mountains?
Jigo
Jigo. The genial wanderer is no simple monk: he is an agent of the Emperor, hunting the very god he sends Ashitaka to find.
Q 16At sunset the Forest Spirit of Princess Mononoke transforms into which towering form?
The Nightwalker
The Nightwalker. Beheaded in mid-change, the giant spills over the land as a dark flood that kills whatever it touches while it searches for its head.
Q 17What are the tiny forest creatures that guide Ashitaka through the forest of the gods?
Kodama
Kodama. Tree spirits are old in Japanese folklore, but the little white figures with rattling heads were Miyazaki's own invention.
Q 18What is the name of San's adoptive mother, a 300-year-old goddess of the forest?
Moro
Moro. Gillian Anderson voices her in the English dub; in Japan the goddess was played by Akihiro Miwa, a male actor famous for his female roles.
Q 19Ashitaka arrives at which settlement that has deforested the land to mine ore?
Irontown
Irontown. Its Japanese name is Tataraba, after the tatara furnaces whose appetite for charcoal is the reason the town keeps cutting into the forest.
Q 20Eboshi's town shelters former prostitutes and people with which disease?
Leprosy
Leprosy. Miyazaki drew on visits to a sanatorium near his Tokyo home, and in the film the patients repay Eboshi's shelter by making her guns.
Q 24Miyazaki's original 1980 concept for Princess Mononoke was loosely based on which fairy tale?
Beauty and the Beast
Beauty and the Beast. In that version a nobleman's daughter was forced to marry the creature; the finished film kept almost nothing of it but the title.
Q 25Which 1983 illustrated book by Miyazaki foreshadows Princess Mononoke?
Shuna's Journey
Shuna's Journey. Its young prince rides a mount called Yakkul, the model and namesake for Ashitaka's own Yakul.
Q 26Before leaving his village for ever, what does Ashitaka cut off in front of its elders?
His hair
His hair. The topknot marked him as a grown man of the village, so cutting it meant giving up his place among his people.
Q 27Which island did Miyazaki and his art directors visit to research the forest of the gods?
Yakushima
Yakushima. They spent days sketching the island's dense, mossy forest, and its Shiratani Unsui gorge became the model for the film's forest of the gods.
Q 28At the end of Princess Mononoke, what do San and Ashitaka agree to do?
Stay apart but keep meeting
Stay apart but keep meeting. San loves Ashitaka but cannot forgive humans, so she returns to the forest while he stays to help rebuild the town.
Q 29Which actress voices San in the English dub of Princess Mononoke?
Claire Danes
Claire Danes. The dub cast screen stars rather than voice specialists, as Ghibli had done in Japan, where San was played by the television actress Yuriko Ishida.
Q 30Besides slowly killing him, what does the curse on Ashitaka's arm give him?
Superhuman strength
Superhuman strength. With the cursed arm he alone forces open a town gate that takes ten men to move, though fear and anger make the mark spread faster.