Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)

There's a moment in Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II – The Ashes of Rage where the screen seems to breathe. Rain-slicked streets catch the light in ways that feel less like animation and more like ink spreading across wet paper. Shadow-draped interiors shift and pulse with symbolic colour. It's the kind of image that makes you sit up straight, lean forward slightly, and remind yourself you're watching something genuinely unlike anything else in contemporary animation. And for a while, that's enough. It really is.

The Mononoke franchise has always been visually singular, and this second theatrical chapter doubles down on that commitment with absolute confidence. Every frame carries the feel of a living scroll, dense with pattern, texture, and traditional Japanese art filtered through something altogether more surreal and hallucinatory. It's immersive, stylised, and utterly distinctive. The sound design and score are equally impressive, using silence as a weapon, threading traditional instrumentation through ambient noise to build tension that dialogue alone couldn't manage. The Medicine Seller's calm, cryptic delivery continues to anchor everything around him, and the supporting cast bring real emotional texture to roles that, on paper, are fairly archetypal. On the level of pure craft, atmosphere, and aesthetic identity, this film delivers in spades.

The trouble is that atmosphere, magnificent as it is here, can only carry you so far. I said something similar when I reviewed Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024), and I'm sorry to report that the problems I flagged there haven't been ironed out in the follow-up. The story unfolds again as a series of loosely connected vignettes, heavy on mood, light on momentum. Themes of grief, vengeance, and spiritual unrest hover at the edges of each scene, hinted at and gestures made towards them, but rarely pursued with any real depth or clarity. You're always waiting for the moment a thread gets pulled and something genuinely surprising unravels. That moment doesn't arrive.

It's not that the film is bad. It isn't. But there's a difference between a story that earns its ambiguity and one that mistakes vagueness for profundity. The Ashes of Rage too often falls into the latter category. You watch a sequence of beautifully rendered, emotionally loaded scenes, and then the credits roll, and you find yourself struggling to say what, exactly, moved you. The imagery lingers. The story doesn't.

If you're drawn to Japanese horror atmosphere and stylised visuals, the comparison that keeps coming to mind is The Ghost of Yotsuya, which manages to be both atmospherically arresting and narratively propulsive. The Ashes of Rage has the first quality in abundance. The second remains elusive.

I want to be fair to what this film does well, because it does a great deal well. The animation team deserve enormous credit for maintaining a visual language this distinctive and this labour-intensive across multiple instalments. The voice performances are committed and often moving in isolation. There are individual scenes here that I'd happily revisit. But a collection of strong individual scenes isn't the same as a strong film, and that's the gap that keeps this from landing where it should.

Three stars. A beautifully crafted mood piece that honours everything the franchise does best on a surface level. Worth seeing if the art direction alone is your entry point, and it's a perfectly valid entry point. But if you're hoping for a story that genuinely grips you, that surprises or moves you somewhere beyond pure aesthetic pleasure, you may come away feeling a little short-changed. Stylish, yes. Essential, not quite.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2025  | Watched: 2026-05-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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