Genre Animation

Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024)

Item: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024)

There's a moment early in Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain where the screen seems to breathe. The lines ripple, the colours bleed into each other, and what you're watching stops feeling like animation and starts feeling like a fever dream pressed between woodblock prints. It's genuinely extraordinary, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: a film that is, frame by frame, one of the most visually striking things I've seen in a theatre in years, but one that keeps you at arm's length just when you want it to pull you in.

The franchise has always worn its aesthetic like armour, and the leap to feature length hasn't dulled any of it. The art direction is rooted in Edo-period Japan but pushed through something wilder and stranger, layering ukiyo-e textures with surreal, almost psychedelic geometry. Every shot is dense with pattern and symbolic detail. Rain doesn't just fall here, it performs. The sound design leans into that same sensory richness, and the score wraps the whole thing in an atmosphere that genuinely earns the word eerie. As a piece of craft, it's hard to fault.

The Medicine Seller himself remains a compelling screen presence. That cool, enigmatic stillness he carries works beautifully in this format, and the voice performance grounds what could easily tip into pure abstraction. The supporting cast do solid work too, bringing enough emotional weight to make you care about the mystery at the centre, even when the script doesn't quite meet them halfway. The characters surrounding him are thinly sketched, but the performances fill in some of what the writing leaves bare.

Here's where I have to be honest though: the story is the weak link. What you get isn't really a plot so much as a series of mood pieces threaded together by atmosphere and motif. That's not entirely a problem. Plenty of great films work that way. But those films tend to make their thematic ambiguity feel like depth rather than evasion, and The Phantom in the Rain doesn't always manage that. The pacing meanders. The central mystery drifts in and out of focus. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, I felt more like I'd witnessed something than experienced it. There's a difference.

I kept thinking about how the Kizumonogatari Part 1: Tekketsu handled a similarly style-forward, mythology-dense source material. That film had its own visual identity and didn't always prioritise conventional plotting either, but it found ways to anchor its strangeness in character and momentum. The Phantom in the Rain could use a bit more of that anchor. It trusts its atmosphere so completely that it sometimes forgets to give you something to hold onto beneath the surface.

And yet. I wouldn't tell anyone who loves animation, or Japanese folklore, or just genuinely distinctive filmmaking to skip it. The experience of watching it is real and memorable in its own way. If you want something that sits in a similar tonal space, pairing it with The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) would make for a fascinating double bill, two very different approaches to rain-soaked dread and supernatural unease rooted in Japanese tradition.

I also have a review up for Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II, The Ashes of Rage if you want to see where the series heads next. Whether that instalment fixes what this one fumbles is a conversation worth having.

Three stars. Beautiful, atmospheric, genuinely unlike anything else in animation right now. But a beautiful curiosity is still, in the end, a curiosity. I wanted to be swept away. I wasn't. Not quite.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2024 | 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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