Mononoke

Alea's protagonist drifts through post-revolutionary Havana cataloguing the ghosts of bourgeois habit he cannot exorcise from himself, much as Mononoke's medicine seller cannot dispel a yokai without naming its grievance. The film insists that personal and national haunting demand the same triad of form, truth, and reason before any reckoning can occur.

This procedural recasts cold cases as ancestral debts the detective must literally walk back into the fjords to settle, paralleling Mononoke's insistence that an apparition cannot be dispelled until the original violence is reconstructed in full. The series treats Norwegian landscape and silence as repositories of the same buried testimonies the medicine seller's scrolls preserve.

Han Kang renders a woman's refusal of meat as an exorcism of inherited domestic violence, narrated by three observers who each fail to grasp the form, truth, or reason of her transformation. As in Mononoke, the haunting is the body itself becoming an instrument that finally speaks the family's unspoken contract.

Keita layers Mandé griot lineage over Parisian studio production to summon ancestors he was forbidden as an albino noble to address, performing the same naming ritual the medicine seller enacts on yokai. The album treats melody itself as the truth-stage of exorcism: only once the genealogy is sung can the singer step out from under its curse.

This Sino-Japanese co-production strips the herbivore-carnivore divide down to a parable of inherited prejudice that two orphans must literally cross continents to dissolve, echoing the medicine seller's premise that hostility is unfinished story. The film's painted backgrounds function like Mononoke's washi-paper aesthetic, treating environment as evidence in the case being argued.