Drawing from Japanese folklore, as well as from his own fertile imagination, Miyazaki then forged his own pantheon of gods and forest creatures. Some of his creatures, such as the wood sprites known as the Kodamas, were inspired by ancient Japanese tales. Others emerge from world literature, such as Princess Mononoke, a wolf-raised young woman reverted to primal ways whose antecedents can be found in such Western sources as the Greek Romulus and Remus, Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” and Francois Truffaut’s “The Wild Child.” The Princess Mononoke is the singular character who has empathy for the both the humans and the animals – her fate is to be the conduit between these two increasingly disparate worlds.