Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

jpn Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä, aka Warriors of the Wind. 1984. Movie. 117 min. Adventure/science fiction. org Hayao Miyazaki (manga). dir Hayao Miyazaki. scr Hayao Miyazaki. mus Joe Hisaishi. des Hayao Miyazaki, Mitsuki Nakamura. -bc

Nausicaä was the first feature by celebrated anime director Hayao Miyazaki to display the unique stamp of style and theme that would mark all of his great works. This tale of a young girl in a devastated world is a grand adventure, but also a touching tale of human will and devotion, and a fable about war and environmental destruction.

In a far future where pockets of humanity live in the few remaining unpolluted areas left amidst the vast deserts of the Earth, Nausicaä, a young princess from the Valley of the Wind, seeks to understand the nature of the toxic jungle oases that serve as habitat for the giant insects who dominate the planet. She alone seems to know how to communicate with the insects, particularly the massive multi-shelled Ohmu, and how to calm them when they’re angry. When an airship from neighboring kingdom Tolmekia crashes into the Valley carrying the remains of an ancient God-Warrior, a mechanical being with great destructive power and the last of its type, it means the end of the Valley’s peaceful idyll.

Led by the ruthless Princess Kushana, the Tolmekian army invades the Valley of the Wind and sets out to use it as a staging area to revive the God-Warrior and destroy the insects in the nearby jungle. Pejite, a neighboring kingdom at war with Tolmekia, embarks on a strategy to lure a herd of giant Ohmu to ravage the Valley in the hopes of wiping out the Tolmekians. Nausicaä does everything in her power to stop the warring forces, even if it means putting herself in the path of the rampaging insects.

The characters are more simply drawn and designed than we have come to expect from later Miyazaki, but all manage to express their basic emotions. Nausicaä is the first of many spunky, colorful, adolescent Miyazaki heroines, and we can see her reflected in all of them, from Sheeta in Castle in the Sky, Satsuki in My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service right through to Fio in Porco Rosso, San in Princess Mononoke, Chihiro in Spirited Away, and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle.

What really stands out in this production are the imaginative backgrounds used to depict the different aspects of this future devastated world. Most impressive is the rich, overgrown, sprawling vegetation of the toxic jungle where humans cannot go without wearing special masks to filter out the poisons. We first see Nausicaä when she enters the jungle and finds a freshly shed shell from a giant Ohmu, from which she carves out an eye covering that will be used to make tools in her valley. Every scene in the jungle shows miles of vegetation, much of it akin to giant mushrooms, and a jungle floor of water or sand, with highly detailed giant insects flying about or crawling, and giant spores everywhere. It’s a breathtaking natural landscape in the polluted future. Also impressive is the lush Valley of the Wind where Nausicaä and her people live, which is protected from the toxicity of the surrounding deserts and jungles by wind from the sea.

The film exults in natural processes, whether the falling of spores in the jungle, the decay of fossilized trees, the movements of giant insects, the shapes of clouds, or the motions of wind, sand, and water. We see the textures of jungle vegetation, the shape of the clouds, and the shadows shifting on those clouds. When an Ohmu is in motion, we see each interlocking shell of this giant creature move just a beat after the shell before it as the creature slowly progresses. Such painstaking work was all done by hand with skilled artists working cel by painted cel.

Prior to Nausicaä, the first of eight personal features that would cement his reputation worldwide as Japan’s greatest animation filmmaker, Miyazaki had directed one feature, The Castle of Cagliostro, the second movie spin-off of the long-running Lupin the 3rd TV series. In the five-year interim between these films, Miyazaki began writing and drawing the Nausicaä manga series, which formed the basis for the film and which he would continue to publish for another ten years after the film’s production.

Nausicaä is many things: an action-adventure of the old school with swordfights, battles, invading armies, aerial combat, and giant monsters; a science fiction film that explores how our surviving descendants will cope in a world made largely uninhabitable; and a cautionary tale about human folly, particularly humankind’s penchant for solving conflicts by violence and destruction, but also their inability to control the pollution of the natural landscape. There is a lot to balance here, and the film ties all these elements together in the character of Nausicaä, a beautiful young girl who is strong, brave, and a natural leader, but also compassionate and noble, eager to set an example by which humanity can reconcile its conflicted nature and learn to live in peace again with itself and the natural world. She offers a better way and displays the willpower, vision, and inner strength needed to pull it off.

The spectacular beauty of the visuals, backed by Joe Hisaishi’s exquisite musical accompaniment, maintains viewers’ interest throughout a long and complicated story. Also helping are the many awe-inspiring action sequences, including Nausicaä’s daring rescue of Lord Yupa, and her calming of an enraged Ohmu in the film’s opening sequence; the crash in the Valley of a Tolmekian airship covered in insects; the raid on the Valley by the Tolmekians; an aerial battle between a single Pejite pilot and a fleet of Tolmekian ships; and the resurrection of the destructive God-Warrior and its attempt to ward off a massive army of rampaging Ohmu. Each sequence is as good as anything one is likely to find in other action-adventure anime, and compares favorably with similar sequences in Miyazaki’s later work, most notably Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke.

It’s not an entirely perfect movie. The narrative piles up so many different parties and elements that the climactic final quarter simply has too much in play to sustain the proper level of suspense. The ending, with its Christ-like parallels, while beautiful to watch, is a tad too improbable, even in an already fanciful setting. To top things off, there is a preachy element that at times threatens to upset the careful narrative balance. One can also argue that Nausicaä herself is a bit too idealized and superhuman to be entirely believable. Later Miyazaki heroines were more vulnerable and less perfect. Looking ahead to Princess Mononoke, made thirteen years later, one can see a more realistic, harder-edged version of the character and a similar story told more smoothly and with a more ingrained sense of the complexity of human nature, offering a deeply felt message about human folly without hitting us over the head with it. Despite all that, Nausicaä remains a unique and richly engrossing film that can be viewed multiple times without ever losing its freshness.

The opening sequence is a masterpiece of action animation and visual splendor as we see Nausicaä amidst the overgrown alien vegetation in the toxic jungle retrieving a needed insect part from the massive discarded shell of an Ohmu and then heading out on her glider over the desert to rescue a lone traveler, her beloved mentor, Lord Yupa, from an angered, rampaging Ohmu.

The next great scene follows soon after, as the two head back to the Valley of the Wind, she by her glider and he on his pack animals. As she runs her glider off a cliff and into the air over the valley, Hisaishi’s score surges with the most hopeful and triumphal notes we’ll hear in the course of the film. As the music continues, Yupa is seen entering the lush, green, paradisiacal valley, the first glimpse the audience gets of this oasis of clean air, water, and life amidst the toxic devastation around it.

Nausicaä was named one of the ten favorite anime characters in Japanese magazine polls for up to a decade after the film’s release.

Teto, the cute little brown-and-gold fox-squirrel with sharp teeth that becomes Nausicaä’s ever-present pet, has cousins who turn up on the floating island of Laputa in Miyazaki’s next film, Castle in the Sky (1986).

In 2005, Disney released its English dub of the film, with Patrick Stewart a standout as Lord Yupa, Edward James Olmos as Mito, and Uma Thurman as Kushana. For the roles of the two young leads, Nausicaä and Asbel, rising young Hollywood film actors Alison Lohman and Shia LaBeouf were chosen. They are all seen at work and interviewed in a supplementary background feature on the DVD.

violence Some bits of standard action-adventure violence.