Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Alison Lohman, Shia LaBeouf, Patrick Stewart, and Uma Thurman

Rated: PG

Runtime: 116 min.

 

 

Hayao Miyazaki made Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984) to show the limitlessness of animation—how the medium could reach beyond setting or narrative no matter how extravagant or impossible their conditions. Accordingly, his scenario contains a science-fiction landscape that no live-action film would dare attempt, because Hollywood effects could never replicate Miyazaki’s vision in all its glorious and unhindered detail. In this, his second feature, he establishes themes and an animation style that appear throughout his subsequent pictures, all while boasting an environmentalist thesis within an epic-sized adventure.

Based on the manga book written by Miyazaki himself, the film’s plot encompasses only the first two volumes of a seven volume series. Miyazaki initially began the series with a film in mind, putting it in manga form only because the producing studio, Toei Animation, refused to fund an anime not based on a manga. But, completed over twelve years, his books took on a life of their own, and though the first volume was published in 1982, and the film in 1984, he continued to work on the book well into the 1990s. As with any book-to-film adaptation, the text proves more complicated and involved in its various factions and politics, but it lacks the simple romanticism demonstrated in the film. And though the film is abbreviated in comparison to its source, the scope of the picture remains the most grandiose of all Miyazaki films. Perhaps the extent of his vision was a reaction to the narrative constraints of his previous film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, for which Miyazaki was required to operate within Monkey Punch’s established limitations.

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For his inspiration, Miyazaki derived the name “Nausicaä” from the daughter of Phaeacian King Alcinous in The Odyssey. Homer’s humble character worked alongside her servants and aided the shipwrecked Odysseus when he crawled ashore. The director combined her welcoming, open-armed character with that of “The Princess Who Loved Insects”, a tale told during Japan’s Heian Period of a young woman who preferred the company of Nature to elegant gowns or life in riches. From these sources the quality of the film’s Nausicaä becomes apparent: She’s a noble girl who in any other time or place would be shunned for acting out of the ordinary; she watches insects and Nature, and she refuses to engage in those feminine things a princess is supposed to.

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