Fall 2014 #8: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki

My sixth Studio Ghibli film! What a wonderful time it’s been, getting to enjoy this amazing collection of unique movies. Always so full of heart, with great themes and incredible depth of storylines, I can’t get enough of Miyazaki’s films. 

Now normally I would say that any film that uses “of the” twice in the title is not worth my time (looking at you Lord of the Rings movies and Planet of the Apes prequels). But imagine if M. Night Shyamalan films had the depth to actually gracefully present their pro-nature sentiments, with strong feminist characters and incredible visual imagery, and that’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Actually, scratch that weird comparison altogether, I’m sorry. So the reason for all of the “of the”s is because Nausicaä is a princess living a post-apocalyptic world, where her small settlement is called “The Valley of the Wind” because of its strong offshore winds. The story takes place one thousand years after a devastating war that wiped out human civilization as well as nature, giving birth to the Toxic Forest. Humans cannot breathe the poisoned air near the forest, but hoards of vicious, giant bugs live there and threaten the human settlements that survived the war.

Nausicaä, who is a badass with a glider, soon becomes entangled in a war between two of the settlements, Tolmekia and Pejite. The Tolmekians have captured an embryo of a Giant Warrior, one of the warriors from the war that destroyed everything, and are planning to use it to wipe out the Toxic Forest and their enemies. They are led by Princess Kushana.

Nausicaaä befriends the Pejite prince, Asbel, and the two must figure out how to stop the war and save the forest (despite it’s toxicity). It’s a real battle of human industrial expansion versus nature’s will to survive and adapt. It’s kind of reminiscent of the Avatar The Last Airbender series, even though that came 20 years after this movie came out.

And the movie certainly has powerful themes with great emotional storylines. It recalls the devastation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the environmental damage of human expansion. Not to mention the way it situates female characters as being strong while also being feminine and uncompromisingly themselves, something that feels crazy for an animated film from the 80s (couch cough The Little Mermaid). 

The English cast for the unedited 2005 version (Miyazaki was furious after an English-dubbed Warriors of the Wind from 1985 cut about 21 minutes of the film) includes Shia LaBeouf as Asbel, Uma Thurman as Princess Kushana, and even Jodi Benson (Ariel from The Little Mermaid) as Asbel’s mother.

So it’s safe to say Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is an awesome film, tying together beautiful animation with thought-provoking themes and striking fantasy elements. It currently sits at #199 on the IMDb Top 250.