Hayao Miyazaki’s career as an animator in charge of his own destiny starts here, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, two hours of typical Miyazaki, from 1984, which more or less set the benchmark for what was to come.
There had been one full feature before, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro, but that was part of an ongoing series dedicated to Lupin III, supposedly the grandson of the French master thief Arsène Lupin. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, we are introduced to Nausicaä, a pure Miyazaki character, a tough, brave, kind, thoughtful and resourceful young woman separated from her parents and adrift in a world that’s a mash-up of the future and the past with a heavy preponderance of Second World War tech.
The ecological content is to the fore as well, also typical Miyazaki, in a story about a world 1,000 years in the future where the people of a poisoned planet are eking out an existence and still learning to deal with the after-effects of some environmental catastrophe while warring tribes compete for dominance.
Nausicaä is a princess of the enlightened school – she believes in reason not magic, thinks before she acts and has been quietly conducting experiments into what exactly has gone so wrong with the planet that the forests cannot be entered without wearing a mask and gigantic trilobite-like creatures threaten everyday existence while swarms of deadly insects darken the skies.
All this and strife with the neighbours, who aren’t quite so enlightened, it would seem.
There are touches of Dune in Miyazaki’s representation of vast sandy wastes where huge creatures are likely to arrive at any moment, but Miyazaki may also be referencing Georgiy Daneliya’s Soviet fantasy Kin-dza-dza! Or even the early desert sequences of the first Star Wars movie – Nausicaä rides a machine that’s a cross between a glider and the hovercraft Luke Skywalker piloted.
Mark Hamill also features in the voice cast of the redub. On which another whole tale hangs. The original Japanese version ran just under two hours but 22minutes were lopped off for the original American release, released in 1985 with the title Warriors of the Wind. It made Miyazaki so furious he had a “no edits” policy written into all of his future films.
Eventually, Disney came good and in 2005 released the full version, now with Alison Lohman voicing Nausicaä, Patrick Stewart as Nausicaä’s staunch, wise swordmaster Yupa and Uma Thurman as Kushana, a princess of a neighbouring territory. All three are excellent – Lohman is energetic, Stewart authoritative and Thurman devious and conniving. Listen out too for Shia LaBeouf and Edward James Olmos, though it’s Chris Sarandon who stands out among the supporting characters, as a snide sidekick general to Princess Kushana. Hamill plays a mayor in an appearance it’s easy to miss.
Miyazaki made his reputation writing and drawing animes and the vast success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in comicbook form was what gave him the leverage to get the directing job here since Cagliostro had not been a box office success. He filleted his digressive original story, simplifying it to get it onto the screen, but even so this is a vast and sprawling epic thick with character and event.
Miyazaki’s pacing isn’t as assured as it would be with his later animation but even so he understands that he’s got to pause the action here and there to let audiences catch up and take a breath. Nausicaä hugs a tree, in one sequence, in a moment that’s emblematic of the whole story (the movie is endorsed by the World Wildlife Fund, as the WWF was then known).
This isn’t a Studio Ghibli film. It didn’t exist at this point and it was the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind that gave Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, Isao Takahata and Yasuyoshi Tokuma the impetus to launch Ghibli the following year.
The animation is Ghibli-esque, though, crisp and simple yet full of well judged sequences making the most of the elementary techniques. Some sequences are breathtaking – in the toxic forest and during the charge of the giant trilobite-like Ohm creatures – and there are atypical sequences, like the flashbacks rendered like the line drawings by EH Shepard for the Winnie the Pooh stories.
For the most part, though, it’s battles – in the desert and in the skies, with swords and gun, with bizarre creatures and other humans, building eventually towards a spectacular and spectacularly animated climax in which Nausicaä proves her mettle and harmony of sorts is restored.
Is it great? No. It sprawls and occasionally sags under its own weight. But it’s full of great stuff. Miyazaki is getting his ducks lined up. My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and eventually The Boy and the Heron all lay in the humanely conceived, elegantly wrought future.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
