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Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind

One of the first manga (Japanese graphic novels) I read back in high school, Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind was an ecological wonder. The first version I saw animated was a now-disowned edit that dropped most of the ecological splendor of the original in order to make it a simple action/adventure (both the creator and myself urge you to forget that that particular version even exists; not too difficult anymore as the distribution license for that version recently expired).

The full unedited version is only available as an import at the moment, but as the US licensor (currently Disney) may release it domestically, I can only hope that they do it justice and release the unedited one with the proper title; I hope the bad sales of the bad edit don't scare them away.

Story Intro

Flying through an apocalyptic forest landscape, a young princess finds an empty Ohmu shell, the tough discarded skin of a giant insect living in this area. She breaks off an eye-lid for use as a shield and begins to take it home to her village, when she hears gunfire nearby and rushes to see a man and an ostrich-like bird being chased by the Ohmu itself. She helps the man escape and sends the Ohmu back to its forest home.

The forest surrounding her village has grown poisonous to humans with the various giant insect life and plant spores ever increasing their hold on the land. A plane flying low through the forest crashes near the village, and Nausicaa finds only one survivor, near death, warning her to burn the cargo. A short time later, a larger war plane arrives in search of the mysterious cargo, an ancient weapon they intend to use to destroy the encroaching forest.

But like any devastating weapon, it has a recoil of its own -- this type of weapon is what turned the world into an apocalytic nightmare in the first place. A race has begun to determine who can control destiny, a girl who loves all life, including that of the forest and its own methods of cleaning up after our past mistakes, or a military who wants to destroy the percieved threat at any cost.

Other Notes

Like another science-fiction ecological wonder, Frank Herbert's Dune, I prefer the longer full series of novels to the one-shot movie. Two hours (and certainly a 90-minute edit) just can't do justice to a multiple-volume classic. Still, this has a lot of memorable images.

Semi-Official news and images can be found in English at the fan site Nausicaa.Net. The true home for all Studio Ghibli work is (in Japanese) Studio Ghibli Homepage.

Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind

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