Miyazaki Season: Nausicaä of the Valley of The Wind (Dir Hayao Miyazaki, 1h 57m, 1984)

 Earlier this year, Hayao Miyazaki's latest film, How Do You Live (retitled The Boy and the Heron for its upcoming Western release) finally reached Japanese cinemas; without fanfare, without trailer, and nearly seven years in the making. At time of writing, despite, or perhaps because of this, it sits atop the Japanese box office, sports the second best opening weekend for any Ghibli film, and is the talk of the international animation community. To millions, if not billions around the world, Studio Ghibli is anime as it should be, spectacularly animated flights of fantasy, full of rich and memorable characters going on adventures that somehow manage to balance bold heroism and homely warmth. How did Miyazaki and his studio become the standard bearers for modern anime?

How did we get here? Over the next four weeks, we'll follow the rise of Ghibli from humble beginnings in the early 80s to industry colossus by the end of the 80s, and the growth of Hayao Miyazaki from first time director to its greatest creative force Before Ghibli, though, there was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and it is with Nausicaä, Miyazaki's ecofable of a post-apocalyptic world, a princess trying to protect her people, and bring peace back to a war-torn and devastated world in the face of hostile forces, that we,. and Studio Ghibli's history begin, in the first of Miyazaki's true masterpieces.

The year is 1979, and Hayao Miyazaki, already an industry veteran, and in his late 30s, is a theatrical director for the first time. Like many other figures in animation, Miyazaki has worked his way up the ladder from inbetween animator in the early 1960s to chief animator and concept artist for (close friend) Isao Takahata's groundbreaking Viking adventure film, The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968). Moving from studio to studio, Miyazaki conceives or co-creates, or otherwise directs series as far apart as the charming Panda Go Panda (1972), Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), and the globe trotting action series, Future Boy Conan (1978), alongside nearly two dozen episodes of the long-running Lupin III (1971-2).

Miyazaki would promptly be put in charge of directing a film featuring the titular gentleman thief and his motley crew, and whilst The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) would financially underperform, it would become an early example of anime crossing over into the west, partly sparking the Disney Renaissance, whilst in its native Japan, it remains a beloved piece of cinema. Miyazaki, however, would hardly rest on his laurels before moving onto his next project, an adaption of the storybook, Rowlf, created by Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant comic artist, Richard Corben as a half-dog half-human anti-hero. Corben wasn't interested, and Miyazaki's other concept, a samurai film, was turned down, as it lacked a basis in an existing manga. By this point, though, Miyazaki had Animage, a popular anime and entertainment magazine, and their editors, Toshio Suzuki and Osamu Kameyama, on his side, and sketchbooks full of concepts. If they wanted an existing manga to adapt, Miyazaki was going to give them one.

From the pages of Animage, Nausicaä soon became a smash hit; a heady mix of Herbert's Dune, Homer's Odyssey, from which Nausicaä took her name, the 12th Century Japanese tale, The Lady who Loved Insects, authors Tolkien, Asomov and LeGuinn the works of French comic book artist Moebius, and Miyazaki's own embryonic works, and the real life poisoning of Minamata Bay. Animage soon approached Miyazaki, despite their initial contract, to make a fifteen minute short-Miyazaki countered with a request to make a 60 minute straight to video Original Video Animation (OVA)-Tokuma, Nausicaä's and Animage's published offered, in response to bankroll a full film.

Thus, armed with just 16 chapters of his manga, the small-but skilled-studio Topcraft, and avant-garde composer Mamoru Fujisawa, alias Joe Hisaishi, Miyazaki set to work on Nausicaä. What emerged, a million dollars and just nine months later, is one of the greatest anime films of the 1980s. Preluded by the apocalyptic Seven Days of Fire-in which the Giant God Warriors, animated by Hideaki Anno, (later to make the epoch defining Neon Genesis Evangelion), lay waste to the world, this nihilistic opening gives way to Bayeux-style tapestry, as the damage inflicted on the world, and the threat of the ever-growing Toxic Jungle is laid bare. We are introduced to Lord Yupa (Gorō Naya/Patrick Stewart), travelling through this dead world, coming across the remnants of a long-dead city. The tone is clear-mankind is on the retreat, much of the world

Our heroine, Nausicaä (Sumi Shimamoto/Alison Lohman) is introduced in more naturalistic terms; her connection to the world around her, her inner strength as a traveller in these poisoned and dangerous lands, and her ability to fly the mehve glider marking her out as the first of Hayao Miyazaki’s great female heroines, resourceful and strong, but gentle and kind, actively shying from war and violence. Soon coming across one of the colossal pillbug like Ohmu chasing Yupa, she rescues him, guides the Ohmu back towards the Jungle, and accompanies Yupa back towards her home in the idyllic Valley of the Wind, where, unlike the rest of the world, things remain verdant and untouched. This is not to last, for the Valley of the Wind is quickly to become the foreground of a war between the two major powers left in the world, the warlike Tolmekians, and the foes, the Pejites.

With a Tolmekian ship crashing, despite Nausicaä's best attempts, soon the Tolmekian army is occupying the Valley, with their troops soon reclaiming the ominous form of an embryonic Giant God Warrior, and Nausicaä is forced to become captive to Princess Kushana, (Yoshiko Sakakibara/Uma Thurman), the commander of Tolmekian forces, and a fearsome warrior and perfect match for Nausicaä. Forced to abandon her home, and her discovery that it is the soil, not the plants that grow in it that are truly poisoned, the Tolmekian military are soon shot down by a Pejite fighter, thus stirring the insects of the forest into fury, from which she must rescue the fighter pilot, Asbel (Yoji Matsuda/Shia LeBeouf), as well as Kushana and her fellow countrymen taken as prisoners. This breakneck middle act of conflict and ever-growing chaos is masterfully undercut both by Nausicaä's continuing attempts to make peace, and with Kushana's second in command Kurotowa, (Iemasa Kayumi/Chris Sarandon), plotting his own path to glory whilst caretaking the growing God Warrior.

It is here that Nausicaä's best qualities come to the fore, in the quiet scenes that consist of exploring the seemingly dead, but beautiful world underneath the Toxic Jungle, as Nausicaä and Asbel find that this has been purified, the air safe to breathe, before once again, the film returns to the war raging around the Valley of the Wind, with Nausicaä attempting to make peace between the warring sides, even as their tactics become brutal and desperate, culminating in the Toxic Jungle, the Tolmekian forces, and the survivors of the Valley clashing, with one of Miyazaki's great finales..However, it is also in Nausicaä's final act that the film's reliance on a manga that wouldn't be finished for over a decade becomes apparent, its third act pieced together, and the director remains dissatisfied with it, the manga's decade plus growth moving from the film's clear-cut ending to an altogether more nuanced and complex world over two thousand pages of comic.

Nausicaä may, compared to some of Ghibli's subsequent works, feel a little rough and unpolished. It is a film, after all, made in a breakneck nine months, based on an incomplete work barely two years old itself, still mid action setpiece where Miyazaki left off to make its cinematic outing. Miyazaki's usual cinematic genius occasionally gets bogged down, its motivations outside its central heroine occasionally lacking detail, (not to mention its initial,disastrous western release in the form of the butchered Warrior of the Wind, which would see Miyazaki and Suzuki take up katana against Harvey Weinstein when later wrangling for western release). Hisashi's score belies an experimental composer attempting to compose music for a world to come, his synthesiser score closer to what Nobuo Uematsu would soon lay down in the early Final Fantasy games.

Even the voice acting occasionally belies that anime was still in its infancy as a legitimate artform in the early 1980s, largely pieced together from the Castle of Cagliostro Lupin regulars, and theatre actors. Despite, or because of this, Nausicaä feels fresh, a film made by a director, a studio, on the cusp of greatness, a film made on the threshold of the fame that would come to define Ghibli and Miyazaki, but with the flexibility and creative freedom of an independent production. Its impact upon the industry would be immediate. In mid 1985, Miyazaki, Suzuki and Takahata' would buy Topcraft out. On June 15th, 1985, Miyazaki, long enamoured with the aircraft that would go on to haunt his films with flights of fantasy, would dub the studio after the nickname for the Italian Caproni Ca.309, itself a loan word from Libyan Arabic: 'Ghibli'.

 Nausicaä, above, all though, feels like a beginning. Not only does Miyazaki perfectly cement, on his second feature so many of his directorial trademark-flight, anti-war and pacifism, environmentalism (to the point Nausicaä's opening titles begin with the World Wildlife Fund logo on all releases) and strong female heroines-but it feels like a forerunner of every film Miyazaki would make under the Ghibli banner. Without Nausicaä's success as a film and a manga, Ghibli would simply not exist. Its legacy is unmatchable, and its longevity undeniable, regularly ranking at or near the top of polls of the greatest anime ever made. Miyazaki himself would find himself drawn back to its themes in the wake of finishing the manga, and would spectacularly invert the motives of Nausicaä's central duo, and refine Nausicaä's central message of man against nature in his 1997 opus, Princess Mononoke. 

Nearly forty years after its release, Nausicaä is a landmark moment, the arrival of one of anime's greatest creators on the scene, adapting one of the great manga of the 1980s. Like Athena, Nausicaä, Ghibli, leap from the head of Hayao Miyazaki, fully grown, and ready to leave their mark on the world of anime. But Nausicaä is not merely the arrival of Studio Ghibli and its master-director on the scene, but a spectacular, thought-provoking, and still powerful piece of cinema about the fragility of man-and nature-'s coexistence, and a perfect crystallisation of what the world would come to love in the films of Hayao Miyazaki

Rating: Must See. (Personal Recommendation)

Next week, we swap post-apocalyptic deserts for the steampunk 19th Century,  and Hayao Miyazaki's action-adventure masterpiece, Laputa: Castle in the Sky

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