NAUSICAA AND THE FANTASY OF HAYAO MIYAZAKI
by Andrew Osmond

[This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally
appeared in the SF journal Foundation, Issue 72, Spring 1998, p57-81.] 

In July 1996, Walt Disney announced a distribution deal with Tokuma
Shoten, a major Japanese publishing conglomerate. Foremost in the
agreement was Disney's acquisition of several anime (Japanese cartoon)
features for worldwide video release. The films, spanning 1984 to 1997
(the last, Princess Mononoke, was in pre-production at the time) were
produced by Studio Ghibli, a Tokuma subsidiary founded by animation
giant Hayao Miyazaki.

Made for family audiences, Miyazaki's films are closer to Disney than
the gorefests and space adventures commonly associated with anime.
However, the interest - and irony - of the Disney deal is its bringing
together of the two greatest studios in feature animation history. For
Miyazaki is no imitator, and his work is as fresh and innovative as it
is universal. His films represents a distinctive, populist alternative,
not just to seven decades of Disney, but to cartoon features as a whole.

MIYAZAKI AND THE WEST
Miyazaki is a rare breed: a fantasy director auteur. In the past
fourteen years he has written and directed seven acclaimed Japanese
features and produced three others, culminating an animation career of
more than three decades (1). He also expanded one of those films -
Nausicaa - into a wildly popular comic-strip epic, described by the US
magazine Comics Journal as 'the best graphic novel ever.' A national
byword for commercial success, Miyazaki is still relatively little-known
in most territories outside Japan. Until quite recently, much of the
literature around him was fan-generated, sidelined by a media more
interested in the anime excesses of Akira or Legend of the Overfiend. In
contrast to those films' ultraviolence, no Miyazaki film except for
Princess Mononoke would rate above 'PG'. His work can be nostalgic and
sentimental, but also meditative and strikingly intelligent. At heart he
is a storyteller, equally at ease building epic fantasies or spinning
modern fables. What sets him apart are his meticulous narratives, his
fiercely individual perspectives and his widely diverse settings and
subjects.

One reason for the Disney deal is Miyazaki's perceived lack of
'ethnocentricity', for whether by accident or design his work draws
extensively on Western sources and settings. In part this is due to his
education. At university, Miyazaki joined a children's literature group,
discovering such writers as Philippa Pearce, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Eleanor
Farjeon and Arthur Ransome. Decades later, the director cited these as
among his greatest influences, calling Britain in particular 'a treasure
trove of children's authors (2).' Miyazaki also admired foreign
cartoons, including the output of the Fleischer studio, Lev Atmov's
Russian Snow Queen (1957) and Paul Grimault's French Shepherdess and the
Sweep (1957): later, he was to praise the work of the Russian Yuri
Norstein (Tale of Tales) and the Canadian Frederic Back (The Man Who
Planted Trees). Finally (and significantly for Nausicaa), Miyazaki read
a wide range of classic western SF and fantasy, including Verne, Asimov,
Aldiss, Le Guin and JRR Tolkien.

Coincidentally, many of Miyazaki's first cartoon projects were also
western-based. In the '70s, he designed long-running TV adaptations of
Heidi (1974), Dog of Flanders (1975) and Anne of Green Gables (1979)
(3). One of his first directorial projects, Future Boy Conan (1978), was
expanded from an obscure SF juvenile by US writer Alexander Key (The
Incredible Tide). Miyazaki also directed TV and film versions of Lupin
III, a James Bond-styled update of the fictional gentleman-thief created
by Maurice Leblanc (4). In 1982, he returned to detective territory with
Meitantei Holmes (shown in the west as Sherlock Hound) a manic reworking
of the Doyle stories, with touches such as a robot pterodactyl flying
through London a la The Lost World.

The western origins of Nausicaa are discussed below: more broadly, it is
notable that five of his seven major features take place in non-Japanese
settings. Lupin: Castle of Cagliostro (1979) is set in the eponymous
imaginary country Cagliostro, 'smallest member state of the United
Nations,' a device reminding the viewer of the fictional state of
Ruritania in Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda. (Miyazaki had read Zenda,
and Cagliostro resembles the book in other ways.) Nausicaa (1984) and
Laputa (1986) are Miyazaki's epics, the first set in a half-European,
half-alien milieu, the second modelling a vaguely steampunk retro-world
on nineteenth-century Wales. (Miyazaki took his animators to a south
Wales village to sketch the setting.) Kiki's Delivery Service (1989),
and Porco Rosso (1992) incorporate fantasy elements into more intimate
contemporary settings, both coastal European. While Laputa bears only a
nominal relationship to the world depicted in Gulliver's Travels,
Rosso's tale of a pilot who returns from death has overtones of the
Powell/Pressburger fantasy A Matter of Life and Death, while Miyazaki
acknowledged that the central image - a heavenly cloud of fighter planes
- came from Roald Dahl's 1946 story 'They Shall Not Grow Old'.

More fundamentally, the films share what is sometimes called the 'hyper-
realist design' of Western theatrical cartoons. With the partial
exceptions of Cagliostro and Laputa, Miyazaki's later work has a
commitment to cartoon naturalism. The technology and trappings may be
outlandish, but the characters and details weave a coherent world with
little sign of the anarchism or 'springboard reality' of much Japanese
animation. For this reason, Miyazaki's films will disappoint critics who
see animation as essentially avant-garde, more suited to sight-gags and
surrealism than plot-driven populism. Instead Miyazaki's animation
heightens rather than defines the various settings, with a weight on
rich landscapes and well-observed detail. To use an often-pejorative
distinction, Miyazaki's work tends to copy reality rather than staying
in plausible impossibility(5). This may be seen as aesthetic betrayal:
the actual artwork is gorgeous. Parallel comments apply to Miyazaki's
manga: indeed the strip Nausicaa resembles nothing so much as a detailed
storyboard for a live-action film.

While Miyazaki's characters broadly conform to anime conventions (wide
eyes, lipless mouths, stylised features which appear Caucasian to
Western viewers), they too lack the overt stylisation of much anime.
This is particularly true of his young heroines, including Nausicaa. On
one level, the girls are inevitably part of the Japanese 'cute' (kawaii)
tradition, pretty adolescents of the kind traced by Philip Brophy to the
world celluloid-plastic doll industry at the turn of the century(6).
(Brophy sees anime drawing on an 'Americanised therapeutically-designed
version of Euro-cute,' strongly analogous to the waif paintings of
Americans Margaret and Walter Keane. The analogy has also been made by
manga critic Frederik L Schodt (7)). At the same time, Miyazaki's
females are removed from the 'cute babe' protagonists of much cyberpunk-
styled anime, memorably described by Brophy as 'fusions of Baywatch
extras, Barbie dolls and Care Bears.' Rather, Miyazaki's designs are
again close to a Disney template, this time that of frail, picture-book
princesses, but with two major caveats. Most obviously the narratives
serve to subvert these appearances; but also, while Miyazaki's heroines
are homogenised as a group - some look virtually identical - they have a
realistic presence in their own films of a kind seldom found in Disney.

On Miyazaki's heroines, the critic Paul Wells points outs:

'Miyazaki establishes authorial tendencies by refuting the tenets of
films constructed on masculine terms... (His) complex heroines are
consistently engaged in the pursuit of self-knowledge and a distinctive
identity. His use of the feminine discourse subverts patriarchal agendas
both in film making and story-telling.
'As Miyazaki suggests, 'We've reached a time when the male-oriented way
of thinking is reaching a limit. The girl or woman has more flexibility.
This is why a female point of view fits the current times (8).'

As characters, Miyazaki's heroines are typically innocent, creative and
attuned to nature in a way which leaves their male counterparts gaping
in disbelief. The heroines are defined by curiosity, their inner and
outer journeys mirrored in the image of flight - most of Miyazaki's
protagonists fly, or learn to fly. Their discoveries range from film to
film but generally connect to Miyazaki's vision of a pantheistic, self-
creating life force which the heroines eulogise, mourn or redeem. Wells
rightly points out that the revelations are delivered in 'resonant
symbolic moments... the nexus of spiritual and philosophic ideas.' This
aspect of Miyazaki's work is fundamental to Nausicaa.

MIYAZAKI VS DISNEY
In animation terms, it is tempting to see Miyazaki as exploiting the
best of two cultural worlds. On the one hand, his commitment to cartoon
realism (against the relative anarchism of much anime and independent
animation) aligns with Disney(9); and Disney, despite efforts to topple
it, remains the dominant force in world feature animation. On the other,
Miyazaki benefits from a domestic industry not dominated by a Disney
mind-set (what anime director Haruhkio Mikitmo called the 'Disney
Complex'). Disney's films rely on an egalitarian package of values: toon
gags, high adventure, caricatures, fairy-tale romance and songs which
sustain rather than complement narrative. (As Jack Zipes argues in From
Mouse to Mermaid, 'Technique takes precedence over the story, and the
story is used to celebrate the technician and his means (10).') In
contrast, none of Miyazaki's films are musicals, and only three could be
described as adventures. All have comic moments, but there are many
"arid" patches that would bore younger children, especially given the
long running times (11). Disney trades on revamping traditional tales
into a studio mould, sublimating narrative into a broader package of
cute animals and 'name' voice-stars. By putting story first, Miyazaki
allows the characters and humour to emerge more naturally than under
Disney's house-style.

One contrast is particularly striking. It would be hard to imagine a
Disney feature without its villain: from Snow White to Mulan, the
studio's flamboyantly pantomime baddies dominate its output. (Admittedly
Frollo, the villain in Disney's Notre Dame, was portrayed with some
effort at depth: it remains to be seen if the experiment is repeated.)
Against this, Miyazaki's films are notable for their lack of evil
characters. Of his theatrical releases, only the Lupin feature
Cagliostro and the better-known Laputa have truly malign adversaries.
More common are stories in which potential villains switch sides (Future
Boy Conan, Porco Rosso), are somehow redeemed (Nausicaa) or simply don't
exist (My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Whisper of the
Heart). Even Sherlock Hound's pantomime Moriarty shows a softer side,
captivated by the charms of the delectable Miss Hudson.

A comparison between Disney and Miyazaki would be incomplete without a
note on the technical quality of Miyazaki's animation. Within the arena
of commercial cel cartoons - features for a popular audience, as opposed
to experimental animation - it is fair to say his work has a consistent
standard seldom seen outside Disney. However, there are qualifications.
Even a blockbuster anime like Akira could not challenge Disney's
character animation, and Miyazaki's early films lose much in pan-and-
scan, where the emphasis is on the characters rather than the (generally
sumptous) backdrops. Ghibli's animation never rises to the heights of
Bambi or Secret of NIMH (though it can come close), but neither does it
sink near the lows of Disney's 70s output, or the production-line
banality of much animation today.

Motion aside, where Miyazaki's films excel is in their sublime,
irreducibly personal background compositions. Against the symbolism of
more abstract animators, Miyazaki's films glory in minutae, blending
scenery from sources both real and fantastic, imbuing locations with a
wide-eyed wonder which makes no divide between present-day cities and
future wonderlands. From the undergrowth of Nausicaa's toxic jungle to
the crumbling halls of Laputa, from Totoro's giant camphor tree to the
seascapes of Kiki and Porco Rosso, Miyazaki creates a series of
imaginary worlds unequalled in fantasy cinema.

THE TWO NAUSICAAS: ORIGINS
Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa) is usually
seen as Miyazaki's pivotal work. The 1984 film cemented his reputation
as an animator, leading to the birth of the most successful anime studio
of recent times. The strip gained its own mythic status, both as a
stupendous feat of world-building and a mushrooming epic serialised over
twelve years. The first part appeared in the anime periodical Animage in
February 1982: by the time the last episode appeared in March 1994 it
was not just the scale setting Nausicaa apart. (Nausicaa's thousand-page
length is not uncommon: Katsuhiro Otomo's manga Akira was more than
twice as long). Rather, as Stephen Chapman noted in Comics Journal, it
was that the strip could truly be described as a graphic novel,
combining a disciplined plot with a conceptual unity belying its serial
origins.

Japanese SF sagas are notorious for tangled histories, and Nausicaa is
no exception. On his own account, Miyazaki created the strip as a stop-
gap. 'I drew the manga because I was unemployed as an animator, and I'll
stop drawing when I find animation work', he said early on. It was not
his first manga: in 1969 he had pseudonymously drawn a newspaper strip
called Desert Tribe, about sheep-herders battling to survive in 11th-
century Central Asia. A later watercolour manga, Shuna's Journey (1983),
was published shortly after Nausicaa began. Elements from both appear in
the longer work: the sheep-herders reappear as Dorok tribesman, while
the androgynous hero Shuna looks disconcertingly like Nausicaa.

Nausicaa was also foreshadowed in Miyazaki's contemporary animation. In
particular Cagliostro boasted a sumptuous mis-en-scene of snowcapped
mountains, azure lakes and labyrinthine aqueducts, dominated by a fairy-
tale castle. All these elements were transplanted to Nausicaa's idyllic
valley home, while the character found ancestors in Clarisse,
Cagliostro's angelic princess (voiced by Nausicaa actress Sumi
Shimamoto) and Lana, the psychic heroine of Conan who communes with
birds. Conan was further set in a world healing after nuclear war,
promising new birth and life if foolish humanity respected it, an ethos
repeated in Nausicaa.

Despite such credentials, Miyazaki was reluctant to turn the strip into
animation. According to Animerica, 'Animage convinced Miyazaki to draw a
manga with the promise that it wouldn't be used as the basis for an
animation project. It was Animage who broke the covenant when they
approached Miyazaki about making a short, fifteen-minute film. Miyazaki
declined the Nausicaa short but offered to work on a sixty-minute
original animation video (OAV). When Tokuma, Animage's publisher, came
back with an offer to sponsor a theatrical feature, the film was born
(12).'

As Tokuma had no studio facilities, it co-produced Nausicaa with the
animator Top Craft, but fans now view it as a 'seed' Ghibli film, the
studio being set up in Nausicaa's wake. Not only does Nausicaa have the
lavish values and realism which became Ghibli's hallmarks, it involved
many future Ghibli staff. Top Craft's president Hara Toru later became
Ghibli's CEO, while other key names included Isao Takahata as producer
and composer Joe Hisaishi. Nausicaa was retrospectively adopted as part
of the Ghibli canon, figuring on the studio's laserdisc collection and
in its multivolume archive of publicity material.

Following the film's domestic success (it earned 740 million yen in
distribution revenue, nearly a million people seeing it in the cinema),
Miyazaki continued to work intermittently on the strip version, though
with several long hiatuses. In one case, he withdrew several chapters
from Animage before publication, dissatisfied with them as they stood:
the magazine inserted a hasty synopsis. Miyazaki later confessed the
strip was a great burden, and it says much for his dedication that he
continually threaded Nausicaa between film projects. As discussed below,
the last chapters have visible feedback with his subsequent anime,
especially Laputa.

As the manga drew to a close, Miyazaki re-edited the strip for
publication in soft-cover form. It was this version that was translated
into English by David Lewis and Toren Smith, with later chapters by Matt
Thorn. Smith, a long-time manga and Miyazaki fan, made no secret of the
translation's difficulty, describing it as a unique blend of
contemporary and formally old-fashioned Japanese. The film's conversion
was less successful: it was bought by the American label New World Video
which released it for the children's market, under the title Warriors of
the Wind. Twenty minute's exposition was cut, removing much of the
character depth and subtext, and the dubbing was perfunctory. Miyazaki
called it a mockery, and refused to sell any more films to the West
without full theatrical distribution.

THE STORY
Excluding the Warriors version, Nausicaa exists in two wholly distinct
and authentic forms, both created and controlled by Miyazaki.
Unsurprisingly, while the storylines diverge widely, many details are
identical, including the premise. Millennia from now, civilisation is
destroyed in a man-made cataclysm known as the 'seven days of fire.' The
remaining humans are divided into warring kingdoms, medieval retro-
cultures with a scattering of high-tech armaments (fighter planes, tanks
and biological weaponary). So far, so familiar - similar scenarios
figure in countless fantasy epics. However, Nausicaa combines this with
the less obvious trappings of the eco-fantasy (where 'fantasy' is meant
in a speculative rather than fabulous sense). Two of the best-known
novels in this sub-genre, Brian Aldiss' Hothouse (abridged in America as
The Long Afternoon of Earth), and Frank Herbert's Dune were apparently
read by Miyazaki (13), and both have a seeming influence on Nausicaa.

To take Aldiss' book first, Nausicaa and Hothouse are very different
stories, but the parallels are clear. Both postulate future Earths
encroached by fantastic giant forests, filled with exotic life-forms
beside which humans seen an anachronism. Both works centre around less
round talismans than revelations, which the humans receive via
superintelligent terrestrials (the fungal morel in Hothouse, the insect
Ohmu in Nausicaa). True to Miyazaki's world-view, the content of these
revelations is less important than the empowerment bestowed. The morel
in Hothouse is malign in intent, but its teachings and philosophy are
fundamental to Gren's final status, a free hero riding his destiny.
Nausicaa's uplift is no less spectacular: her communion with the Ohmu
turns her into a blend of scientific explorer and spiritual messiah. It
is here that Nausicaa aligns with Dune, both patently messianic
fantasies though Nausicaa, unlike Paul Atreides, never recognises her
iconic status. This strand is most developed in the manga: in the film,
many fans compare Herbert's sand-worms to Nausicaa's Ohmu giant insects,
both in terms of plot import and monstrous presence (Nausicaa was
released the same year as Lynch's disastrous film). This was confirmed
by Miyazaki, who had partly derived 'Ohmu' from 'Sando Waamu' (or 'Sando
Uomu'), the Japanese name for Dune's sand-worms.

One last similarity between Nausicaa and Hothouse is their shared
Homeric heritage, but at this point the stories diverge. As Joseph
Milicia notes in the Panther edition of Hothouse (14), Aldiss' book is a
thoroughly traditional odyssey with its Ulysses hero (Gren) defined more
by cunning than morality. Miyazaki, however, models his protagonist on a
relatively minor Homer character: Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess who
cares for Ulysses when he is naked and dying. In an afterward, Miyazaki
explained how he came across a retelling of Greek myth by Bernard Evslin
which embellished the character. In Miyazaki's words, 'Nausicaa was a
beautiful and fanciful girl, quick on her feet. She loved playing the
harp and singing more than the attention of her suitors or pursuing
earthly comforts. She took delight in nature and had an especially
sensitive personality (15).'

Miyazaki also linked Nausicaa to a legendary insect-loving princess from
Japan's Heian period (AD 794-1185). 'She was regarded as an eccentric,
because after reaching a marriageable age, she loved to play in the
field and would be enchanted by the transformation of a pupa into a
butterfly. As an aristocrat's daughter, such behaviour would be shunned.
She never had an Odysseus wash up on her shores, nor foreign lands to
wander in, to escape society's restrictions. Even as a child, I couldn't
help worry about the princess' fate (16).'

THE FILM
As an anime, Nausicaa is in many ways the quintessential Miyazaki film.
The most conventional and evocative of his productions, it establishes
much of the worldview described above. At a time when Western cinemas
were saturated with fantasylands - Legend, Krull, Conan the Barbarian,
Disney's Black Cauldron (17) - Nausicaa was almost unique in using its
mythic setting for more than sub-Star Wars heroics. As much SF planetary
romance as Tolkienesque fantasy, the two-hour film delivers on its
promise to explore a whole new world.

When it was made, Miyazaki had already written sixteen episodes of the
Nausicaa strip for Animage, but the story was nowhere near an end. (A
similar problem beset the 1988 anime of Akira, based on Otomo's
2000-page strip.) Miyazaki's solution was economic. For most of the way,
the script closely follows the manga - sometimes frame for frame - but
with fundamental changes to make it self-contained. Most obviously,
Miyazaki rounded the story by adding a subplot about the invasion of
Nausicaa's home, turning a background location into the film's narrative
centre. He also amalgamated two of the strip's warring factions (the
Doroks and the Pejiteians), and telescoped sundry other details. (In the
best serial traditions, many of the manga's enigmas were not resolved
for hundreds of pages.) Overall, the resulting film is a fair
translation of the first quarter of the strip storyline. Whether it
reflects the strip as a whole is more debatable.

Miyazaki's Nausicaa is effectively Evslin's character, recreated as the
teenage princess of the Valley of Wind, mankind's refuge on the
periphery of the sea of corruption. Rather than Aldiss' sweltering
jungle, this is a luminous forest of fungus, shrouded in miasma fog and
inhabited by giant insect mutations. Nausicaa's valley is a European
idyll: protected from decay by fresh sea-breezes, its meadows, windmills
and medieval castle might have been transplanted straight from
Cagliostro. The Valley's fragility is established in the film's prologue
where a traveller enters a similar haven, once prosperous, now destroyed
by the all-invading rotwood. The opening credits are similarly downbeat,
showing humanity's fall depicted in a Bayeaux-like tapestry, an elegant
conceit. Yet as the film proper starts we see Nausicaa - masked and
hooded like a medieval spaceman - walking alone in the forest depths.
Her reaction is not fear but awe: awe at a deadly but beautiful
landscape teeming with life. The first five minutes of the film are
almost wordless as the viewer shares Nausicaa's contemplation
of an alien Earth.

True to form, Nausicaa shares the empathy and intuitions of Miyazaki's
other heroines. When she sees her mentor Yupa pursued by an angry ohmu -
a giant crawling sentient insect, now the dominant life-form - she
imitates its call to calm the beast. The same scene demonstrates her
ability to "ride the wind", surfing the breezes on a jet-powered glider
called a mehve (the word comes from the German moewe, seagull, an
interesting European root reflecting the setting). Such powers are
tested in the subsequent story, in which Nausicaa's Valley is caught in
a war between two imperial kingdoms, Torumekia and Pejitei (the Dorok
empire in the manga). The latter unearths a God warrior, an ancient
weapon which could reduce what remains of the world to ruins. Sealed in
a flying gunship, the warrior crashes down in the valley: the
Torumekians respond by invading, killing Nausicaa's father and taking
the princess hostage.

As a character, Nausicaa begins midway between Evslin's princess and
Disney's Snow White, a mix of precocity and fairy-tale innocence. In the
West this would doom the character to passivity, and Miyazaki
effectively subverts this model while staying true to Nausicaa's mythic
roots. Nausicaa is no ugly duckling but a self-reliant heroine-in-
waiting. Her innocence does not come from child naiveté but scientific
wonder. Her father trains her to lead her people, but her calling is
both self-imposed and self-defined. Most significantly, her first ally -
the ageing traveller Lord Yupa - is set up as a teacher-figure, but ends
up Nausicaa's follower. However, Nausicaa's independence does not free
her from the role-playing and soul-searching of traditional fantasy.
Rather, she must define herself even as she is defined by those round
her.

In the film this process starts when Nausicaa's home is invaded and her
innocence becomes an ideal as fragile as the valley. A crucial turn
comes when she finds her father murdered in his castle bedroom.
Formerly, Nausicaa's empowerment has been spiritual: now she kills her
attackers in a scene which would be ludicrous if it weren't played with
total conviction. In many films this would be a masculinising rite-of-
passage or a moral object lesson. The Nausicaa scene suggests both, but
the lack of overt messages lends the scene special ambivalence, mirrored
in Nausicaa's horror at her loss of identity. It is the first of a trio
of scenes which recall pivotal moments in the original Dune novel; in
this case, Paul's early duel with the Fremen warrior Jamis, with its
fatalistic overtones of the future jihad. (Jessica's timely admonishment
of Paul - 'How does it feel to be a killer?' - anticipates a similar
intervention by Yupa in Nausicaa.)

By the next scene, Nausicaa has switched back to a Disney princess,
bravely suppressing grief as she begs her people not to fight the
invaders, but the ambiguity is established. We already know this is no
"safe' fantasy (a girl resembling Nausicaa was killed early on,
confirming the princess' mortality); equally Nausicaa is no "safe"
heroine. The process is extended later when Yupa finds Nausicaa's secret
room in the castle foundations. Here the princess nurtures plants from
the Sea of Corruption, quite against valley custom (shades of Jessica
finding the conservatory in the Arrakeen mansion). Already Nausicaa
knows the flora is non-toxic when given clean earth and water. But such
personal projects are threatened. 'I'm scared of myself,' she says as
she shuts the room down and prepares for war, 'because I don't know what
I will do.' Now the once-enraged Nausicaa diminishes into a vulnerable,
downcast girl, terrified of the power within herself. Again, the scene
stresses Nausicaa's identity, the fact she has values beyond - perhaps
contrary to - those imposed by the traditional adventure story. In the
film this conflict is resolved through pacifist self-sacrifice: the
manga is rather more complex.

The cellar scene is a prime example of Wells' loci of 'spiritual ideas,'
the literally earthbound setting chiming with Nausicaa's environmental
proselytising. ('Who could have done this to the world?,' she asks with
more incredulity than preachiness.) In both versions, she sees the
living world - human and natural - as inherently good, a subject rather
than a giver of pain. After many perils - an electrifying aerial
dogfight, hazardous communion with the Ohnu, a brush with a man-eating
insect of the rotwood - Nausicaa finds her true calling in another
earthbound setting. In the film's key scene, another locus, she enters
the rotwood and finds a cave under the forest floor. In contrast to the
dangers of the last hour, the cavity is a natural nirvana: stone pillars
support a cathedral world of running water and crystal sand. Based on
her former investigations, Nausicaa realises the Sea of Corruption is
nothing less than a worldcleanser: pollution is taken into the trees,
which petrify to stone and crystallise the poison into sand. 

Miyazaki uses the location's tranquillity as a natural breathing space,
a place to stop, reflect and wonder. Nausicaa simply lies on the sand
and lets the peace wash over her. As well as the obvious echoes of James
Lovelock's 'Gaea' vision of nature (itself the basis of numerous eco-
fantasies), the scenario recalls John Christopher's 1969 juvenile SF The
Lotus Caves, with Miyazaki's Ohmu replacing Christopher's underground
moon-plant as nurturers of a new, more creative Eden. Closer still is
the Dune parallel, Paul and Jessica gazing awestruck on the Fremen's
subterranean cache of water. Miyazaki himself cited the international
conservationism of the 1970s (his film bears the seal of the World
Wildlife Federation).

In Dune, Paul realised the sandworms' centrality to Dune's water-cycle
and the political power it brings. Equally, it is with the Ohmu that
Nausicaa finds her higher purpose. In Miyazaki's condensed script, the
main motive of both Torumekia and Pejitei is to destroy the poisonous
rotwood (hence the import of the fire-demon), and so the second half of
the film, for all the battles and adventure, effectively turns into an
eco-debate with all sides given plausible motives. It is here that
Kushana, female leader of the Torumekians, comes to the fore. A powerful
presence (in one memorable scene she casually reveals she's one-armed,
having lost the other to an insect), she follows many Miyazaki
adversaries in being less evil than hubristic. One scene, omitted from
the manga and the Warriors cut, has an 'ordinary' Valley dweller explain
her mistake just before the last battle. 'You (the Torumekians) use
fire. We use a little of that too, but too much fire gives birth to
nothing. Fire turns a forest to ash in one day. Water and wind take a
hundred years to nurture a forest. We prefer water and wind.' Sadly,
Kushana doesn't listen until almost too late.

Nausicaa's discovery that the rotwood is central to the Earth's healing
shortcuts the debate and foreshadows the climax, in which the Pejiteians
mutilate a baby ohmu in graphic detail (another ravaged innocent, born
to suffer) to provoke the insects into destroying the Valley. For
Miyazaki, the final conflict is almost redundant except symbolically.
The Torumekians and Pejitei are virtually forgotten as the new-born God
Warrior, a standard fire-spitting anime monster, sets off impressive
nuclear-style detonations before disintegrating before the oncoming
defenders of the forest. As the film pulls away from its expected
climax, the last minutes centre on Nausicaa's martyrdom - shockingly
violent for a family-oriented film - as she struggles to save the baby
ohmu and her people. In the process, she is shot twice, burned by acid
and dies facing the Ohmu stampede. Anticipating the darker turns in the
Nausicaa manga, it is an astounding sequence and one undiluted by the
glib (if evocative) deus ex machina which ends the picture (18).

On its own merits, Nausicaa is an impressive, if patchy, piece of
cinema. Years later, its influence was still being felt. In the late
1980s it was among the top Japanese films selected by a national panel
of writers, critics and directors. At the time of writing it has just
been voted sixteenth favourite anime in a Japanese poll involving two
hundred thousand people. (All the higher votes went to TV series,
including the Miyazaki-drawn Heidi at number six.) Yet Nausicaa is
arguably the least satisfactory of Miyazaki's features. In retrospect,
the main problem is the compression, with a surfeit of runaround and
characters in the second half, combined with a brusque end which leaves
several issues unresolved (though the film is a model of self-
containment compared with sprawls like Akira). The animation has dated:
character movement is often stilted, backgrounds static, while the
'epilogue' (played under the closing credits) contains some alarmingly
bad drawing.

Against this, there is the compensation of the film's vibrant design and
colour scheme, while some sequences - the opening tour through the
luminous rotwood, the encounter in Nausicaa's hidden room - are still
stunning today. Nausicaa also benefits from Hisaishi's delicate, oft-
exquisite, score, and from numerous evocative images, from Nausicaa's
early sighting of a lone ohmu to her 'funeral' as the creatures bear her
body to the sky. Above all, the film has the exhilaration of a genuinely
novel scenario, combining aerial dogfights, retro-technology, surreal
landscapes and eco-mysticism, all without a hint of Star Wars.
Above all, the film has the exhilaration of a genuinely novel scenario,
combining aerial dogfights, retro-technology, surreal landscapes and
eco-mysticism.

THE STRIP
It is impossible to discuss the Nausicaa manga without again raising the
spectre of ethnocentricity. In a long piece in his book Dreamland Japan
(19), Frederik Schodt argues Nausicaa broke with Japanese comic
conventions in a fundamental way - perhaps because Miyazaki was
primarily an animator, writing (seemingly solo) a strip that itself
became animation. Whether by accident or design, the result, like
Miyazaki's anime, was aligned to the West in style and content.

Eschewing the brash norms of manga - giant panels, improvised layouts,
scant dialogue - the strip was a disciplined saga that packed more plot
per page than many manga do in five. It helped that Animage's A4
dimensions are much larger than those of standard manga magazines. (In
the strip, ten or more panels a side are commonplace). Visually, the
monochrome, line-drawn strip resembles the Luther Arkwright alternate-
world saga by Bryan Talbot, or perhaps a black-and white analogue of
cult French artist Jean 'Moebius' Giraud (whose work is also inspired
Akira). The drawing can be criticised - characters look similar, and the
some of the action set-pieces are hard to follow in places. That said,
the best sequences have a kinetic power equalling anything in Miyazaki's
films.

Schodt does not doubt Nausicaa's 'look' was decisive in its acceptance
by Western readers. He also notes the Nausicaa's eclectic sources: as
well as Western SF, he sees influences from the Old and New Testaments,
Buddhism (though Miyazaki denies being versed in its teaching) and Greek
and Norse mythology. For Schodt, the most Japanese aspect of Nausicaa
was the agrarian valley setting, a celebration of 'clean' power sources
(the windmills), advanced ceramic technology (the valley's main product)
and pre-urban society. 

Actually, the deepest plot difference between the film and the manga
relates to the valley's function in the story. In the film, Nausicaa's
home is the unqualified moral core; an innocent buffer between warring
empires, it suggests pastoral ideals (a staple of post-Tolkien fantasy)
and cultural isolationism. While the idealism remains in the manga the
political message is muddied considerably. For a start, the invasion
plot is omitted (though Nausicaa fights a Torumekian raiding party early
on, leading to a moral trauma like that in the film). Instead the valley
is established as a Torumekian protectorate and wartime ally, dependent
on the wide world for its survival. True, this is a world of war but
Nausicaa's salvation lies in the help she receives from all sides -
soldiers, priests, women and children who see in her a common cause. An
element of this appears in the film, where Nausicaa is freed by a
Pejitei who seems a surrogate mother. Afterward, her national identity
blurs when a soldier mistakes her for a dead Pejetei girl.

As in the film, the manga version portrays Nausicaa's journey not as a
routine quest but a search for knowledge, in the traditions of SF.
Appropriately, the valley is forgotten as Nausicaa leaves with the
Torumekians to explore a larger world. To the Torumekians she becomes a
warrior; to the enemy Doroks, a redeemer of sin. To herself, Nausicaa is
a chimera, embracing new cultures as ambassador and wanderer. Her most
polemical message is non-political: 'My clan knows how to share the
burden of suffering... let us show you the way.'

The manga story takes flight where the film ends. Nausicaa halts the
Ohmu stampede (not dying in the process) and is embraced into the
communion of insects. In the film, this was a device to allow a fairy-
tale rebirth: in the manga it is a more subtle transfiguration. After
the event, one of her guardians advises caution: 'Princess, you are too
gentle - so gentle you may and up destroying yourself. I shouldn't say
this but it seems you're more concerned about the Ohmu than us people.
There's an old saying: Look not into the heart of the Ohmu. If you do,
you'll never come back.' Nausicaa's reply, repeated in different
contexts, is that when one embraces life there is no conflict:

'I love the Ohmu. I think they are the greatest, most noble creatures in
all the world. But in the same way, I love all the people of the valley.
Look at this dress... An old Dorok woman's memory of her daughter, yet
she gave it to me. It's stained pure blue with Ohmu blood, yet there is
no unpleasant smell at all. A girl from the Valley of Wind puts on a
Dorok dress, dyed for her by the Ohmu, and prepares to depart in a
Torumekian warship...
'When I left the Valley, it hurt so much... I was so afraid. But now, I
can hear a voice in my heart, all the time. Go forward, it tells me. So
all I think of now is of going forward, as far as I am able... Isn't it
strange? I can't help but feel I'm not alone. It's as if all these
people are watching over me (20).'

The first half of this speech suggests a secular vision of spiritual
unity: indeed, one of Nausicaa's few religious declarations, made toward
the end, is to say 'Our God inhabits a single leaf and the smallest of
insects.' The second half recalls a speech in Fellowship of the Ring,
which Miyazaki had read:

'I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness, but I know
I can't turn back. It isn't to see elves, nor dragons, nor mountains,
that I want; but I have something to do before the end, and it lies
ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through, sir, if you understand
me (21).'

Both espouse common strands in heroism: faith in destiny coupled with
self-sacrifice that borders on the suicidal. But for Nausicaa, her faith
is a starting-point as she is constantly forced to change her stand.
Initially she seeks scientific enlightenment. Transfigured, she becomes
a healer, neutrally aiding civilians and soldiers alike. In the manga's
strongest scene, her near-telepathy forces her to share the pain of a
nameless Torumekian dying from miasma. She saves his life by taking his
poisoned blood into her lungs. Later she becomes a Torumekian warrior,
perversely in order to save Dorok civilians. Following victory, both
sides hail her as a spiritual icon. She promptly vanishes to seek the
Ohmu, this time as pilgrim rather than adventurer.

All this unfolds in a standard epic framework, where Nausicaa's story
alternates with the usual tapestry of sub-plots and minor characters.
The warring empires are conventional monoliths - Torumekia is a royalist
state riven by family infighting, while the Dorok empire is a theocracy
of clone-kings and secret priesthoods. The myth-scholar Joseph Campbell
would have approved of the holy emperor Miralupa, a failed philosopher-
king turned holdfast, clinging to power as an extension of his crumbling
ego. (Miralupa is driven by and dependent on fear; Nausicaa's greatest
weapon against him is her pity.) Nausicaa transcends this framework, but
Miyazaki recognises she merely follows a wider set of rules. While her
allies regard her as a maverick, Dionysian force, Yupa sees her as a
saviour reborn, though his account is progressive: 'A creation of our
species' lifeforce, reaching across space and time in our moment of
need.' Overall, Nausicaa's model is less Tolkien's Frodo than Shaw's
Saint Joan (compare Shaw's 'evolutionary appetite'); spiritual heroines
with heresies which subsume the conflicts that created them.

The most important supporting character is the Torumekian leader
Kushana, who changes from the film's sympathetic foe to Nausicaa's dark
foil. (Incidentally, she has both arms in this version.) Their
backgrounds are oddly parallel. Kushana is driven by hatred of a sibling
who poisoned her mother, and her partial redemption comes when the
insects kill him in front of her, removing her motivation. Conversely,
we learn Nausicaa's siblings absorbed the rotwood poisons from their
mother and died in her place, leaving the parent distanced from the
princess. (This is Nausicaa's perspective: in interviews, Miyazaki
suggests she was tragically mistaken). Hence Nausicaa's fateful turning
to the forest and non-humans (including her mothering of the God warrior
in the end). Miyazaki uses such devices to acknowledge the random
cruelties of the world but, in a manner integral to his work, he
portrays them as absorbed and overwritten by nature's creative power. In
Nausicaa's and Kushana's cases, random suffering and death begets a
spontaneous, often frightening, love of life. The moment where Kushana
loses her hatred is a reverse of the film scene where Nausicaa kills the
Torumekians, and as troubling:

'One of the objects of my vengeance died all too easily, right before my
eyes. His death was all I had been living for. I was completely empty,
oblivious except for the overwhelming sadness of my men's corpses. But I
don't want to emulate [Nausicaal, to feel not contempt nor anger but
sorrow... No, I don't even want to try to copy her (22)."

More concretely, Kushana's heroism reflects on Nauricaa's spirituality.
The point is succinctly made when Nausicaa asks Kushana to free the
Dorok hostages: Kushana calmly points out she is responsible for 2,000
soldiers, with no time for those who would wash their hands of war. Her
bargain for the hostages is that Nausicaa fight at her side, committing
herself in the conflict. (The battle is Miyazaki's headiest set-piece:
armoured cavalry fight with swords and grenades across World War I
trenches, mounted on horse-bird hybrids.) In the fighting Nausicaa kills
again, and sees others die for her sake. The shock drives her into the
wilderness, where Ohmu speak of a new forest which calls for their aid.

In her travels she discovers an ancient temple and unearths the holy
dead. The spirits preach apocalypse is at hand:

'God will allow us to befoul the world no longer. The old world will
shall be utterly destroyed, and the years of purification shall begin.
All suffering is but a trial for the rebirth of the world (23).

Nausicaa's response to this nihilism is a brave denial:

'No! Our God of the Wind tells us to live! The light, the sky, the
people, the insects - I love them all! I won't give up - I won't!'

But Miyazaki puts the spirits on a footing with her- they too seek to
heal the world, ending pain through annihilation. This fact haunts
Nausicaa when Miralupa unleashes his doomsday weapons, artificial spores
which mutate into a gigantic, all-devouring fungus mould. The creation
shocks Nausicaa's optimism - "Any form of life knows joy and
satisfaction... but this knows only hatred and fear!" Accidentally
released on Dorok soil, the creature causes a holocaust. The crisis
forces Nausicaa to become a full-fledged participant, taking on
'heretic' angelic guise to lead the Doroks to safety. (One of the
strip's ironies is that the self-destructive Kushana is a beacon of hope
for her men, while the Doroks worship Nausicaa as an angel of death.)
Mythic status begets mythic enemies. The formerly benign wilderness
spirits turn into dream-demons ('a nothing that eats people'), hounding
Nausicaa for keeping the damned alive.

Matters come to a head when, in a transcendent reverie (the equivalent
of the 'film loci'?), Nausicaa deciphers the Ohmu's purpose. The forest
they seek is the mould itself - to the Ohmu even a mutant is family.
Nature's avatars, the insects embrace the newcomer, turning themselves
into a seedbed to welcome the mould. In one key scene,  Nausicaa is
sobbing over an ohmu's corpse, only to sense new life as the spores on
its body germinate at incredible speed:

'When humans destroy the world's balance, the forest restores it, at
enormous cost to itself. The mould becomes the very seedbed for the
trees it has eaten. To eat and be eaten... one and the same in this
world. The entire forest... one life (24).'

The rebirth, however, does not console Nausicaa as thousands of Ohmu
race to be devoured. As she watches aghast, her demons launch their
final assault:

'Look at your hands; tell me what you see. Blood... Look at your feet.
Amongst the dead there are those you killed yourself. How dare you feign
innocence? Try all you like to remain an undefiled child, but it won't
do any good. Surely you don't think the Ohnu will forgive you? You're
nothing more than another foolish, filthy human being. A bloody woman of
a cursed people (25).'

Her faith broken, Nausicaa chooses to die with the Ohmu and become part
of their myth. 'The Ohmu are far more beautiful than we are... If only I
could turn into a tree while still alive!' The Ohmu, however, value her
more than she does herself ('We have always felt you were close to us'),
and reject her sacrifice. Suggesting a different tradition, an ohmu
swallows her as the mould engulfs the landscape. Trapped in limbo,
Nausicaa finds her inner forest, an evolving archetype of the Sea of
Corruption in her heart. Here she encounters the soul of the tyrannical
Mirapula, regressed to helpless babyhood. Previously, she had seen him
as pitiful and tragic: now she embraces him as an extension of herself.
'If the forest is inside me, then the desert is mine as well... and if
that's the case this person is already a part of me. (26)' Learning to
accept her own corruption, Nausicaa leads Mirapula to the forest's end-
state: as suggested in the film, this is a purified fairyland of grassy
slopes and flowing rivers, the valley of wind writ large. As the
redeemed villain escapes into the distance, Nausicaa is invited to stay.
She refuses: 'I find myself involved with every individual living thing.
I love the people of this world too much... In a thousand years you (the
cleansed world) will spread and grow. If we can survive, become a little
smarter, then we can join you here (27).'

THE LAST ACT
One might expect this to be the end; but instead the manga's last
quarter is a tour de force coda and commentary, both affirming and
reversing what has gone before. It must be remembered these chapters
were written years after the Nausicaa world was created in Animage and
'fixed' on screen. In the interim Miyazaki had created four other films
and found shortcomings in his original vision. As he ruefully put it, it
became his 'homework' to tease out the implications in what was once a
stopgap story. Analysis is difficult because Miyazaki denies he had any
overarching plan. "I don't think a story based on a [pre-planned] model
is a good idea,' he said, claiming to adjust the tale to his attitudes
at the time. Among the influences he cited was his rejection of his
student Marxist ideals, as well as his shock when ex-Soviet states
plunged back into war at the end of the '80s. Overall, though, Miyazaki
conceded he simply did not understand many issues he was raising, which
may explainthe ambivalent ending.

The coda begins conventionally enough. Restored to life, Nausicaa is
enmeshed in the war's endgame as the surviving factions push toward the
Dorok capital Shuwa. By now, the Doroks have stolen the comatose God
Warrior. (Unlike the film, it was never revived and has been something
of a Macguffin so far. Indeed, Miyazaki never bothers to explain exactly
how the Dorok theft took place!) In trying to destroy it, Nausicaa
brings it to life; the giant imprints on her, naming her 'Little
Mother.' She in turn lifts it to sapience by naming it 'Ohma,' meaning
'innocence.' Fans speculate Miyazaki borrowed the naming motif from Le
Guin's Earthsea books, where a character's 'true name' has great magic
power. More concretely, it echoes Nausicaa's use of 'child' to describe
the moulds and insects of earlier segments. 

In an interview for Comic Box (28), Miyazaki refers to the myths of
'giants who give power,' linking Ohma both to the giant robot shows of
Japanese TV and also to Tarzan's elephant-herd and Asimov's law-driven
robots. In Nausicaa, though, the treatment is closer to Terminator 2 as
the girl strives to control Ohma's instincts:

'It takes more than power to become a fine person. You have to learn how
terrible your powers can be. If you divide the whole world into just
enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything (29).'

Nausicaa's allies in her last journey are not her own people but worm-
handlers, a despised forest-dwelling underclass, formerly derided as
'maggots.' Another companion, the wild-boy Chikuku (directly equated
with Ohma) is revealed to be descended from the Dorok kings: the cliché
is reversed when these transpire to be tyrants worse than the present
rulers. Themes of identity come to the fore again. Chikuku's and the
worm-handler's insistent worship of Nausicaa (similar to the Fremen's
treatment of Paul in Dune) contrasts with Ohma's persona as 'arbitrator,
warrior and judge,' evolving to a point where he assimilates Nausicaa's
ideals as his own.

The strip also introduces notions of a cyclical, ultimately degenerate
human history. This strand is introduced in Nausicaa's encounter with
the new Dorok emperor, which, in perhaps the most revisionary turn of
all, gives the villain the best speech:

"You disgust me, you pseudo-divine, wet-behind-the-ears little girl!
You, who would be a messiah, have unleashed the God Warrior on the
world! I'll give you these rotten Dorok lands and the lousy peasants
too! Crawl around with the whole bloody lot on your shoulders, and then
see if you can save the world (30)!"

In a related plotline, Kushana is portrayed as incapable of abandoning
her blood-drenched path (despite earlier redemption), instead making
Shakesperean declarations to 'turn this spot into an ocean of blood and
bring the cycle to its end.' The only salvation comes from Nausicaa's
mentor Yupa, who crucifies himself on a charge of bayonets to save the
Doroks, his features combining with the face of a Dorok priest whose
soul he carries. Unlike the contrived film miracle of Nausicaa's
sacrifice, this only underlines humanity's degeneracy. The point is
amplified when Nausicaa is waylaid to a garden repose outside time,
conceived as a cross between Shangri-La and the Snow Queen's palace.
Here, she learns from its keeper that her world is artificial, an end-
directed ecosystem to purify the globe for 'true' humans, who survive as
a race bank in Shuwa's depths. Extinction is predestined: even the
pastoral utopia she envisioned with the Ohmu is a cruel cheat, an alien
world her people will not survive. ('Why do you deceive yourself that a
place visited in spirit somehow represents hope?')

There is a fair amount of wry self-deprecation as Miyazaki undercuts the
premises of his original Gaea world. 'Have you never questioned why
humans survive the miasma with only flimsy masks?,' the keeper asks,
while Nausicaa reflects, 'An ecosystem with a goal... contrary to all
laws of nature!' More deeply though, the sequence parodies traditional
utopies as Nausicaa is shown through masterpiece libraries and nature
conservatories, all waiting for 'true' humanity's return. 'This garden
contains all that humans were able to create that are worth passing to
the next world,' says the keeper. But Nausicaa knows that the God
Warrior was created in Shuwa, along with the mould and other genetic
menaces. Her reply is blunt: 'Why is there technology which spews a
shadow of death?... According to the plan mankind should be sell along
the path to rebirth. But in reality foolishness has continued, and
nihilism and despair have spread.'

As in the film the story segues into a dialogue, focused on two keynote
speeches. The first is given by the garden's ageless (and dispassionate)
keeper:

'Some two-hundred years ago, a boy very much like you (Nausicaa) visited
us here. He was a talented scribe, a musician. One day he left this
garden, leaving a note which read 'I want to save humanity.' He become
the first Dorok holy emperor...
You humans tread the same paths over and again. What you try to do has
been attempted by many others before. Everyone believes they alone will
not err, yet none can escape the cycle where karma gives birth to karma,
sorrow gives birth to sorrow (31)."

Nausicaa finds hope, but from where? Her reflections are ambiguous:

'Human beings transformed the human body to suit a polluted world. But
something in me calls passionately to the landscape I saw, the end of
the corruption. The world is being reborn. Even if we cannot tolerate
the purity, even in the moment we are exposed we spew blood from our
lungs, just as birds migrate we shall live and live again.
'Our lives are like the wind, or like sounds. We come into being,
resonate with each other, then fade away. For the sake of a single
sprout, countless forest spores rain down again and again, dying a
useless death. My own life was supported by the deaths of ten older
brothers and sisters. No matter how wretched, every life-form lives by
virtue of its own power... Life is its own miracle. Are we to believe
that those who planned the reconstruction of the world could have
predicted the Ohmu, or the giant mould? I don't think so... something
inside tells me passionately it isn't true.
[True humans] left the Dorok temple to be the kernel of their
reconstruction. But it never occurred to them that that could be the
ultimate demonstration of contempt for life (32).'

Much of this is unclear, particularly Nausicaa's references to 'living
and living again.' Does she intuit that 'her' breed of humanity can,
after all, survive the end of the corruption? Or is she referring to
wider spheres, perhaps to all life affected by humanity whether the
species survives or not? Miyazaki made a cryptic comment to this effect
in the Comic Box interview. "I don't believe it's all-important to have
a future... I think we talk about the future too much. Look at children,
living entirely in the moment. Their only future is to become boring
adults!' One could see Nausicaa as extending this temporal bias:
existing human life is paramount, possible future generations secondary.
The text throws up other readings. At a crucial point, Nausicaa declares
it is 'for the planet to decide' if man will endure. When she is accused
of 'nihilism, nothingness,' she shouts, 'the sympathy and love of the
Ohmu was born from the depths of nothingness!' For a Western reader,
this suggests a world always throwing up creatures with appreciably
human qualities and values. But for many Japanese, man is not the centre
of nature in this way. The point is a broader one, that nature is
infinitely more creative and unpredictable than humans can conceive.

Moreover, the speech extends one of the running themes in the strip:
life overwriting its nature. Despite their artificial origins, the Ohmu
and mould remake themselves in a way undreamed of by 'true' humans. Even
Kushana, who believes herself damned, is finally able to remake herself.
Miyazaki has explored these themes in other works.  In his 1986 film
Laputa, Sheeta, a more frail heroine than her soul-sister Nausicaa, is
press-ganged into a treasure hunt for the flying island. Laputa is known
as a devastating war-machine; when the characters land, however, they
find an abandoned, moss-grown haven tended by rusting ex-warrior robots,
Ohmu-like gardeners. An attempt to return Laputa to its past glory ends
in cataclysm when Sheeta uses her powers to unmake the island: 'We
cannot live apart from Mother Earth!' As Laputa's armaments crumble into
the sea, the 'garden' part of the island rises into the heavens, free
from man's influence.

Returning to Nausicaa, one final observation is that what Nausicaa's
foes - Miralupa, the desert spirits, the 'true' humans - have in common
is a drive to manipulate and cleanse the world, whether from survivalist
or suicidal scruples. The present Earth is treated as a means only.
Nausicaa sees it as an end in itself, even if that proves quite literal
for human beings.

'You are living in the long period of purification. The great suffering
is our atonement. We gather all human wisdom in an age of despair and
bewilderment that we might lend a hand in rebuilding the world.' In a
fine didactic ending, Nausicaa confronts humanity's guardian in Shuwa's
depths. Initially it manifests as a crowd of angelic humans,
materialising Spielberg-style from a glowing orb, but Nausicaa strides
through these like a modern Alice: "You are nothing but shadows!" Next
the guardian appears as a satanically attractive spirit. This form
assures Nausicaa of resurrection - 'We have the technology to restore
your adapted bodies, so that all may live in the purified world.' But
Nausicaa is unmoved, seeing only an extinct force chasing a long-dead
dream, keeping life in a cycle of slavery and suffering. Those who
transcend life are the ultimate villains, trapped in a holdfast past;
nature is the true dynamic.

'Our bodies may be transformed, but our lives will always be our own. We
are birds who, though we may spit up blood, will go flying beyond the
morning, on and on! To live is to change... the Ohmu, the mould, the
grasses and trees, we human beings... we will go on changing, and the
sea of corruption will live on with us. Suffering and tragedy and folly
will not disappear in a purified world - they are part of humanity. That
is why, in a world of suffering, there can also be joy and shining
light! But you cannot change. You have only the plan that ws built into
you. Because you deny death...
Because you were created as a god of purity, you have become the ugliest
creature of all, never knowing what it means to be alive! All things are
born from darkness and return to darkness; and now it is time for you to
return to darkness (33)!'

Compare the hero's climactic speech in The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le
Guin. (Farthest Shore is the third of Le Guin's Earthsea fantasy novels,
which Miyazaki said had a profound effect on him.). 

'All who have ever died, live; they are reborn, and have no end, nor
will there be an end. All save you. For you would not have death. You
lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your
immortal self! What is it? Who are you? You exist, without name, without
form. You cannot see the light of day, you cannot see the dark. You sold
the green day and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no
self. All that which you sold, that was yourself. You have given
everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you,
all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it
cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of
heaven, could fill your emptiness. (34)' 

Nausicaa commands Ohma to break the tomb, crushing the guardian (in its
true form a giant, pulsating ball of matter) and destroying the egg-
cache from which man would be reborn. In breaking the karma cycle she
becomes both destroyer and possible saviour of humanity. Miyazaki
stresses the moral conundrum in the dialogue. 'History will remember you
as a devil!,' the guardian proclaims, especially as Nausicaa has
knowingly spread a myth that a purified world will welcome her people
with open arms. The pacifist heroine 'shudders at the depth of her sin'
at her moment of victory, while an ally describes her as a chaos of
destruction and mercy. 'You are so gentle,' Nausicaa whispers to the
exhausted Ohma as he dies. The strip's last panels shows a traumatised
but triumphant Nausicaa proclaiming to her allies, 'We must live!" A
postscript adds the princess ended her days in the rotwood she
championed, perhaps echoing the 'no-return' coda of Lord of the Rings.
It is an ending totally unexpected for fans of the film, and indeed the
main difference between the two Nauasicaas is that the manga is not a
fantasy of return, to the valley or anywhere else. The past is dead, the
future wiped blank, unknowable. The only time is now.

CONCLUSION
On July 12th 1997, Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime)
opened in Japan. By November it had broken E.T's record for the most
successful film ever released in the country. Although this record was
soon broken in turn by Titanic, Mononoke remains the most successful
Japanese film to date,  with takings of around $160 million.

For many in the West, Mononoke was the first exposure to Miyazaki's work
as Miramax gave it a limited theatrical release in America, France and
other territories. (Ghibli's back catalogue has also started to appear
on video, beginning with the US release of Kiki's Delivery Service.) Yet
Miyazaki makes no secret of the fact that the blockbuster Mononoke (the
most expensive Japanese cartoon ever) is firmly rooted in Nausicaa's
themes, especially those of the manga. Its story, of a young woman
fighting for forest spirits in medieval Japan, rings a change by making
its Nausicaa-mediator a boy striving for peaceful balance between man
and nature. Screen International's Mark Schilling commented, 'The
dazzling beauty of the animation and the strong narrative pulse of the
story should win Japan's master animator new admirers.'

Miyazaki is currently working on his next fantasy film, to be
provisionally released in Summer 2001. Irrespective of that how that
film fares, Miyazaki's impact as artist, director and profound
storyteller will last for many years to come. His momentous animation
and manga career has produced some of the richest and most thought-
provoking fantasy of the last decades. 

'I always try to start from the assumption that humans are foolish. I'm
disgusted by the notion that man is the ultimate being, chosen by God.
But I believe there are things in this world that are beautiful, that
are important, that are worth striving for.'
Hayao Miyazaki

REFERENCES

For general reference, I am indebted to Helen McCarthy's Anime Movie
Guide (Titan, 1996) and Team Ghiblink's 'Miyazaki Web'
(http://www.nausicaa.net). A translation of the Comic Box interview
alluded to in the text can be found at the magazine's home page at
http://www.ask.ne.jp/~comicbox/e-nau/contents.html

1. Prior to his 'canon' from Nausicaa onwards, Miyazaki had directed
Castle of Cagliostro (1979), a spin-off from the long-running Lupin III
TV series, while two features were compiled from his Future Boy Conan
serial. Miyazaki was also closely involved with an earlier film, The
Adventure of Hols, Prince of the Sun (1968, western title The Little
Norse Prince.)

Several related films deserve mention. Miyazaki's colleague Isao
Takahata, director of Hols, went on to direct the acclaimed anime
feature Goshu the Cellist (1982) before joining Ghibli to produce
Nausicaa and Laputa. In 1988, he directed the stunning wartime drama
Grave of the Fireflies (released in America by Central Park Media); the
first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film, it was distributed and double-billed
with Totoro. Subsequently, Takahata directed two more Ghibli titles,
Only Yesterday (1991) and Pom Poko (aka War of the Racoons) (1994). The
latter is a fantasy with thematic similarities to Totoro and Princess
Mononoke, though somewhat unfocussed. Both were produced by Miyazaki.

More recently, Ghibli released the quietly excellent, borderline magic-
realist fable Whisper of the Heart (1995). Although directed by
Yoshifumi Kondo (who died suddenly in January 1998), Miyazaki is
credited with production, storyboarding and script: he also directed the
dream sequences. 

Two further titles are On Your Mark (aka Castles in the Air) (1995) and
Gainax's Nadia (aka Secret of Blue Water) (1990). The former is a
spectacular six-minute short directed by Miyazaki: the heroine is a
girl-angel resembling Nausicaa. On Your Mark appeared in Japanese
cinemas to support Whisper of the Heart. Nadia, directed by Nausicaa
animator Hideaki Anno, is a TV series based on a '70s Miyazaki
storyline, best described as a parallel-world/Flash Gordon reworking of
20,000 Leagues. The plot is close to the equally Verne-ish Laputa. Anno
has since created the popular revisionist robot show Neon Genesis
Evangelion.

On the manga side the translated strip Nausicaa is available in many
Western territories. At the time of writing it has just started being
released in France, by the publisher Glenat. The English version is
published in Britain and America in seven volumes (160-250 pages) and
four Perfect Collection omnibuses (200-300 pages). The publisher is Viz
Communications Incorporated.

2. Miyazaki interview, Manga Mania 20 (March '95), p118. 

3. The three aforementioned serials - especially Heidi - helped
popularise the World Masterpiece Theatre strand, mainly produced by
Nippon Animation. WMT became an institution, responsible for high-
quality anime versions of such titles as Tom Sawyer, Little Women,
Pollyanna and even Lassie. By the time it ended in 1997, it had racked
up over twenty separate serials and over a thousand episodes.

4. The Lupin III character (often renamed 'Rupan' or 'Wolf' after a
copyright clash with Leblanc's estate) was created in manga and anime by
the artist Monkey Punch (real name Kazuhiko Kata). However, fans note
that Miyazaki's portrayal of a more heroic, less self-centred Lupin is
very much his own.

5. Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema Animation by Ginnalberto Bendazzi, John
Libbey 1994, p65.

6. 'Ocular Excess: A Semiotic Morphology of Cartoon Eyes' by Philip
Brophy, in Art and Animation  (Art and Design Vol 12, 3/4), Academy
Group, p26-33.

7. Brophy himself stressed anime character designs belie great
sophistication. He even praises the 'cute babe' cyberpunkettes for
'complex, well grounded traits in the line of Sigourney Weaver or Zoe
Tammerlis [..] Imagine Drew Barrymore cast as the leader of a new
Russian dictatorship.' The comparison between anime designs and the
Keane 'waif paintings' is made by Frederik L. Schodt in Dreamland Japan,
Stone Bridge Press, 1996, p61.

8. 'Hayao Miyazaki: Floating Worlds, Flying Signifiers' by Paul Wells in
Art and Animation p22. Wells focuses on Miyazaki's films Laputa and
Totoro: (mis)inferences to Nausicaa are my own. The Miyazaki quote is
from an interview in Kaboom: Explosive Animation from America and Japan,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1994, p129.

9. It must be stressed that toon 'realism' is wholly relative. Disney
and Miyazaki have a pedestrian world-view beside the metamorphing
anarchism of Avery or Svankmajer (compare Disney's and Svankmajer's
Alice). In contrast, even Aladdin's chameleon Genie plays off a
framework of 'realist' norms which contain and enhance the character.

Miyazaki's realism is fairly unusual in anime (though less so in cinema
anime). While most Japanese toons have 'lifelike' backgrounds and
settings - often with an eye to detail that shames Western counterparts
- the action often involves a hefty amount of slapstick and caricature,
even in 'serious' productions. One particularly disconcerting
convention, used especially in girls' anime such as the timeslip romance
Fushigi Yugi, is for already stylised characters to turn into crudely
'deformed' caricatures for comic effect. These devices often come from
manga comics, and help compensate for the often low frame count in
Japanese animation.

Undoubtedly the most Disney-like anime was 1991's Little Nemo. Produced
by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, the film combined such talents as Ray Bradbury
(screen concept) and Jean 'Moebius' Giraud (story), while animators
included Disney legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson. Miyazaki and
Takahata worked on early pre-production, but left after creative
differences. Nemo's trip to Slumberland through a storm-cloud is
reminiscent of Laputa.

10. 'Breaking the Disney Spell' by Jack Zipes in From Mouse to Mermaid,
Indiana University Press, 1995, p39. 

11. For the record, Disney's films average around 75-80 minutes in
length: Miyazaki's average well over 100.

12. First of two-part Miyazaki feature, Animerica Vol 1 No 5 (July '93),
p4.

13. Interviewed on SF in Comic Box (November 1982), Miyazaki mentioned
he had read Hothouse. The Sando Waamu detail (see text) comes from
Shuppatsuten (Starting Point) 1979-1996, Tokuma Shoten, 1996, p544. As
Nausicaa was begun in 1982, two years before Lynch's film version, it
seems plausibe that Miyazaki read at least the first Dune novel, which
was available in Japan from the early '70s.

14. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, Panther 1984.

15. Reprinted in Nausicaa Perfect Collection 1, Viz Communications,
p262-3. In general, anime probably combines SF and fantasy tropes more
than any other screen medium. Two well-known TV cases are the French-
Japanese co-production Ulysses 31 (1981), a close reworking of the
Odyssey as a space-opera, and the more recent serial Vision of
Escaflowne (1996), in which robot knights battle in a world of dreams.

16. See 15.

17. Ironically, two superior toon fantasies of this time were
marginalised: The Last Unicorn (1984), adapted by Peter Beagle from his
book, and Flight of Dragons (1986), an ingenious reworking of Gordon
Dickson's '70s novel Dragon and the George. Both films were produced by
the oft-maligned studio Rankin-Bass and animated at Japan's TopCraft
studio, also responsible for the film Nausicaa.

18. Miyazaki subsequently regretted the resurrection ending, suggested
by his producer after Miyazaki had written himself into a corner. The
problem is not so much the end itself (the scene is well handled) as the
way it reduces Nausicaa's messianic status to an ad hoc punchline.
Compare the similarly blatant deus ex machina which ends Lynch's Dune.

19. Schodt, op. cit. p275-82.

20. Nausicaa Perfect Collection 1, p219-20.

21. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, Unwin 1985, p124.

22. Nausicaa Perfect Collection 3, p50-1.

23. Nausicaa Perfect Collection 2, p238.

24. Nausicaa Perfect Collection 3, pl67-8.

25. lbid, p138.

26. This scene bears a striking resemblance to the climax of Ursula Le
Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea, a book Miyazaki cited as a major
influence. Ged has spent the whole book first fleeing, then hunting, his
own shadow, his dark side. At the end, he embraces it:
'Ged spoke the shadow's name, and in the same moment the shadow spoke
without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices
were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took
hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and
darkness met and joined, and were one.' (A Wizard of Earthsea in The
Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin, Penguin 1982, p164.)
See also the note on Farthest Shore, below.

27. Nausicaa Perfect Collection 3, p24l/38.

28. Comic Box, Nausicaa special issue, January 1995.

29. Nausicaa Vol 7, p33.

30. Nausicaa Vol 6, pl46/8.

31. Nausicaa Vol 7, p120/2.

32. lbid, p171-2.

33. Nausicaa Vol 7, pl98-200. It's instructive to compare Miyazaki's
philosophy with that espoused in Campbell's classic Hero With a Thousand
Faces. Campbell's citation of Toynbee is especially apposite: 'Schism in
the body social is not resolved by any scheme of return to the good old
days (archaism) or by programmes guaranteed to render an ideal projected
future (futurism) [..] Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of
the old thing again, but of something new (pl6, Fontana 1993).'

34. The Farthest Shore in The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin,
Penguin 1982, p462-3.