Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Review
9/10
A thousand years after industrial civilization destroyed itself, a toxic forest is spreading across the world and the giant insects that live in it kill anybody who disturbs them. A princess in a valley on the coast flies over it and takes samples.
The 9 is for worldbuilding that arrives entirely through behavior. Nobody explains the ecology. You learn it because Nausicaa handles a spore with gloves, because a village elder’s hands have gone stone-hard, because the insects respond to a sound she can make and nobody else thinks to try. The point I withhold is the ending. That reaches for a religious image the film hasn’t quite earned. Everything up to it is patient and specific, and the last five minutes ask for a leap the preceding two hours didn’t prepare. I adore this film. It’s the Miyazaki I’d hand to anyone who thinks animation is kid stuff, and I find the heroine’s patience more thrilling than most action heroes’ fists. The finale is the one thing I’d change, and it’s a single wobble at the end of two hours I’d happily live inside.
The Ecology Is the Plot
The toxic jungle is the subject. The insects protect it, the spores kill the people who breathe them, and every faction in the film has a different theory about what to do.
Tolmekia wants to burn it using a resurrected weapon from the old world.
Pejite wants to use the insects as a weapon against Tolmekia. The valley wants to be left alone. Nausicaä is the only person who has bothered to find out how the system works, and what she’s learned is that the forest is cleaning the soil.
That discovery is the film’s argument and it’s delivered as a physical fact. She grows plants in clean water in a cellar and they come up harmless. That proves the toxicity is in the earth and not in the plants. It takes about ninety seconds and it reframes the entire conflict.
That cellar is the scene I’d use to explain why I rate this film so high. A few plants in clean water, a minute and a half of screen time, and the whole war turns out to be a mistake. I can’t think of many films brave enough to settle their central argument with so little fuss.
Every faction is then wrong for the same reason. They’re trying to defeat a process that’s repairing the damage they inherited, because nobody except her sat down and looked.
The Ohmu carry the same idea in their design. They’re enormous, armored and terrifying, and their eyes turn blue when they’re calm and red when they’re enraged, so the film gives the audience a readout on a creature nobody in the story can speak to. One visual rule, used consistently, and the insects become legible without a word.
A world becomes real when its rules produce the conflict. If your factions could be fighting over anything, the setting is scenery. Here every position follows from a different misreading of the same ecology. Deliver the rules through handling. Gloves, a mask, a held breath, a hand that’s hardened. The reader learns what’s dangerous by watching people be careful. Then let your protagonist know one true thing nobody else does, and make her have learned it by work the reader witnessed. Nausicaä’s cellar is the whole difference between a character who’s right and a character who’s correct because the author says so.
A Protagonist Who Solves Things by Paying Attention
Nausicaä is competent in a way that’s still uncommon. She flies well, she fights when she has to, she’s physically brave, and none of that is what resolves the story.
What resolves it is that she notices. She works out how to calm an enraged Ohmu, she recognizes what the baby insect is being used for, and she understands the stampede before anybody else does because she’s spent years watching the creatures nobody else will approach. I’m a pushover for a hero who wins by paying attention, and I wish more action films had copied that from Miyazaki.
Her one failure is instructive. She loses her temper early and kills several soldiers in a rage after her father’s death, and the film treats it as a real lapse that frightens her. A protagonist who’s horrified by her own violence is doing something a great many action heroes never manage.
Kushana is the other half of that. The Tolmekian commander is hardly a villain in the usual sense: she’s lost limbs to the insects, she has a coherent plan, and her argument for burning the forest is the reasonable one given what she knows. I like her enormously, and I think handing the opposition the better short-term case while Nausicaä is right on a longer timescale is the smartest choice in the script.
Sumi Shimamoto’s voice work carries a lot of it. Nausicaä is gentle without being soft, and the gentleness reads as a decision instead of a temperament. That’s what makes her insistence on it under pressure worth watching.
Ten Months and a Million Dollars
Topcraft animated the film. Ghibli didn’t exist yet. The schedule ran about ten months and the budget was roughly the equivalent of a million dollars, with animators hired for the single production and paid by the frame.
Isao Takahata produced and by most accounts spent the schedule protecting Miyazaki from the people paying for it. That relationship is the reason the film is coherent, and it’s the working arrangement both men carried into Ghibli. One of the frame animators was Hideaki Anno, later of Neon Genesis Evangelion, assigned the God Warrior sequence. Toshio Suzuki has described it as a high point of the film, and it is: a melting, half-formed weapon firing while its own body sloughs off. Joe Hisaishi wrote the score, his first for Miyazaki, and the collaboration ran four decades from here. The music is doing something unusual for 1984, mixing synthesizer with a child’s voice, and it’s a large part of why the toxic jungle feels sacred and not merely dangerous.
A tight schedule with one protected decision-maker beats a long schedule with committee input. Takahata’s contribution was largely keeping other people away from Miyazaki.
If you’re working with somebody, work out early which of you is holding the vision and which is holding the room. Both jobs are real and doing both yourself is how projects lose their shape. Note also that the constraint shows in the finished film as economy and never as poverty. Fewer frames means the movement that exists is chosen, and a held image with wind moving across it costs almost nothing and reads as calm.
What Warriors of the Wind Did
New World Pictures released a version in the United States in 1985 called Warriors of the Wind, produced by Manson International, cut by about twenty-two minutes and rewritten with new character names. The cuts removed the ecology. Distributors took a film whose entire argument is that the poisoned forest is purifying the earth and edited it into a monster adventure, because the argument was the slow part. What that produced is the clearest possible demonstration of what an edit can do to meaning. Same images, same animation, most of the same scenes, and a film that says the opposite of what it was made to say.
The recut makes my blood boil. Somebody looked at a movie about a forest healing the earth, decided the healing was the boring part, and cut it. Ghibli’s no-cuts rule is the one good thing that came out of the wreckage, and I’d still like a word with whoever made that edit.
The consequence is permanent. Ghibli adopted a strict no-cuts policy for every international release afterward. That’s why the Disney distribution deal in the 1990s came with a contractual guarantee against alteration and why Miyazaki’s films reach foreign audiences whole.
It Paid for Ghibli
Released in Japan on 11 March 1984 by Toei, it took around one and a half billion yen. Against a budget of about a million dollars that’s an enormous return, and it’s the direct reason Miyazaki, Takahata and Suzuki could found Studio Ghibli the following year.
So the film occupies a strange position. It’s not a Ghibli film and it’s the first Ghibli film, and it’s sold as one on every later collection because everything the studio became is visible in it already.
The manga is the other half. Miyazaki began serializing it in Animage in 1982 and didn’t finish until 1994, and the film adapts roughly the first two volumes of what became a far longer and considerably bleaker story.
That’s why the ending feels like a reach. Miyazaki was ending a film in the middle of a story he hadn’t worked out yet, and he reached for an image of hope that the manga would spend another decade complicating.
Adapting an unfinished work means inventing an ending for a story whose author hasn’t decided one. That’s a difficult problem and it usually shows in the last reel.
If you’re in that position, end on a smaller question you can answer instead of the large one you can’t. A film that concluded on the cellar and the clean water would have been complete. The general lesson about scale: justify every leap. This film justifies two hours of them and then makes one it hasn’t paid for, and that single unjustified moment is the only thing anybody argues about.
Should you watch Nausicaä?
Yes, and watch a complete version. This is the film that made Studio Ghibli possible, an environmental argument delivered through gloves and spores and a girl who bothered to look. It gets a 9 from me because nearly every minute is patient, specific and beautiful, and it misses a 10 only because of that reach in the last five minutes. For years the only version most of the world could see had the argument cut out of it, so find the real one.
