Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 11th of March 1984, carrying a story set one thousand years after an apocalyptic war called the Seven Days of Fire. The film was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, adapted from his own manga that had only been running for two years at the time. Its central figure is a 16-year-old princess who rides a jet glider through poisonous forests and soothes giant insect creatures with a bullroarer. That image, at once strange and precise, points to the questions the film kept raising for decades: what does it mean to understand something that everyone else fears? And how does a work made before its creator's famous studio existed become permanently associated with that studio's legacy?

• 2. From Manga to Screen

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  Miyazaki began writing the Nausicaä manga in 1981, serializing it in Tokuma Shoten's Animage magazine. It quickly became the magazine's most popular feature, and Animage's editors, including Toshio Suzuki, pushed for a film adaptation. Miyazaki initially refused. He had a deal with Tokuma to never adapt the manga into a film, and agreed only on the condition that he could direct.

  With only sixteen chapters of the manga completed at the time production began, Miyazaki faced a practical problem: not enough story. He resolved it by narrowing the focus. He took elements from the existing chapters and rebuilt the narrative around the Tolmekian invasion of Nausicaä's homeland, sharpening a political conflict that the manga had developed more gradually. Pre-production began on the 31st of May 1983, and animation work started in August of that year.

  The studio chosen to produce the film was Topcraft, a minor animation house. Miyazaki and his co-producer Isao Takahata selected it because its artistic talent could reproduce the atmospheric sophistication of the manga. Takahata's role was that of executive producer, a position he joined reluctantly even before the studio had been selected. The entire film was made on a nine-month production schedule, with animators paid by the frame.

• 3. Hideaki Anno and the Giant Warrior

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  One animator on the production stood out for a particularly demanding assignment. Hideaki Anno, then a founding member of the studio Gainax, was tasked with drawing the Giant Warrior's attack sequence. Toshio Suzuki later described this as "a high point in the film". The Giant Warrior is one of the ancient bioweapons blamed for the Seven Days of Fire, and in the film it hatches prematurely, manages to destroy only a fraction of the Ohm herd before it, and then disintegrates.

  Anno's work on that sequence left a lasting mark on him. He has said he considers his later series Neon Genesis Evangelion a continuation of Nausicaä, carried out in his own way. That connection runs deeper than influence: the poll conducted by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs at the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival rated Nausicaä second-best animation of all time, placing it directly behind Neon Genesis Evangelion. The two works, linked by the same animator, sat at the top of the same ranking more than two decades later.

• 4. Joe Hisaishi and the Score

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  Takahata enlisted Joe Hisaishi to compose the film's score. For Hisaishi, this was his first collaboration with Miyazaki, a partnership that would extend through many subsequent films. Hisaishi was described at the time as an experimental and minimalist composer, and that sensibility shaped the film's sound.

  The titular theme song, "Kaze no Tani no Naushika", was written by Takashi Matsumoto, composed by Haruomi Hosono, and sung by Narumi Yasuda. A separate piece, "Nausicaä's Requiem", was performed by Mai Fujisawa, Hisaishi's daughter, who was four years old at the time of the recording. Six soundtrack releases followed the film between 1983 and 1992, ranging from an image album to a piano solo collection, reflecting the score's standing as a distinct artistic work. Critics including Helen McCarthy, writing in 500 Essential Anime Movies, singled out the soundtrack alongside the script as the film's primary strengths.

• 5. Influences and Themes

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  Miyazaki drew on a range of literary sources when building the world of Nausicaä. He cited Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Brian Aldiss's Hothouse, Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. He also described the Japanese folktale The Lady who Loved Insects as a possible influence. The protagonist's name and personality were drawn from Homer's Odyssey, where a Phaeacian princess named Nausicaä appears.

  A concrete real-world event shaped the film's ecological imagination: the mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay, and specifically how nature responded and continued to function in a poisoned environment. That observation became the film's central conceit, the idea that the Toxic Jungle is not dying but purifying, producing clean soil and water underground while the surface remains poisonous.

  Scholars and reviewers have identified Buddhist philosophy in the film's moral structure. Loy and Goodhew argue that the film contains no outright evil, only the Buddhist roots of evil: greed, ill will, and delusion. Fear of the poisoned forest generates the greed and resentment that drives the conflict between Tolmekia and the Valley. Ian DeWeese-Boyd summarized Nausicaä's role with a direct quotation: "Her commitment to love and understanding -- even to the point of death -- transforms the very nature of the conflict around her and begins to dispel the distorting visions that have brought it about."

• 6. Warriors of the Wind

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  Before the film reached Japan's cinemas, Tokuma Shoten sold its foreign sales rights to World Film Corporation, which pre-sold global distribution rights to Manson International. Manson commissioned ADR producer Riley Jackson's Showmen, Inc. to create an English-dubbed adaptation, overseen by screenwriter David Schmoeller. The result, titled Warriors of the Wind, opened theatrically in Florida on the 14th of June 1985, released by New World Pictures. A VHS release followed in November 1985.

  Manson's version was cut by approximately 22 minutes compared to the 117-minute Japanese original. The voice actors received no screen credit. Most characters were renamed: Nausicaä became Princess Zandra. The environmentalist themes were simplified, and the subplot involving Nausicaä's childhood bond with the Ohm was largely removed. The United States poster featured characters who do not appear in the film, riding the Giant Warrior.

  Miyazaki was unsatisfied with the result. The experience led him to adopt a strict no-edits clause for all future foreign releases of his films. Warriors of the Wind also prompted him to allow translator Toren Smith of Studio Proteus to produce a faithful English translation of the Nausicaä manga for Viz Media. The Manson cut was eventually replaced in wide circulation by a Disney-produced English dub released on DVD on the 22nd of February 2005, with Patrick Stewart and Uma Thurman in the cast. Alison Lohman voiced Nausicaä after Natalie Portman was originally announced for the role.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  At Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 86 out of 100 based on 7 critics, indicating universal acclaim. Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo named it the second-greatest Japanese animated film of all time in 2009. The 2001 Animage readers poll placed it 43rd among all anime productions. By 2003, it had sold 1.77 million VHS and DVD units in Japan alone.

  Critics have credited the film's commercial success with enabling the founding of Studio Ghibli, making it influential on the institutional level as well as the artistic one. Sega's Yukio Futatsugi cited it as an inspiration for his 1995 rail shooter Panzer Dragoon. Several video games contain Ohm-like creatures treated as references to the film, including Metal Slug 3, Cyber Core, and Viewpoint. Megan Peters identified multiple elements in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) that resembled characters and situations in Nausicaä, including the lead character Rey.

  The film's influence extended into engineering. In 2004, the OpenSky Aircraft Project began attempts to build a real working personal jet glider based on Nausicaä's vehicle, which the film's accompanying book identifies by the German word for gull. A jet-powered version with registration number JX0122 took off under its own power for the first time on the 3rd of September 2013.