Column Science Fiction Film Club Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Living and Dying in the World We Create Miyazaki’s classic celebrates scientific curiosity as a heroic act. By Kali Wallace | Published on May 21, 2025 Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based upon his manga of the same name. Starring Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, and Yoshiko Sakakibara in the original Japanese cast, and Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Shia LaBeouf, and Uma Thurman in the 2005 English cast. Let’s get this out of the way: Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most written-about filmmakers in the world. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve researched a lot of filmmakers for this column, and there are very few, even among the most revered auteurs, who have as many books, essays, scholarly articles, and documentaries about them and their work. On top of that, Miyazaki himself has spent decades talking freely and frequently about his life and work; he has never been shy about sharing his thoughts about anything from his own art to world politics and everything in between. On the one hand, that’s great, because there is an answer out there for every single question anybody might have. On the other hand, there is nothing that I can say here that hasn’t been said one million times before, and the sum of what has been said is far more than I can sift through in the week or so I have to write this piece. So please forgive me if I awkwardly try to land in the center of an enormous Venn diagram where “things of interest to animation fans” and “things of interest to cinephiles” and “things of interest to sci fi fans” all overlap. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is pretty interesting for how it sits at the intersection of those realms of art and entertainment. It’s a Japanese animated film from the 1980s deeply inspired by folklore, real-world events, and American and English sci fi and fantasy of the ’60s and ’70s. It led to the founding of Studio Ghibli, whose films have so thoroughly influenced the art and business of animation that their impact is apparent everywhere you look. It’s an environmental fable with elements of atomic-era sci fi, and it’s also a story about a princess saving the day. There are giant bugs; they’re kind of psychic. It makes everybody who watches it wish they could fly. But for all of that, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind actually has a pretty mundane origin story. Unlike many of the movies we’ve watched, it wasn’t a flashy debut or a passion project or a genre-bending experiment, and it certainly wasn’t the world’s introduction to a hot young auteur filmmaker. I like that about it. I like that a movie that would have such a cascading effect on animated cinema can come about just because a longtime industry veteran was doing his job really well. Hayao Miyazaki began writing the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1981. He was forty years old and had been in the animation industry for nearly half of his life. He had started in 1963, when he went to work at Toei Animation as an inbetween artist, or one of the animators who would illustrate frames to provide the transition between the main artist’s primary frames. As I mentioned in the article about Soviet animation, he almost gave up as soon as he started; the way he tells it, it was a screening of Lev Atamanov’s The Snow Queen (1957) that convinced him to stick with it. Miyazaki spent the next twenty years or so working in the industry: advancing from inbetweening to key animation and storyboarding, spearheading labor negotiations, seeking out more creative opportunities, writing tie-ins as well as original manga, contributing to dozens of projects in both film and television animation. His first work as a director came in 1971, after he left Toei to work at Tokyo Movie. He directed several episodes of the anime series Lupin III, or Lupin the 3rd Part I. (The “Part I” was added later when more parts came along.) If you’re an anime and manga fan, you already know about the Lupin III franchise; if you’re not, it might be hard to appreciate just how enduringly popular it is. It’s a long-running series of stories about a gentleman thief who gets into all manner of criminal shenanigans; the first manga was published in 1967 and the franchise has been going strong ever since. That included the 1979 film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, which was the first feature film Miyazaki wrote and directed. I haven’t seen The Castle of Cagliostro—feel free to chime in if you have. Although the film was well-received by critics, it wasn’t very successful upon release. It has gained a cult following in the decades since its release, although that’s mostly on account of it being Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film. Even though it wasn’t successful, The Castle of Cagliostro caught the eye of Toshio Suzuki, editor of the manga magazine Animage. Suzuki approached Miyazaki about writing something for Animage, and Miyazaki began Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The manga became very popular, and Suzuki encouraged Miyazaki to make an animated adaptation, even though that hadn’t been part of the publishing agreement. Miyazaki agreed, provided he was allowed to direct it. Animage’s parent company, Tokuma Shoten, was a magazine publisher, not an animation studio, so Miyazaki and producer Isao Takahata had to find a studio to work with. They chose a small studio called Topcraft. You’ve seen their work before, even if you don’t recognize the name: Topcraft worked on several Rankin/Bass films, including The Hobbit (1977), The Return of the King (1980), and The Last Unicorn (1982). Topcraft was already struggling financially by the time Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came along, and in 1985 Miyazaki, Takahata, and Suzuki acquired the studio and folded it into the newly formed Studio Ghibli. But that came later. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was made before the founding of Studio Ghibli, and the studio probably wouldn’t exist if the film hadn’t been successful. It has been retroactively slotted into the Ghibli library, which is why a lot of people refer to it as a Ghibli movie, even though it technically isn’t. I know that’s the sort of thing only pedants really care about, but anime fans are among the world’s most enthusiastic pedants, so maybe I should have called it “the first Ghibli movie” just to provide enrichment for commenters. The Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga has a total of 59 chapters and was published sporadically between 1982 and 1994. The movie was made pretty early in the process, when there were only 16 chapters. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand the story we see in the film is, for obvious reasons, a much shorter and more focused tale than the sprawling, philosophical graphic novel. Much has been written over the years about the many inspirations behind both the manga and film. Those inspirations include Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse, a book I am thinking I need to read since it keeps making unexpected appearances in things I write about. Another facet of the idea came from the industrial pollution of Minamata Bay and subsequent Minamata disease, which was caused by a petrochemical company dumping tons of mercury and mercury compounds into a harbor in a seaside town on Japan’s Kyūshū island. We can see the threads of this real-world inspiration in the sickness that afflicts Nausicaä’s father, and in her desperate questions about who could have polluted the world so badly that nature would change itself in order to adapt. One more source of inspiration worth mentioning is the Japanese folktale The Lady Who Loved Insects, which is about—you guessed it—a lady who loves insects. The woman in the folktale is an eccentric who defies the expectations of Heian-era womanhood by caring more about making up little poems about her caterpillar friends than she does about being beautiful and demure. The story exists only as an incomplete fragment of unknown authorship, but most scholars seem to think it was originally meant as a cautionary tale against such unladylike behavior. But what’s meant as a warning in the 12th century can be wholly aspirational in the 20th century, and that’s how Nausicaä’s character is presented. That’s also what I love most about this movie. Don’t get me wrong; I’m very fond of the whole movie. The art is beautiful in spite of having been animated on a very brisk timeline (as was and still is normal in the Japanese animation industry). The music by Joe Hisaishi is delightful in a very ’80s anime epic kind of way. That was the first time Hisaishi and Miyazaki worked together, and Hisaishi would go on to score all of Miyazaki’s films from that point forward. The story may be simplified from the manga, but it’s still refreshingly complex for a family-friendly animated feature film. It contains all the elements that would become hallmarks of Miyazaki’s films: the earnest naturalism, the determined anti-war stance, the lived-in sense of place and worldbuilding. This movie also has one of my favorite horrifying atomic bomb analogues in sci fi: the Giant Warriors. The film doesn’t go into much detail about them; all we know is that they were created to be more destructive than anything else, they nearly destroyed the world in the Seven Days of Fire, and it’s a bad idea to use them again, because it is always a bad idea to use a weapon that previously destroyed the world just because you think you can control the destruction this time. The warriors are eerie and terrifying—I love the glimpses we get of their skeletal remains in the wilderness—but the best part is the way the revived warrior horribly melts when the Tolmekians try to deploy it. It’s grotesque and ugly in the worst way, strongly implying the ravages of atomic weaponry while looking like an absurd caricature of a human. Fun fact for anime fans: The warrior attack sequence was animated by Hideaki Anno, who would later go on to co-found the studio Gainax, where he would create and direct a little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion. All of that is great, but what I really love about this film is that Nausicaä saves the world with scientific curiosity. Her heroic act is one that is woven into the entire film, from the very first moment she appears on screen. She wants to study and understand the world. She wants to know why her father is sick, why the Sea of Corruption exists, why the Ohmu are so protective of it, why the world outside of her safe valley works the way it does. (Note: The Sea of Corruption is called the Toxic Jungle in the 2005 English dub. I don’t know why. The Japanese name is 腐海, which translates to Sea of Decay. What’s important is that all of these names would make excellent titles for angry, anthemic, environmental-themed metal albums.) Maybe it’s because I find Nausicaä’s curiosity so very relatable. I don’t normally want or need fiction protagonists to be relatable in any particular way, but I did spend many years of my life studying the natural sciences. It’s very difficult for me to understand how people can not be curious about the way the natural world works. So I get it. I get why Nausicaä looks at a post-cataclysm world that everybody else has accepted as inevitable and thinks there is more to it. Everybody agrees the Earth is poisoned and the Sea of Corruption is spreading and the insects are trying to overtake the world. But Nausicaä wants to explore precisely what that means. Where is the poison? Is it in the soil or water or plants or animals? What is making the Sea of Corruption spread? Why do the insects react to stimuli the way they do? What happens when those stimuli change? What would it look like to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the inhospitable wilderness rather than an antagonistic one? It’s not enough to wonder and speculate; she conducts experiments herself, in secret, exploring possibilities she knows others won’t understand. My personal appreciation for sci fi that treats scientific curiosity as a heroic act is one thing, but I think my reaction to rewatching this movie now, in the year of our unending miseries 2025, goes beyond that. It is a distressing truth of modern life that pro-environmental and anti-war stories only ever get more relevant and more urgent. A feeling of urgency doesn’t really sit well with this movie—or any Miyazaki movie, as a sense of timelessness is part of the style—but it’s there nonetheless, rearing its head this time with wearying predictability every time I read an article about politicians attacking scientific research, or college students outsourcing their ability to think to ChatGPT, or nations insisting that this time setting the world on fire is going to cleanse it properly. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a beautiful movie with a lot of very smart things to say about human curiosity and aggression, about the endless adaptability of nature, and most of all about how to view ourselves as an active, intrinsic part of the natural world rather than a force separate from it. Those ideas have only grown in importance in the past forty-one years. I wish we didn’t need so very badly to be reminded of them, but I guess I’m glad we have films like this ready to serve as a reminder to anybody willing to listen. What do you think of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind? I didn’t get into the tale of the infamous first English dub released as Warriors of the Wind (1985), which was so bad it made Miyazaki swear off allowing Americans to edit his films ever again, but if anybody has seen it and cares to share their thoughts, I would love to read them. Same goes for anybody who has read the whole manga! Next week: It’s about cute bunnies, right? Everybody likes stories about cute bunnies. Watch Watership Down on Max, Criterion, Amazon, and more.[end-mark] The post <i>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind</i>: Living and Dying in the World We Create appeared first on Reactor.