Special: Nausicaä — Part 1: The Messiah in Blue

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind opened on March 11, 1984. Pre-production had begun ten months earlier, on May 31, 1983. The film was scheduled as part of a triple bill: Nausicaä as the main attraction, preceded by two compilations of the Sherlock Hound TV series, also directed by Miyazaki. It is the first time the Japanese audience sees Nausicaä in motion. The last time Miyazaki will allow this character to end by consoling anyone.[1]

The film is not born inside Studio Ghibli, because Studio Ghibli does not yet exist. Tokuma Shoten, publisher of the Animage magazine that was serializing the manga, had no animation studio of its own. Miyazaki and Isao Takahata (reluctantly, in the version Toshio Suzuki would later tell) chose Topcraft, a small studio that had been getting by on subcontracts for the American Rankin/Bass, which had made the animated versions of The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn.

The financing came from an unlikely arrangement. Tokuma put up half. The other half came from Hakuhodo, the second-largest advertising agency in Japan, after its president was personally convinced by Yasuyoshi Tokuma. (Miyazaki’s younger brother worked at Hakuhodo, a fact the official FAQ mentions in passing.) Toei agreed to distribute but did not believe in the project. It tried to cut the marketing budget. Tokuma had to go in person to convince the Toei president to keep the funding.[2]

The score was signed by a 33-year-old composer named Mamoru Fujisawa, who signed as Joe Hisaishi and was just starting out. It was the first collaboration between the two. It would remain in place across every subsequent Miyazaki film, for four decades.

Photo: Shiratani Unsuikyo gorge, Yakushima — the dense cedar and moss forest locally known as the Mononoke Forest. Miyazaki drew the Sea of Corruption’s density and primeval atmosphere from landscapes like this. Photo by Chris 73 / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The film opens on a legend. There is a valley protected by a sea wind that drives off the spores. There is a toxic forest called the Fukai. There are giant insects called Ohmu whose eyes shift from blue (calm) to red (rage) and back to blue, a gradient that works as the film’s internal signage. Nausicaä, princess of the valley, is the only one who listens. She listens to the wind. She listens to the fear of her own people. She listens to the pain of the Ohmu.

Her name carries two inheritances. The first is Greek. Nausicaä is the princess in Book VI of the Odyssey, daughter of King Alcinous, the one who receives the shipwrecked Odysseus on a beach and treats him as a guest without knowing who he is. Miyazaki read Homer as a teenager. The second is Japanese. “Mushi Mezuru Himegimi” (虫めづる姫君), “The Princess Who Loved Insects,” is a short tale from the Tsutsumi Chūnagon Monogatari, a twelfth-century anthology, about a young aristocrat who refuses court protocol to observe caterpillars and study butterflies. Miyazaki crossed the two figures: the radical hospitality of the Greek, the obstinate zoological attention of the Japanese.[3]

The difference from the dominant Western fantasy of the same year is not decorative. In 1984, Disney released Splash, and the classic Disney princess was still waiting to be chosen. The Miyazaki princess enters the poisoned forest because it is the place no one enters. She touches what no one touches. She tries to understand why the world became this way. Nausicaä is introduced above all in a scene at an improvised laboratory, examining spores under a microscope she built herself. Before being a princess, she is a garden scientist.

Her laboratory matters more than it appears to. In a hidden chamber under the castle, Nausicaä cultivates Fukai saplings in clean water and clean soil drawn from the deep, and discovers that, isolated from the soil contaminated by the previous civilization’s pollution, the toxic plants grow without producing poison. The forest is toxic because the soil it is trying to filter is toxic. The revelation is methodological, not mystical. Nausicaä does not arrive at her understanding of the Fukai through feminine intuition or generic empathy with nature, those two Western clichés about Miyazaki characters. She arrives through repeated observation, hypothesis, and experiment. Before being a messiah, she is a researcher. Before being a saint, she is a botanist. The film repeats this detail calmly because it is one of the moral axes that separates Nausicaä from the kind of heroine the West tended to produce in that decade.

The contaminated soil Nausicaä discovers beneath the Fukai has a real-world origin. Chisso Corporation’s (チッソ株式会社) methylmercury discharge into Minamata Bay, Kumamoto, across the 1950s and 1960s, poisoned a fishing community for two decades — and Miyazaki has cited that image of a poisoned land that kept growing as one of the direct origins of the Sea of Corruption.

Memorial de Minamata, Kumamoto. O envenenamento por mercúrio da baía nos anos 1950-60 inspirou Miyazaki: ele viu na forma como a natureza absorveu o veneno e seguiu vivendo a origem da Selva Tóxica de Nausicaä. Foto: Bobo12345 / Wikimedia Commons (Domínio Público)

Another detail the film establishes with economy: Nausicaä flies. She pilots a single-seat glider called the Möwe (“seagull” in German), built decades earlier by Master Yupa himself. The glider has no permanent engine. It rides wind currents. Anyone who has watched Miyazaki draw wind across his career (in Porco Rosso, in Mononoke, in Ponyo) recognizes in Nausicaä the first complete articulation of that obsession. Wind in this film is not setting. It is character. It is what separates the Valley of the Wind from the Fukai. It is what carries Nausicaä. It is what signals, through changes in direction, that the world is about to change state. Topcraft produced animation of wind that was unprecedented at the time and a reference afterward. Layers of particles, foliage in waves, capes in flow. Miyazaki has never since trusted anyone to draw wind without personally revising it.

The conflict arrives quickly. Tolmekia, an imperialist military power from the West, invades the Valley of the Wind. Princess-general Kushana brings with her a terror preserved in embryo: the Kyoshinhei (巨神兵, “giant god-warrior”), a biotechnological weapon of the previous civilization, the one that destroyed the world in the “Seven Days of Fire” a thousand years before. Unstable. Half-awake. Capable of burning the world again if it manages to finish being born.

Kushana is not a generic villain, and even in the tight space of the film this is established. She wears full armor because, in a detail the film mentions in a single line of dialogue, part of her body was eaten by the insects of the Fukai. The armor covers prosthetics. When Kushana speaks of the Ohmu, there is a layer of personal hatred underneath the imperialism. She does not despise Nausicaä. She recognizes her. There is almost a reluctant respect when the two meet, of the kind generals reserve for other generals. The manga will develop this over seven volumes. The film already plants the seed in three shots.

In the film, the Kyoshinhei appears as pure horror. A rotting carcass trying to obey a button. The mouth opens like a wound. The skin melts before it fires. When it fires, it fires badly. It fails. It is monster and it is pathetic. It is a symbol of the past humanity still tries to recover as if it were a trump card. Miyazaki does not hide his contempt. The absolute weapon of the lost civilization is, on screen, an abortion.

When Nausicaä Opens Her Arms

But the heart of the film does not beat there. It beats in the baby Ohmu scene.

Pejite, a rival city-state, captures a wounded juvenile and uses it as bait to draw the adult Ohmu herd against Tolmekia. The creature bleeds. It tries to return to its kind. The humans look and see a tool of war.

Nausicaä looks and sees a wounded child.

This is the film’s turn. Up to that point, one might still see the Ohmu as a threat. In front of that juvenile, the frame inverts: the monster also feels pain. When the herd finally advances, red and huge, it does not look like an army of animals. It looks like the planet itself moving.

Nausicaä then makes the gesture that defines the film. She does not fight. She does not kill. She does not conquer. She returns the young one. She opens her arms. She accepts the impact. She falls. She appears to die.

The Ohmu lift her with the golden tentacles, which by the film’s own visual convention function as a healing device. Hisaishi’s score shifts, rises a half tone, and the blue princess walks across the golden sea of tentacles like a religious figure the film does not even try to disguise.

The music in this scene deserves its own attention. Hisaishi composed a choral arrangement for soprano and orchestra that quotes, without quoting literally, the vocabulary of a Catholic Requiem. Anyone who listens to Nausicaä’s main theme with eyes closed could mistake it for an early twentieth-century funeral mass. It is an authorial choice. Hisaishi and Miyazaki, in a film of Japanese ecological fantasy, deliberately import the sonic vocabulary of Western religious redemption into the scene where Nausicaä returns from the dead. It is not cynicism. It is authorship. In 1984, before Mononoke, before Chihiro, before the Miyazaki who would unlearn consolation, this was a film in which that import worked.

This point matters for Part 2. The iconography of the closing scene is not subtle. Nausicaä extends her arms, is lifted, walks in golden light over a collective mass. It is not resurrection metaphor. It is resurrection image. Miyazaki is direct: anyone watching this scene must recognize the Christian-Buddhist visual vocabulary of redemption through sacrifice. The film is not Christian, nor Buddhist. It is quoting the vocabulary because the vocabulary still worked, in 1984, to deliver consolation.

This is why the film ends as consolation. The Valley of the Wind survives. The Ohmu retreat. The prophecy is fulfilled. Those leaving the theater were the ones who believed purity could save the world, and the ones who wanted to believe. The film opened the commercial path Miyazaki needed to open. Tokuma made money. Topcraft, even so, went bankrupt one year later, on June 15, 1985. Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki bought the assets on the same day and founded Studio Ghibli. Toru Hara, founder of the bankrupt Topcraft, became the new studio’s first manager. Nausicaä is, therefore, the pre-Ghibli film that made Ghibli possible.[4]

But a crack is visible in the film itself, in 1984, if the viewer slows down. The Fukai remains intact. Human division remains. Weapons remain desired. The past remains unexplained. The film ends before the harder question. It shows Nausicaä as a messiah and does not ask whether the world needs a messiah. It shows the Kyoshinhei as a monster and does not explain where it came from. It delivers a nearly happy ending and closes the program before anyone can ask why the nearly.

Miyazaki would have known this better than any viewer. The film covers, with adaptations, only the content of the first sixteen chapters of the manga, which he had already been drawing for two years. The story would continue for another ten years in another medium, and in another moral direction.

In 1985, an American version of the film circulated in the United States under the title Warriors of the Wind, with 22 minutes of cuts, added explanatory narration, reorganized subplots, changed names (Nausicaä became Princess Zandra), and promotional posters showing male warriors who are not in the film wielding a reassembled Kyoshinhei. Miyazaki was furious. The Ghibli “no-edits” policy for international licensing was born literally from this. When, years later, Harvey Weinstein at Miramax tried to cut Princess Mononoke, Suzuki went to a meeting in New York carrying a prop katana, placed it on the table, and said: “Mononoke Hime, no cut.”[5][6]

But in 1984, still inside the story, the Valley of the Wind sleeps in peace for the first time in twenty years. Miyazaki ends the film giving the audience something he will take back slowly, chapter by chapter, over the following decade.

Photo: Forest canopy in Shiratani Unsuikyo gorge, Yakushima. The unbroken ancient cedar canopy — filtering light, holding moss, outlasting centuries — is the visual root of what Nausicaä defends when she opens her arms to the Ohmu. Photo by Chris 73 / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

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This is Part 1 of 2. → Continue to Part 2: The Manga That Destroys the Film’s Paradise