Hayao Miyazaki: A Celebration

Part 2

However, Miyazaki didn't originally want to turn his story into animation, despite encouragement from ANIMAGE, the magazine serializing Nausicaä. According to The Art of Nausicaä book, it was only when Tokuma, ANIMAGE's publisher, offered to sponser a theatrical feature that Miyazaki finally agreed to make it.

Because Tokuma had no studio facilities, Nausicaä was animated at Top Craft, which also animated such U.S. Rankin-Bass fantasies as The Hobbit, The Last Unicorn, and Flight of the Dragons. However, Nausicaä is now viewed by Miyazaki devotees as a "seed" Ghibli film. Not only does the film have the lavish technical and story values which later became the studio trademarks, but it also involved many future Ghilbi staff. Top Craft's president Toru Hara later became Ghibli's first CEO, while other familiar names included producer Isao Takahata and composer Jo Hisaishi.

When he made the film, Miyazaki had written sixteen chapters of Nausicaä for ANIMAGE, but the story was no where near an end. Miyazaki's solution was economical. For most of the way, the film closely followed 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 Nausicaä's home, turning a background location into the film's narrative center. He also amalgamated two of the manga's warring factions, and telescoped sundry other details. Overall, the resulting film is a fair translation of the first two hundred manga pages.

The scenario in Nausicaä is a complex one. Millennia from now, civilization is destroyed in a man-made cataclysm called the "Seven Days of Fire." The remaining humans are divided into warring kingdoms, medieval retro-cultures with scattering of high-tech armaments (fighter planes, tanks, and biological weaponry). Most of the world is covered by the "Sea of Corruption," a luminous forest of fungus shrouded in poisonous miasma fog and inhabited by giant, mutated insects. In contrast, Nausicaä's valley home is a quasi-European idyll: Protected from decay by fresh sea breezes, its meadows, windmills, and midieval castle might have been transplanted straight from Miyazaki's Lupin III movie, Castle of Cagliostro.

Nausicaä herself was based on a minor character in Homer's Odyssey. In the classic Greek poem, Nausicaä is the Phaeacian princess who cares for Ulysses when he is naked and dying. In comments published in the first compilation volume of the Nausicaä manga (reprinted in Viz Comics' English edition of the manga), Miyazaki explained how he came across a retelling of Greek myth in a small dictionary by Bernard Evslin which embellished the character. According to Miyazaki, Evslin had described Nausicaä as "a beautiful and fanciful girl, quick on her feet. She loved playing the harp and singing more than the attentions of her suitors or pursuing earthly comforts. She took delight in nature and had an especially receptive (or sensitive) personality." Miyazaki also lined Nausicaä to an insect-loving princess from Japan's Heian period (AD 794-1185) that he remembered reading about. As he put it, "She was regarded as an eccentric, because even after reaching a marriagable age, she loved to play in the fields and would be enchanted by the transformation of a pupa into a butterfly." Miyazaki went on to explain how these two characters fused in his mind to become his own character of Nausicaä. (For the full commentary click here).

Miyazaki's Nausicaä is effectively Evslin's character recreated as the teenage princess of the Valley of Wind, a refuge for mankind on the edge of the sea of corruption. The valley's fragility is established in the film's prologue, where a traveler enters a similar haven, once prosperous, now destroyed by the all-invading rotwood. The credits are similarly downbeat, showing humanity's decline and the fall beautifully depicted in a Bayeaux-like tapestry. Yet as the film proper starts, we see Nausicaä--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 are almost wordless as the viewer shares Nausicaä's contemplation of an alien Earth.

True to form, Nausicaä shares the empathy and intuition of Miyazaki's other heroines. When she sees her mentor Yupa pursued by an angry ohmu--a giant crawling sentient insect, exploding from the depths of the toxic jungle--she imitates its call to calm the beast. The same scenes demonstrates her ability to "ride the wind," surfing the breezes on a glider called a mehve (from the German moewe, "seagull"). Such powers are tested in the subsequent story, in which Nausicaä's valley is caught in a war between two great kingdoms, Torumekia and Pejitei (which plays a similar role to the Dorok empire in the manga). The latter unearths a God Warrior, an ancient weapon that could reduce what's left of the world to ruins. Captured by the Torumekians and sealed in a gunship, the God Warrior crashed down in the valley: the Torumekians react by invading, killing Nausicaä's father, and taking the princess hostage.

At first, Nausicaä could be taken for a standard fairy-tale princess, a mix of precocity and childish innocence. But as the film progress it's clear that she's a self-reliant heroine. Her innocence does not come from childish naivete but scientific wonder. She respects her father Jhil, but her calling is self-imposed and self-defined. As for her innocence, Miyazaki floors the audience with a scene where Nausicaä finds Jhil murdered in his castle bedroom. Formerly, Nausicaä's empowerment has been spiritual; now she kills her attackers in a fight which would be ludicrous if it weren't played with total conviction. In many films this would be a misculinizing rite-of-passage, or a moral object lesson. The Nausicaä scene suggests both, but the lack of clear messages lends the scene special ambivalence, mirrored by Nausicaä's horror at what she's become.

By the next scene Nausicaä has switched back to a gentle princess, bravely supressing 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 Nausicaä was killed early on, confirming the princess' mortality); equally, Nausicaä is no safe heroine. Her development is extended when Yupa finds Nausicaä's secret room in the castle foundations. Here the princess nurtures plants from the Sea of Corruption, quite against valley custom.. Already Nausicaä knows the flora are non-toxic when given clean earth and water. But such personal projects are now 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 Nausicaä diminishes into a vulnerable, downcast girl, terrified of the power within herself.

Nausicaä faces many perils--an electrifying aerial dogfight, communion with the ohmu, a brush with a man-eating insect of the rotwood--before finding her true calling. Crashlanding in the Sea of Corruption, she discovers a giant cavern beneath the forest floor. After 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, Nausicaä realises the Sea of Corruption is nothing less than a world cleanser: Pollution is taken into the trees, which petrify to stone and crystallize the poison into sand. Miyazaki uses the location's tranquillity as a nautral "breathing space," a place to stop, reflect, and wonder--Nausicaä simply lies on the sand and lets the peace wash over her. It is a classic Miyazaki moment, similar devices being used in all of his later films.

Afterward, it's back into the breach. In Miyazaki's condensed script, the main motive of both Torumekia and Pejitei is to destroy the poisonous rotwood (hence the import of the God Warrior), and so the second half of the film, for all the battles and adventure, 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, the other having been lost to an insect), she follows many of Miyazaki villains in being less evil than hubristic. Kushana sees herself not as a destroyer but as savior, burning the rotwood to the ground to restore Earth to its human masters. One scene, omitted from the manga, shows an ordinary valley dweller vainly explaining her mistake to her: "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 nuture a forest. We prefer water and wind." Sadly, Kushana doesn't listen until almost too late.

In a tremendous climax, 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 newborn God Warrior, a fire-spitting monster, sets off impressive nuclear-style detonations but disintegrates before the oncoming ohmu. The film pulls away from the battle, and the last minute center on Nausicaä's martyrdom 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 Nausicaä manga, it is an astounding sequence and one undiluted by the deus ex machina which ends the picture.

On its own merits, Nausicaä is a superb peice of cinema. Many fans rate it as their favorite Miyazaki film, while Nausicaä herself regularly tops anime polls as the medium's most beloved character. Yet Nausicaä is arguably the least of Miyazaki's features. In retrospect, the main problem is the compression from the manga, with surfeit of runaround and characters in the second half, combined with a brusque end which leaves several issues unresolved. In particular, the manga shows Nausicaä's moral development in a much more complex and ambiguous way. Also, compared to later Ghibli works, Nausicaä's animation now appears somewhat dated. Character movement is often stilted, and the backgrounds are sometimes static, while the epilogue (played under the closing credits) has instances of alarmingly bad drawing. In compensation, there is the film's vibrant design and color scheme, while some sequences--the opening tour through the luminous rotwood, the subtle encounter in Nausicaä's hidden room--are still stunning today. Nausicaä also benefits from composer Jo Hisaishi's delicate, oft-exquisite score, the first of many, as well as numerous evocative images, as the creatures bear her body to the sky. Above all, the film has the exhileration of a genuinely novel scenario, combining aerial dogfights, retro-technology, surreal landscapes and eco-mysticism.

The article continues with Laputa and Mononoke, which I decided not to include due to ::gasp:: laziness. But if I get enough requests from people wanting these two articles then I will make sure to include them.
-Crono