Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (1984)

a.k.a Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

117 min
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

After a global war, the seaside kingdom known as the Valley of the Wind remains one of the last strongholds on Earth untouched by a poisonous jungle and the powerful insects...

19K 1.9K 108

10.3%

18:1

8.0

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Dieguito

Incredible story, Nausicaa is definitely one of the biggest heroins in the history of cinema!!

13 years ago

After giving this one a rewatch recently, I was a disappointed. The visuals are stunning of course (as you'd expect) but the narrative was weak and the characters were near-nonexistent. The world was great but underexplored. I love 80s synth but found it ill-fitting to what was on screen. But most egregiously, our main character had no arc. It's unfortunate…they really could have given Nausicaa an interesting path of character development. In Act 1, in the scene in her father's bedroom, she is shocked by what she is capable of when she is blind with rage. The story could have been about her coming to terms with this aspect of herself, and finding a better way to respond to her anger. This journey would have paralleled the nature of the Ohm, and provided a solution to the problem posed by the attitudes and decisions that led to the Seven Days of Fire. But the movie just drops it. She never again confronts her own anger. She is the same, perfect person at the start of the film that she is at the end. That's unsatisfying, as a viewer. Characters gain strength through adversity, and our heroine was a static Christ allegory from the start to the finish. Swing and a miss, on this one.

9 years ago

Siskoid

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a gorgeous, early Miyazaki, based on his own manga of the same name, and it stands right there with Princess Mononoke among my favorites. It shares a lot in common with that film, in fact - an imaginative world where human pollution has created monsters, a princess in the chosen one role, and a lot more violence than in later Miyazaki animations. Like the best anime of the 80s, it's a delight to look at, especially knowing computer assistance wasn't possible. Not only is this world fully imagined and realized, but the story really doesn't go where one expects, possibly because it's collapsing a much longer time line from the manga. There's something quite poignant about Japanese creators working in the shadow of Hiroshima, whether that's a giant monster movie like Godzilla, point-blank docu-drama animes like Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies, or postapocalyptic ecological fables like Nausicaä. The specter of war and environmental disaster is very much at the forefront here, and despite it all, the titular princess and her daring-do have an uplifting effect on the audience, just as they do her people

7 years ago