Nausicaa: Better than Mononoke, I’d say

movie opinion

I just watched in its entirety, for the first time, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 sci-fi/eco-parable available now broadly for the first time in U.S. DVD release.

I’m fairly well-versed in Miyazaki after a few years of catching up; my first screening was the Miramax U.S. theatrical release of Princess Mononoke, I’d guess about 5 years ago. Since then, I’ve repeatedly rented and watched much of the Studio Ghibli box set; I’d seen bits and pieces of Nausicaa in the original Japanese prior to this week.

All in all, Nausicaa is an engrossing watch, if a little simplistic in its morality. It’s an obvious precursor to Mononoke; the central theme of man’s self-defeating war on Nature is inescapable, as is Miyazaki’s mildly disquieting (at least to my occidental sensibilities) fixation with 14-year-old heroines on the verge of sexual awakening. Not that Nausicaa is in any way lurid; there’s blood and dead people, not quite so much as in Mononoke, but enough to be confusing – probably not terrifying – to younger children.

But the sexual tension is there. As are the tentacled giant bugs and amorphous humanoid monoliths you’ll find in virtually all Miyazaki’s work. It’s visually stunning, and his omnipresent metaphor of transforming flight (again with the sexual awakening) is pulled off here perhaps as well as in any Miyazaki film, save his masterwork Spirited Away.

Nausicaa stands out for me because it avoids Mononoke’s moral tidiness. The bad guys (as in Mononoke, embodied in a powerful but distant female leader) aren’t summarily killed off, but they also don’t reform – they just go away when there’s nothing left for them to gain. It may seem like a minor distinction, but for me, it was a highly satisfying change of pace.

I don’t necessarily agree with this review’s comparison of Nausicaa and Mononoke, but it’s well worth a read.