nausicaä of the valley of the wind manga volume 1

The really strong points of the movie are its pacing (at least until the very end. He just seems a little out of place, though he's quite delightfully drawn. I have a fairly trivial complaint in that the character of Kuratowa is drawn in a slightly more 'anime' style, ala Lupin III, whereas all of the other characters are done in a realistic style. The backgrounds aren't as amazing and the animation not as good as the last few Ghibli films, but for 1984 it was plenty good enough. There aren't really any major weak points in Nausicaa - unless you count the frustrating 12 drawings per second animation which I constantly complain about in Japanese animation. In some ways 'Nausicaa' seems like an early stab in the direction of 'Mononoke', though the latter would delve far more into spirituality and mythology, eschewing the SF aspects. If you're starting to think 'Princess Mononoke', you'd be on the right track. There's also an opposing princess/leader trying to use technology to overcome the apparently hostile environment. Technically not a Ghibli film (Miyazaki actually used the studio which did most of 'The Last Unicorn', and which more or less became Ghibli when 'Laputa' was made a couple of years later), 'Nausicaa' is a far-future SF story with a princess/warrior/nature-lover heroine and strong environmental themes. Whereas it didn't have quite the emotional clout that I look for in an animated feature, it was a stupendously told SF story. Therefore one's expectations should be a little different, and ultimately it was the SF aspect which gave the movie such a high grade in my books. It has more in common with 'Dune' or any number of SF novels - Brian Aldiss's 'Hothouse' springs to mind for one- than it does with a typical western animated children's film.

The first thing to establish is that this is a science fiction epic.

Nausicaä of the valley of the wind manga volume 1