the pollution lies in the earth itself

nausicaä of the valley of the wind (hayao miyazaki, 1984)

image from fancaps

In the far future, after what is clearly the aftermath of nuclear war, humans live in small cities and towns outside of the “Sea of Decay,” a forest full of toxic spores and gigantic insects, like the ohmu, which are sort of like gigantic rollypollies covered in eyes. Humanity retains some machinery from the past, like planes, but all the airships we see in this movie are so rickety it’s safe to say they aren’t building new ones. The Valley of the Wind is protected from the Sea of Decay by its winds, which the town also uses to operate windmills. Nausicaä, the princess of the Valley of the Wind, is drawn to explore the Sea of Decay, even though it’s dangerous. (Her father is bedridden and dying from the effects of accumulated exposure.)

One day a giant airship crashlands near the Valley of the Wind. There are no survivors, but one girl lives long enough to tell Nausicaä that the cargo must be burned and destroyed. Nausicaä assures the girl that everything is being burned up, but this turns out not to be true. The ship’s cargo has survived and it seems troublingly organic. Before anybody can investigate further, however, the Valley of the Wind is invaded by the army of nearby Tolmekia, who kill Nausicaä’s father. She kills several of them in a rage before her mentor, Lord Yupa, steps in and ends the violence.

Lord Yupa addresses himself to the leader of the invaders, a woman named Kushana: if she had cause to declare war, she should have sent a messenger in advance. She concedes the point but doesn’t seem all that troubled by the fact that her men just killed an old man in cold blood. She then explains her plan to the people of the Valley of the Wind: the cargo on the ship is a “God Warrior,” a weapon that previously all but destroyed the world. Kushana plans to resurrect the God Warrior but use it to destroy the Sea of Decay. An old woman protests that actually whenever people try this out they just end up causing the Sea of Decay to spread. Kushana is unmoved by this objection. Those were other people. She is Kushana. It will work this time.

The God Warrior cannot be transported out of the Valley of the Wind, so Kushana leaves her second in command there and takes Nausicaä away with her as a hostage. However, they are attacked. Remember that girl who died? She had a brother, his name is Asbel, and he’s mad as hell. The ship Nausicaä and Kushana are on goes down into the Sea of Decay. Kushana briefly tries to reassert her authority but only succeeds in summoning some insects. Nausicaä goes after Asbel, who is shooting insects and has thus made them extremely angry.¹ The two of them fall through the forest floor and discover that beneath the Sea of Decay there is purified earth and water. Far from being a threat to mankind, the Sea of Decay is slowly cleaning the earth.

It turns out Asbel has friends who are all maybe even more convinced of the power of being built different than Kushana, because their genius plan is to provoke insect attacks on the areas where Kushana is, even though this plan not only completely destroys wherever the insect rampage but also spreads the Sea of Decay. Nausicaä is understandably not a fan of plan “send a bunch of insects to destroy your home and also all the people there” and after a struggle escapes. She figures out that Asbel’s stupid friends are provoking the attack by torturing an ohmu infant.

Meanwhile, back at the Valley of the Wind, Kushana has returned and is about to end up in a war with the villagers when everybody realizes there is a stampeding herd of ohmu coming in the distance. Kushana goes to get the God Warrior, even though it’s not fully done yet, because if not now, when. I think this reasoning is sound but when she does get it out there, the God Warrior falls apart in a big gooey heap. This scene rules, let’s all pause for a moment and watch it again:

Nausicaä returns the infant ohmu to the herd but at the cost of her own life. But the ohmu resurrect her, thus fulfilling a prophecy. Kushana goes home, having become a somewhat better person. We see that there are signs of new life growing in the clean earth under the sea of decay. The end.

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I’ve never considered myself a fan of this movie. I remembered it primarily for the tremendous scene of the God Warrior, which was also one of Hideaki Anno’s early triumphs. I don’t think it would be exactly unfair to say that Nausicaä is Miyazaki’s first attempt at the material he’d tackle again in Princess Mononoke, down to “a compelling female antagonist who’s missing an arm,” and that Princess Mononoke is just a better movie in much the same way that Lady Eboshi is a better character than Nausicaä’s Kushana. Both Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä are concerned with how humans can co-exist with the greater natural world, but Princess Mononoke is both less optimistic (there’s no person so pure of heart that they can heal the divide just by existing) and less misanthropic (people are not almost synonymous with poison).

In general, the degree to which Nausicaä is both a sweeping adventure story with a charismatic, lovable heroine and a deeply misanthropic movie with an attitude toward humanity that stops a few yards short of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement² makes it a difficult movie for me. Nausicaä herself is all but the only good human being, and the good actions of the individual human beings she meets along the way are usually ineffectual, as when Asbel tries to help her and is immediately knocked out with a wrench.³ People caused the ecological collapse and will continue to keep causing it, because they are stupid and don’t learn and always think that they are the exception. Unlike the insects, which only attack defensively, most of the human aggression in this movie is downright stupid; Kushana’s army shows up and kills Nausicaä’s father and then she is like well I’m not here to slaughter people, as if that was not what she just did. Later, Kushana is only prevented from eventually blowing up the world again by releasing the God Warrior when it’s not yet ready. Humans are, very consistently, the only creatures that do not have a place in the harmonious ecosystem that has developed in spite of them and which is purifying the earth of their mistakes.⁴

But all this heavy humans are the problem stuff is packaged with a cute girl and her cute animal mascot, and it is fun to watch her fly around, and she is a friend to all, she certainly doesn’t hate people, so who’s to say that this movie is misanthropic, really.…

Rewatching this movie, though, I found I liked it more. Some of that is probably because of reading the manga, which is quite different. Where Nausicaä-the-movie places Nausicaä into a fairly straightforward conflict against both an evil militaristic country and rebel forces that have become corrupted, Nausicaä-the-manga takes place in a dizzying conflict in which sides and alliances are constantly shifting because what is driving the war is the dwindling human population and the scarcity of resources. By the time Nausicaä reaches the end of the story, the global picture is complete chaos, and the ultimate villain is something you could not anticipate: essentially, the scientists of the past, who have engineered the plans for the eventual purification of the world. They created the Sea of Decay and have plans for what will eventually follow it. (This purification would also mean creating a world in which currently extant humanity, having been adapted to the poisoned present, cannot live.) Nausicaä refuses the plan of the ancient past and chooses the human life that actually exists and blows them up, a moment memorably described by Hideaki Anno as the moment when Miyazaki “took off his underwear, and his penis was erect.”⁵

In other words, the way the movie is simpler and its conflicts more obvious made it work for me as a genuine alternate take on the manga’s material, and the stuff in it that bothers me is worked out in the manga over time, which in turn makes them bother me less in the movie, even though they are independent works. The manga ends on a different note than the movie’s miraculous healing of its heroine and ending of hostilities: humanity has to make a life for itself in the world that is, which is a world of corruption, decay, and death. Its attempts to control life and death (and with them, the future) are doomed to failure, because life is free to choose its own way.

The other thing that I did not like about Nausicaä back in the day is the way it feels almost like a shaggy dog story. The big feared God Warrior that might destroy the world just—dies. To me this is how a lot of the movie goes. Even Nausicaä turning out to be the fulfillment of the prophecy feels like it doesn’t really “mean” anything, it’s just a neat moment.⁶ Rewatching it, however, this bothered me less and I felt like this refusal of narrative satisfaction is an aspect of what the movie is doing. It does matter that Nausicaä is a good person: that is why she can avert the ohmu stampede. But it isn’t going to fix the world. Nausicaä asserts that heroism is real and that it matters but that its reach is always limited.⁷ Part of what makes Nausicaä (in either form) an effective work of “climate fiction” is that it doesn’t take the position we’re going to ruin the earth and we’ll all die.⁸ It says: we’re going to ruin the earth and we’re going to live in that earth, the same way we live in this one.

Nausicaä’s characteristic decision through the movie is to allow somebody to vent their fear and aggression on her, much as the trees of the Sea of Decay eat poison. It’s an interesting quality because, while nobody would characterize her as “passive,” it is at the same time this ability to absorb what others hurl at her that is her biggest strength.⁹ Through this ability to stay calm while she’s bitten or shot at or otherwise threatened, she changes a lot of individual hearts throughout the movie. Still, even she, at the end, picks up a gun and threatens somebody into doing what she needs them to do. Her holiness is revealed not to be a refusal to live in the real world but as a sign she may be the only person to do so.

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• Walk with me for a moment. Nausicaä comes out in 1984… the first Chocobo appears in Final Fantasy II in 1988… hmmmmmmmm.

• I find myself looking forward to Castle in the Sky, which is a personal favorite, because it’s also about what’s alive versus what’s mechanical. I think one of the things that keeps Miyazaki fun on this theme is that he obviously loves machines. Sometimes indeed he could be accused of loving machines too much.

• Nausicaä is a very beautiful movie and a lot of the designs find a careful balance between “cute” and “troubling”… for instance, the ohmu have those big ol’ eyes (cute) and those terrifying hermit crab–esque legs (troubling).

• I love the air battles in this movie and am looking forward to rewatching Porco Rosso.

• I didn’t see an Animation Obsessive post about this movie specifically, but here’s one about a music video Miyazaki was working on that is a bit relevant:
  

  The Dark Music Video That Saved Miyazaki

  Here’s one about his image boards:

  Hayao Miyazaki's Image Boards

  Also, from this other post, I’m pleased to see that Miyazaki shares my bias for just calling things cartoons: “A long time ago, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the term manga eiga (‘cartoon film’) was commonly used to refer to animation in Japan. Although the word anime came into wide use by the ‘80s, Miyazaki kept calling his work manga eiga.”
  

• When I was looking for the quote from Anno about the ending of the manga, I found this amazing exchange (I feel like maybe one of you posted this in the comments once?):
  
  How about, your disciple, Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion”, from your point of view, Mr. Miyazaki?

  
  Miyazaki: I can’t watch it for more than three minutes. It’s unbearable to watch.
  

• Supposedly, Nausicaä is very influenced by Dune. Which means it’s time to ask the magic eight ball once again.…
  

  

  Well well well.

• Over the summer I picked up a book called Prehistory of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Whether or not this book is worth purchasing depends on how much you want to look at pictures in a book where all the context is in a language you probably cannot read, but I enjoyed leafing through it. Here are some pictures I took of some of the pages:

  

  

• So… what next? Here’s what I got:

  • November 8: Dallos

  • November 22: Castle in the Sky

  • December 6: Grave of the Fireflies

  • December 20: TBA. (It’s cutting it close to Christmas, but I just don’t think we can end the year on Grave of the Fireflies.)

1. One of the more mystifying things in Nausicaä (both forms) is that the insects are completely reactive—they do not attack people unless provoked. Once provoked, they are extremely dangerous and almost unkillable. So you might ask: why not simply… not provoke them, particularly given that to provoke them you basically have to fire a gun in their face (or steal a child)? It is a great question but boy people keep on doing it. Kushana appears to be missing half her body from insect attacks. Even though Lord Yupa makes a reference early on to insects stealing a baby there is never anything that indicates this actually happens.

2. somebody’s gonna get mad at me for this, i can feel it

3. Yes, Lord Yupa and the various old men who follow Nausicaä around are good, and so are the women who help her out on that ship. But the old men are also basically useless.

4. In Princess Mononoke, people are, first of all, given a clear reason to be in conflict with the forest; secondly, Nausicaä herself is split across Ashitaka and San, and the character of San is so radically estranged from humanity that she simply despises them as a category. It’s a better movie because very few people in it are bad or acting from bad motives. Lady Eboshi is basically heroic unless she is viewed from the perspective of the forest.

5. If I have to imagine this you do too.

6. For some reason Miyazaki is so afraid you’ll miss this event that he tells you that’s what’s happening three times (the kids say it, the old woman says it, and there’s an image overlay). That did drive me a little crazy.

7. In some ways this is a hard thing for a work of heroic fantasy (which I think Nausicaä basically is, despite the post-nuclear setting) to do; in another sense it’s a very classic thing to do, it just tends to be ignored. Lord of the Rings is also a story about both the necessity of and the limits of heroism but try telling that to Peter Jackson.

8. I’m not comparing it to anything specific here.

9. In general, I think the frameworks of “passive” / “active,” “agency” and lack thereof, etc., don’t really make a lot of sense applied to Miyazaki’s movies, but it’s hard not to slip into them. Nausicaä is not a “passive” character but her biggest moments involve her doing nothing and accepting what will happen to her.