Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä
   Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

If I were to choose a single favorite film of all time, it might be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. When I was about 11 years old, my sister and I were both sick one weekend and we borrowed several movies from a neighbor. One of them was Warriors of the Wind, which I would much later learn is a severely edited and somewhat inaccurately translated version of the original 1984 masterpiece by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Obviously the cover artist didn't see the film, but it's fun to find the vaguely familiar elements from this and other shows.

This was the first example of Japanese Animation I had ever seen other than Voltron, and I was amazed at the quality of both its art and its story. It was a great contrast to the cartoons I was used to, those aimed at children that assume children are fairly mindless.

The story of Nausicaä (or Zandra, as she is called in Warriors of the Wind) influenced my thoughts, my drawings, and especially my taste in entertainment. It took a few years to track down a copy of my own, since the American version had already been out of production for some time, but I was eventually able to special order it. Years later, I got my hands on a copy of the original with English subtitles, and was finally able to see the large segments of the film that were cut in my familiar version, and learn the true plot, which was actually quite different and even better than the story I knew.

Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli has also produced several other films that are worth seeing, such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away.

Nausicaä resources:
Nausicaa.net	A comprehensive Studio Ghibli site.

back back back