Hayao Miyazaki: A Life Dedicated To An Art Form Part Three

Hi every­one and wel­come to part three of my anthol­ogy of the work of Hayao Miyazaki.

In this third part, I want to focus on what can arguably be called Miyazaki’s great­est work..Nausicaa of the Val­ley of the Wind.

There has been much said about this ani­ma­tion fea­ture, from it being an Anti war movie to being a tableau about the plight of the environment…but let’s start at the beginning…

Work on the movie had begun in May of 1983, and the movie itself would be released in March of 1984..that’s right kids, this film was done in just under a year.

This was an amaz­ing feat to be sure con­sid­er­ing that Miyazaki had six­teen chap­ters of Manga  of this story already fin­ished, he felt that he wanted to make this film a sep­a­rate entity, so that it would not con­flict with the sto­ry­line he had already estab­lished in the manga.

The Nau­si­caa sto­ry­line is set many mil­len­nium in the future, in a post apoc­a­lyp­tic world, and yet the story owed lit­tle to the world of Sci­ence Fic­tion, but rather used the ele­ments of Japan dur­ing World War II as an influence.

As you can imag­ine, the pro­duc­tion sched­ule for this movie was very tight, and french artist giant Moe­bius, would con­trast the nine month Nau­si­caa sched­ule and it’s mil­lion dol­lar bud­get, with that of the movie Lit­tle Nemo-Adventures In Slum­ber­land, co-production from which Miyazaki would with­draw from after doing some of the scenic design chores.

There has been some claims made that Frank Herbert’s fic­tional work Dune, was an influ­ence on Miyazaki’s Nau­si­caa and the cre­ation and nam­ing of the Ohmu or   ” Worm “  crea­tures which can be com­pared to the ” Sand­worms ” of Dune.

The Ani­mal and Plant life in the movie are firmly based on the nat­ural world, and thus gives the movie watcher the sense of nature in the real world.

The first five min­utes of the film depict the strange and yet some­how famil­iar and inter­est­ing insects of the film, as Nau­si­caa walks thru the lumi­nes­cent depths of the ” Poi­soned Forrest “.

The Ohmu are depicted as large, pow­er­ful, and yet at the same time timid and sen­tient creatures.

They are dri­ven by an intel­li­gence that is dri­ven by an evolved social system.

This imagery is in stark con­trast to the scene of the dead vil­lage where we first glimpse Yupa for the first time in the film, through the lay­ers of dust and decay, which give the aura of death and des­o­la­tion in the poi­soned forests, once the viewer’s per­cep­tion has adjusted to the hal­lu­cino­genic scenery dis­played on the movie screen.

So here is the end of part three…and part four will focus on the Char­ac­ters of the movie and more.