Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

"Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a manga comic written in the eighties by Hayao Miyazaki, who would go on to become an acclaimed director. It would inspire his early feature-length film of the same name, which would go on to lay the groundwork not just for Studio Ghibli, not just for Japanese animation, but, I would argue, for animation in general, and for so much of what we’ve been able to see that medium accomplish over time. If you want to tease it back to where it all began, the Nausicaä manga is where he was understanding how stories worked. You can see he always had a very intuitive sense of how these things proceeded, but I think you can see him becoming more and more imaginative as he writes this manga. You can see him working with different ideas that eventually show up in other places. There’s a book called Shuna’s Journey, first published in 1983, that came out in English recently. You can see so many of the visual elements that he was working through in real time in Shuna’s Journey appearing in Nausicaä and in some of his later films. Nausicaä was a big hit. The 1984 film adaptation was a big deal for many reasons, both for film and for the entire industry within Japan. Just in terms of these graphic novel series that can sometimes see an adaptation happen, it is genuinely worth a read. It is charming. It reads very well. It is a little bit of its time, but you can tell that this is a guy who wanted to do his version of the Odyssey , just as he was developing. I think he’s at the height of his creative talents now, but you can tell that he already had a mastery of the craft back then. It has all the elements of what would become his career: his fascination with visually striking objects, his staunch environmentalism, flight. You can see it all here. It’s the blueprint for everything that he’d be doing for the next three decades. The influence of his films and his aesthetics in general are everywhere, particularly within American comics, which are trying to evoke some of the Japanese perspective. I think that the entire world would be unrecognizable without this specific comic existing. You Are What You Watch is all about the science of how pop culture impacts the world as a whole—whether that’s our society, our minds, our identities. Whether seeing somebody have a gay relationship in Heartstopper sparks something in you, whether I Kill Giants allows you to cope with grief or stress, these things leave us fundamentally changed in a way that, historically, we haven’t given them enough credit for. In the book, I try to explore all the different ways in which our society—our science, our military, our minds, our bodies, our psychology, how we see the world and the people within it—is affected by things like this. Time and time again, we have seen movies act as mechanisms for empathy. Various studies have been conducted in individual capacities showing that. For instance, people who had a very strong relationship with Harry Potter books while they were growing up tended to have a more favorable attitude towards immigrants, refugees and people who were potentially in a state of difficulty in their lives. One of the things that I mention in You Are What You Watch is tourism. I think that people’s worlds really are broadened by reading because they will oftentimes embark to the very places that they see. The Lord of the Rings movies were a gigantic motivation for a ton of people to start traveling to New Zealand. For a decade now, Japan has seen a surge in tourism, based on the Pokémon films and the Miyazaki movies. Americans want to visit the country that has produced so many of these interesting and beautiful objects that we’ve come to love. You can see people’s perceptions of the world around them consistently adapt, based on what they see in books."

"Hayao Miyazaki is less well known for the fact that he is a great manga artist. Nausicaa is probably his manga masterpiece. It’s very important in understanding Miyazaki preoccupations and the themes that will come up in his later work, and also his way of looking at the world in a futuristic sense. He’s very prescient. Nausicaa is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Industrial toxins have pretty much destroyed the earth and there are just a few human communities left hanging on. He based this idea on what happened in Japan a decade or so earlier: a bay in Japan was accidentally poisoned by a large industrial chemical country. He drew on that to imagine what the whole world would be like with unchecked industrial toxicity. In his world, insects have grown bigger; humans are trying to get by under these new conditions; there’s still violence; there are still military maneuvers. It’s an epic manga, and a very entertaining work. “For 1981 it was so novel to feature a female lead character who was smart, non-sexualized, great at science, good with a sword and a leader.” From the point of view of understanding Miyazaki and manga, what’s particularly appealing about Nausicaa is it has a very strong female protagonist, a woman named for the Greek princess in Homer’s Odyssey . For 1981 it was so novel to feature a female lead character who was smart, non-sexualized, great at science, good with a sword and a leader. For the period, this was unique. We had no characters like Nausicaa in America. This competent, independent heroine becomes the kind of progenitrix of a long line of competent, independent female leads in Miyazaki’s work. Nausicaa also set a pattern for other manga authors and other anime characters and even infiltrated American culture. For instance, one of my students pointed out that the female protagonist in the Force Awakens , Rey, her actions in the first scene of that film are very clearly modeled on Nausicaa. Nausicaa also had a poignancy and depth to her, that is remarkable not just in manga but in literature in general. She is a really interesting multi-layered character. The style you see in Nausicaa is certainly very popular in manga and anime, and that style also imprinted American movies. The paradigm of stories about epic journeys into a fantastic immersive world filled with alien characters who engage with humans, is something you’ll see in, for instance James Cameron’s Avatar . Miyazaki definitely molded that paradigm."