Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind(風の谷のナウシカ)

Lily Bradfield

Every frame of this film is like a piece of art! Such a moving tale of environmentalism and feminism.

Conner Dejecacion

Miyazaki holds life as infinitely sacred and precious, presenting every loss of life, every potential loss of life, as a tragedy. That doesn’t stop him from putting to the screen some of the most beautiful war machines ever conceived of. Miyazaki’s planes are penned down to the rivet, his weapons detailed down to the rifling of a barrel and the particular shine of a spent shell casing. Part of the wonder of watching Nausicaä as a kid was the allure of these machines, especially the hulking gunships bristling with turrets and missile launchers. For all my infatuation with Nausicaä and her dreamy idealism, I was equally amazed by watching futuristic flying machines shoot each other to pieces and go down in flames. I can draw from memory the gunship Nausicaä flies throughout the film, have memorized the antiquated, yet elegant profile of her rifle and still laugh at the chunkiness of the brass Torumekian tanks. Miyazaki’s craft is in machines just as it’s in people, and the way he’s able to imbue such beauty and terror into cold metal is a hallmark of his mastery of animation. Only Miyazaki is able to grieve over technology, the sheer waste of craftsmanship when something as beautiful as a plane is used to drop bombs, the waste of life when it’s shot down, death rippling through the skies as the grief travels like a shockwave from those aboard to the ones they loved. The effort Miyazaki puts into his creations proves everything has life, and everything can die. We’d best remember that.