Nausicaa of the Valley of the wind is one of those movies. I’m talking a movie so famous & renowned that practically everyone has seen, or at least heard of this movie. I won’t waste time talking about the impact it left, how it basically kick-started Hayao Miyazaki’s career, & all that jazz, I’m just gonna get straight into it.
Story:
The story of Nausicaa follows our titular protagonist on a journey to try & save The valley of the wind. We first meet Nausicaa going to the sea of decay to try & recover an ohm shell. We then are taken to the valley of the wind where we’re introduced to the villagers. Hours later a ship comes by carrying with it spores that end up infecting the valley of the wind. The next day some airships operated by the kingdom of Tolmekia comes to the valley of the wind in order to try & recover a fire god creature to use it to burn the sea of decay in order to unite humanity. From there on out it’s about Nausicaa’s journey to try & save the valley of the wind.
The story of Nausicaa is excellent. It has a grand scale attached to it & the stakes are high. The villains also aren’t just hate filled & evil for the sake of being evil. The villains of Nausicaa are fleshed out entities with their own personality traits & charism to all of them. They feel burning down the sea of decay will be for the greater good of all humanity & their motivations come off as believable. It’s also a very balanced story, as it has enough complexity to it to be grab people looking for more involved stories, but it’s simple enough to where the average movie goer can follow along just fine.
The world of Nausicaa is also a very realized world. From the sea of decay itself, to the underground of the sea of decay, to the valley of the wind, to the destroyed kingdom of pejite, every frame of the movie has a distinct landmark about it.
Characters:
The characters in Nausicaa are excellent. All of them have great characterization, good charisma, motivations that actually make sense & reasons to act the way they do. Nausicaa isn’t just an environmentalist for the sake of one, as a traumatizing event from her childhood (watching a baby ohm taken away from her after she tried to protect it to then be presumably killed off screen) & the sand from beneath the sea of decay being able to be used as a purifier causes her to act this way. On the other end Kushana, ruler of the tolmekian’s believes that destroying the sea of decay will benefit the environment & open up the possibility to not only expand her empire, but create more livable environments for the humans. Most importantly of all, she doesn’t act like an asshole about any of this, in fact she not only lets Obaba speak but she orders her soldiers to stop firing at the villagers from the valley of the wind near the end of the movie after they have a misunderstanding. Safe to say the main villain of this movie isn’t just a “big bad villain” & is actually a well thought out, written character with believable motivations & a good personality to match.
Art & Sound
It’s studio ghibli, do I really need to say this movie looks excellent? Backgrounds are beautiful, landscapes are lush, colors are vibrant, it’s an all around excellent production. The animation is also really good & still holds up to this day, it has great flow, there’s never really a moment where the animators get lazy, it stays consistently fluid. Character & Mechanical designs are also well made, character art remains on model & mechanical things such as the weapons, tanks, aircraft, all look great & very distinctive.
Music is phenomenal & dare I say it, Joe Hisashi’s best score, the pieces have great variety, match the tone, create great atmosphere and emotion, the pieces used match their scenes perfectly, it’s almost as if the movie was built around the music it matches so well. Voice acting is also supherb. Sumi Shimaoto as Nausicaa, Yoshiko Sakakibara as Kushana, Gorou Naya as Yupa, it’s all great stuff. Even the minor characters have great performances.
Overall:
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is one of the all time greatest things ever conceived by mankind. From it’s excellent storytelling, brillant characters, lush world, god-tier OST, phenomenal voice acting, & all the little things that add up into an amalgamation of one of the greatest movies ever made, wow. This was only Hayao Miyazaki’s 2nd full feature length film & he hit it out of the park with this one. This is his masterpiece & a movie that him and his team should feel very proud of. This movie created a juggernaut studio that would bring us over 3 decades of entertainment, really put Hayao Miyazaki on the map, & made anime so, so much better. Unsurprisingly, this movie gets the full 10 out of 10. This is my favorite movie of all time, & I don’t see anything topping it.
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