Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Review

The film covers roughly the first two volumes and stops before the manga becomes interesting. What Miyazaki spent the next decade drawing is far stranger and far less consoling: a war epic in which the ecological system everyone is fighting over turns out to have been engineered, the purity it promises turns out to be uninhabitable by the people alive now, and the heroine's final decision is to destroy a guaranteed future in favour of an unguaranteed one.

That is a genuinely radical ending and it is argued rather than asserted. The world building has no equal in the medium. Miyazaki designs insects, aircraft, theology, industrial history and three separate political blocs, and each behaves consistently under pressure. Kushana is the best character, a general written with real command logic.

The art is the obvious obstacle. Miyazaki works in tiny, densely hatched panels with heavy grey, and long passages of massed infantry and swarming Ohmu are legitimately hard to read at page size. Nausicaa herself stays closer to a principle than a person. It remains the most ambitious thing anyone has drawn in seven volumes.