Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika) is Hayao Miyazaki's first directorial debut. Produced in 1984, the movie was popular enough to allow Miyazaki to open his own animation studio.

Plotline
At first glance, Nausicaa would appear to be an early draft of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, however there are significant differences between the two movies. Nausicaa follows a young princess on her journey through a post-apocolyptic world. Nausicaa and her father reign over a small valley called the Valley of the Wind where they live as peaceful, simplistic farmers. The film opens with Nausicaa soaring over the poisonous wastes left by generations long past.

Shortly after she returns to her valley, a large war airship crashes in the valley's fields. The airship belongs to the Tolmeki tribe, who arrive shortly after to reclaim the airship's cargo and to conquer the valley. The leader of the Tolmeki, Lady Kushana, desires to destroy the warring tribes who oppose her as well as the toxic wastes that cover the world. She abducts Nausicaa as a means to manipulate the people of the valley.

On the journey back to Tolmeki, Nausicaa learns that the cargo the airship had was one of the ancient, giant warriors that people of old used to wage mass war on each other. It is the last living of its kind and has been in hibernation for thousands of years. On transport, however, the ship bearing Nausicaa is attacked and she falls into the wastes, accompanied by one of the attackers. From him she learns that the giant warrior was originally found in Pejite, and now Pejite and Tolmeki fight to possess it. The boy, Asbel, leads Nausicaa to the Pejite only to find that the Pejite are preparing to attack Nausicaa's valley. They have stolen a baby Ohmu, caterpillar creature, from the wastes and are using it as bait to provoke the larger, more deadly Ohmu.

The movie continues on to follow Nausicaa as she endeavors to stop the warring clans from destroying her homeland.

Interesting notes
While Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke have similar storlines, Nausicaa is has a more distinctly anti-war message than Mononoke. Specifically, the ancient giant warriors can be equated with the atomic bomb. Their power is what created the toxic wastes in the first place. The strange fire attack the resurrected warrior sends out at in the final battle of the film distinctly resembles a mushroom cloud.

Also, Nausicaa is perhaps the ideal heroine: kind, powerful, understanding, and independent. San of Mononoke represents perhaps the opposite of Nausicaa: a woman reclaimed by the more primal, violence of nature and completely unwilling to try and understand those she opposes. Also, Nausicaa, though extremely progressive for animation of its time, is still not nearly on par with the visual style of Mononoke.

It is also interesting to note that Nausicaa is taken from both Eastern and Western myth. Nausicaa is the name of a princess in the Odyssey, who assisted Odysseus by rescuing him from sea on his journey home. Miyazaki has stated that he particularly drew on Bernard Evslin's in-depth rendering of the character Nausicaa. The tale of Nausicaa is also drawn from a Japanese myth called "The Princess who Loved Insects."