Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be talking about the nineteen eighty four Japanese animated fantasy film NAUSICAA of the Valley of the Wind, an entry that I think fits very well in the Weird House Cinema library because it contains a vision of a world imagine with such a unique, confident weirdness that I think it actually has come to seem less weird in the intervening decades because its original imagery has influenced so much
other stuff that came after it. I just kept noticing, like I feel like I see textures and themes and contours and ideas from Nausica like I recognize them from later media of the past few decades all over the place.
Absolutely, I mean, this is a film that's been highly influential not only within the realm of Japanese cinema and Japanese animation, but also in Japanese culture and the larger cinematic culture of the world as a whole. Like this is a film that casts a long shadow.
So I picked this movie because I knew it had a reputation for being very beautiful and wonderful, and I was a fan of Miyazaki already, the writer director, who we'll talk about later. But after I watched it, you know, in a way, I feel kind of at a loss. We'll have to see how today goes. Because I like this movie so much. I'm actually finding it a bit difficult to put together the correct words to express my thoughts about it. For me, Nausica feels almost a bit
beyond analysis. So I'm going to do the best I can. But this might be a kind of weird episode.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Like this one is we discussed a lot of films that are kind of, you know, treasures from the Temple, or you know, they're kind of sometimes they're curious items that are encrusted with
interesting jewels. But there is a structural completeness and just a completeness of the artistic vision in Nausica that is, to a certain extent, unlike anything we've covered before, Like this might be the first time we've covered a film on weird house cinema that I've long held up is one of my favorite films. You know, some of the films we've watched for Weird House have become some of my favorite films. But Nausica is a film that has a special place in my heart and in my life
with cinema. So I think I've mentioned this before. It's my origin story with Nausica, Okay, And I think a lot of people I was looking around. I saw some other people online that seemed like they had a similar situation. But I had a very early exposure to this film home, and I didn't know what it was when I caught it. This would have been let's see I actually I did some figuring last night and I was able to get a little closer to when it was. I want to
say this was probably the early nineties. I could be wrong on that, but I was with my family somewhere and we were staying in a hotel and that hotel had HBO, and I turned on HBO there and there was this animated movie being played, And you know, I loved animation at that point, but my exposure to animation was was kind of limited based on what was available
to a mainstream audience during the early nineties. So, you know, I knew Disney I knew, and as far as Japanese animation went, I knew things like you know, Voltron and so forth I had. You know, I'd seen Rankin in bass that sort of thing, But this, whatever this was, it it seemed so different. You know, I'd never seen anything that was at all calibrated for outside of a childhood viewership, Like I don't think i'd seen any snippets
of heavy metal. Maybe i'd seen just a little. I think I've seen part of an animated Wagner Opera short on public broadcasting at some point, and that that felt weird because I was like, this is clearly not for children, exactly, like what is this? But yeah, here was this? This this strange, weird and just very dramatic vision. I think the clip I saw was from like the middle to the early end portion of the film, and it enthralled me.
But then, you know it as a family trip, we all had to leave you to turn off the TV, and so we left the hotel room and I did not find out what this film was, but it stuck in my head and I remember it influencing things that I imagined and thought about as like I was transitioning into a different grade, and I was, you know, I was imagining all these these things, and I could see like this monster forming out of all these fleshy ropes
and all. Yeah. So this was a film that touched me pretty deeply, but in that weird childhood way where you don't really have much follow up on it. You don't start asking around like, hey, I saw this movie on HBO, what was it? Where can I find it.
I had a very similar experience with the Revelations of Hotel Cable, with the Mystery Science Theater episode of the Incredibly Strange Creatures who stopped living and became mixed up zombies.
Yeah.
Yeah, Sadly, I don't think I ever caught any Miyazaki on the Hotel Cable though. It was always Sci Fi channel stuff.
Well that sci Fi channel. It had a lot of interesting things on it to expose people too, for sure. But yeah, as far as this goes, this was my earliest exposure to Miyazaki. I didn't know it was Miyazaki at the time. I didn't know this was NAUSICAA and I would be in my twenties before I re entered the world of Miyazaki's films and realized that this perfect film, or at least an imperfect cut of it, was what had enthralled me as a child.
Oh so you think what you saw was part of the Warriors of the Wind broadcast.
I think it likely was when I look at the timeline of how things came together, and so it'll be interesting to keep that in mind as we when we discussed Lawyers of the Wind, which is an early North American release and an edit of the film and also a kind of a pretty rough dub I'm to understand, but at the time, like that's what was available, and that's what that's what I caught a glimpse of.
Well, even if the narrative we were totally structurally butchered and a lot of the meaning were taken out of the film, I can see how it would be appealing. Nonetheless, because one thing that struck me about it was the animation style. This is a film where you certainly do need to hear the dialogue, Like the story told is a wonderful story, and I wouldn't change really a single
thing about it. But I think this movie would also work on mute, like you could chop it up and you know, take out a lot of the story and stuff and still have an enthralling time just watching the animation because every scene really just in the visuals kind of tells the story of its own and the way a lot of the action is realized, the way the characters move and the way shots are framed, is filled with emotion completely by itself, without hearing what anybody says.
Yeah, I mean, in its complete cut, I think this is as close to a perfect film as I can imagine. And I don't use that term, you know, without some forethought here, you know, it's I love flowed movies. Plenty of flowed movies are among my favorites. But I think this is a movie where absolutely everything works. But even if you encounter it outside of that desired form, it's like it's like encountering pieces of a of a temple
that was ruined, you know, in ancient times. You know, even the fragments of it are going to speak of the art that went into it. Like, so, you can edit this film pretty severely, but you can't edit like the environmental themes out of it. You can't edit the weirdness and the wonder out of it completely. You're still going to get some some intense flashes of that.
Right, So even if you do, as the Warriors of the Wind cut apparently did, like try to edit out a lot of the environmental themes about why we can't destroy the jungle and stuff, you would still get the moments in various scenes of like the way that Nausicaa just like physically regards plants and animal life, and so that you'd still get that like emotion coming through just in those moments.
Yeah, yeah, and you still get that, like the music is still there. The score wasn't replaced or anything, which I'm to understand sometimes has occurred with anime films that are cut and put back out in a different different markets. So yeah, I'm not certainly not advising anyone watch the Warriors of the Wind cut of the film. I think that's only for like completists who really want to, you know, understand the history of the film. I have no desire
to see it myself. But I'm also I've also read from some people who have that point out, you know, it's not a good cut, but it's not nearly as bad as it could have been. It's not nearly as bad as maybe some people make it out to be. But hey, when you're dealing with a film that is, you know, arguably perfect in its original cut, like, you know, anything you do to it is potentially a defacement. You know.
I haven't seen it, so I can't really say, but in reading about it, it does seem to me like a pretty profoundly cursed artifact, especially with like the way it was marketed. So there's like this poster for it that just adds in some badass looking male characters who are not characters in the movie. It just got to
put them in the center of the poster. I think we talked about another movie that did that, like a like a kid's fantasy movie from the eighties that had a that had a girl as the protagonist, and so they just eded in like a tough looking dude on the poster, not in the film. What what was that.
A tough on I I don't remember off hand, but yet this.
Oh oh it was one of the Ewoks movies.
Oh yes it was. It was one of It was Battle for Indoor probably, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So this poster so that, yeah, War's the Wind, which we'll continue to talk about here because you know, ultimately, when if you're if you're poking fun about at anything regarding Nausica it's Warriors of the Wind that deserves in the marketing
around where's the wind that deserves that attention? Warriors the Wind seems to the poster seems to reimagine Nausicaa as a basically like a heavy metal it's in the heavy metal you know, comic and film franchise Doctor Doom on there. Yeah, it kind of looks like a Doctor Doom. Also kind of looks like a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer forty thousand, the Tech Priests. There's there's some dude in the middle with a machine gun or a laser
rifle that I don't think is in the film. There's a guy with a gun riding a pegasus, which definitely isn't in the film at all. There are no horses in the film, even much less flying horses. And then there's sort of a like a sexy Nausicaa in the background, but you know, she's like way in the background, Like clearly she's not the focal point of this film.
This poster just has evil corporate sorcery radiating off of it.
It is it is.
The business equivalent of necromancy. That the bad kind where you're making skeleton armies, not the kind where you're just talking to the dead.
It is. It's I hate it. Yeah, I mean, the monster looks kind of cool about it. But but but the monster, the monster looks cool because it is something legitimate taken from the film. Even if they kind of like, I mean, they I'm not even gonna say they made it more horrible looking because it's extremely hard horrifying in the movie itself. But the poster promises us that the future has never been so exciting. And to be clear, Naska is an exciting film. It is a very exciting film.
It has wonderful action sequences of some of the best action sequences I've ever seen. And yet it's so much more than that. It is a thoughtful film. It is a film with deeply well thought out characters. So yeah, this, I guess that's the whole thing about where it's the wind. It attempts to reduce this to something that the producers thought that the public could handle and that the public wanted.
Though, picking up on the first half of what you said here, this is a movie with absolutely thrilling action I complained about action a lot on Weird House Cinema. I often talk about how action scenes are supposed to be understood as exciting, but most of the time they're incredibly boring. You've seen a million of these just mind numbing actions. He's like close up of a guy shooting, close up of something exploding. There's no drama to it.
There is no emotion, there's no suspense, there's no wondering what's gonna happen, there's no really like having feelings about the characters or watching interesting exchanges of power. It's actually fairly rare that a movie gets action scenes right and makes them exciting in the way that they could and should be. And Nausica, despite being a movie that is thoroughly against violence, has some of the best action scenes
of any movie I can think of. When you see Nausica moving in a tense moment, like when she's racing to the rescue, or there's a chase scene somebody's trying to escape, or there's a fight about to break out, it is absolutely thrilling. Like every moment, you are riveted, or at least I was. And it's because it gets all of those things. I just said, right, Like, the action scenes are full of suspense and emotion. You don't know how they're going to unfold, and there is drama
in it in the movements of the characters. There's a lot of like feeling and struggle, and you are right there with them, empathizing with them.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's ultimately that complex alchemy of great filmmaking and great storytelling. You know, it's like all the elements that make me as ACTI films great from just like this, the richness of the animation, that characters move like human beings and animals move like animals, and everything has weight this scene in that scene or intercut so that everything feels like it's in the same place.
I mean, all of this adds together, and again you have stakes, you have characters, and yeah, you have these just riveting action sequences on the land and in the sky.
Oh and especially in the sky, because a lot of the action in this film involves flying. This is another case where I'm sorry, but I feel like I've been struggling to find the right words to express my feelings here. But I was talking to Rachel about this before we started. According you know, there are a lot of movies that involve some degree of kind of power fantasy identification with
the protagonist, to superhero movies, action movies. You want to see the hero do something very confident, be very strong, be a ninja, be a strong fighter, or something like that, and you get a kind of exciting sense of identification with the protagonists there. It's what a lot of superhero movies are about and stuff. Nausica has that, but in a way that I felt is so much better than ninety nine percent of movies like that and kind of
cheapens them by comparison. The way it feels to watch Nausica move and fly with her glider is so thrilling and freeing in that sense of watching a character be strong and free and be able to act swiftly and do what they do with competence and confidence. But it's not about like hurting and dominating people the way it is in most movies like that. It's about the way that she can fly, and I guess really it's about the way that she can be where she needs to be.
Yes, yeah, Because, like you said, the violent action in this film is intense and exciting and very entertaining, but the film has a very strong pacifist core. It is strongly anti violence, and you see that in these themes where violence occurs, but violence almost never solves anything in this movie. It's communication and empathy that solve problems. And yeah, Nausica's ability to move quickly from one place to another like that facilitates that kind of communication and negotiation.
I would say also, though, it's not just a kind of shallow, unthinking rejection of violence, where like it just so happens that violence is always bad. In the movie, like you see innocent characters defending themselves violently against violent attacks in a way that you totally empathize with, you know,
and it's not like they're condemned for doing so. So like it, I think it has a mature relationship to pacifism, you know, where like there are many situations where a character has to use violence and they're not bad for doing it. You understand why they're doing it, and you and you're in a way can be on their side.
But also you kind of you kind of get to zoom out and see the larger relationship of all these violent interactions and see other ways that peace could be achieved or that people could get what they want.
Yeah, and when the violence occurs, the violence has weight, the violence has has a cost for both sides. You know. It's like there's a character, Lord Yupa, who will discuss here in Bett, who is described as a master swordsman, and clearly he is extremely skilled with a blade and kills multiple enemy soldiers and at least a couple of
major encounters. But it is negotiation that he falls back on as his true skill to end those encounters and to avoid death for himself or for you know, his compatriots. And yeah, it's yeah, it's quite fascinating to take all this apart, but yeah, he had and I think in both of those sequences, or at least one key sequence, like he has wounded himself. Nausicaa in trying to prevent violence is also wounded. And so so yeah, there's no
like simplistic model of like violence bad, pacifism good. It is a complex world full of interactions that we're witnessed to in this film.
So anyway, another problem I've been thinking about when talking about this episode is I really don't want to get into like granular spoilers for the later part of the plot or reveal too much about it, because it really is the kind of movie where I would want people to just watch it and just let it unfold for them. So what can we say as a as a as a very safe kind of elevator pitch here.
I mean, I just have to think about just the larger genre that it establishes and grows here, and it's just it's a post apocalyptic environmental fantasy epic, and yet it's more than that too. So it's really hard to pin this one down.
Should we do some trailer audio?
Yeah, and I was really tempted to play the Words of the Wind trailer because it's ultimately perhaps more amusing in a in a purely audio sense. So we'll probably just hear a snippet of the original Japanese trailer for NAUSICAA of the Valley of the Wind Jodi Yai. So not state all right now, if you want to go out and watch this film, and we highly recommend that you do, certainly if you haven't seen it before, go watch it before you continue on with this episode. It's
widely available in physical and digital formats. Your streaming source for this is going to vary depending on international location. I know there are some streaming sites that don't have it until you cross an international border, and then you know, then get excited because now all the Miyazaki films just showed up in your streaming service. So yeah, depending on where you are, you should be able to find it somewhere. They're widely available and they're great.
I watched it on the Max Headroom streaming service you've formerly known as HBO.
Yeah, yeah, available there as of this recording in the United States anyway, but stuff has a way of vanishing from there, so I don't know, you know, keep an eye out for it. But the thing about these films is they will remain available. You should be able to find them somewhere, and I will say on the Max environment especially and probably anywhere you might be streaming it. You can watch it in the original Japanese with subtitles, or you can watch it with with a really great dub.
This is the Disney dub that we'll discuss here in a bit. This is not the Warriors of the of the Wind dub. This is a really quality dub. So you know, your taste may vary when it comes to dub versus sub, but in my opinion, this is a This is a great one. I agree.
I don't have a general preference for subtitles versus dubbing. It's just case by case for me. But I think this is a case where the later English dub is fantastic, and we'll get into what some of those voices are later. But like, I mean, how can you turn down Patrick Stewart as lord you? Yeah?
All right, Well, let's talk about the people involved. I mean, most of what we're going to discuss you with the people is this is going to concern the director, the writer, and author, also the author of the original manga upon which it is based, and that is, of course Hayal Miyazaki born nineteen forty one, still alive and still active as of this recording, and with some details to come on that last point. He is, of course a legendary
Japanese animator and filmmaker. And yeah, it's actually a bit intimidating to attempt any sort of summary of his career, because while we've touched on directors who have garnered cult followings and even larger critical acclaim in their time, Miyazaki is kind of in a league of his own. I mean, who else can you speak of in the same breath, like maybe like Akira Kurosarwa or Walt Disney or Jim Henson. Those are just the three that came to my mind.
But I mean, he really stands on his own. It's hard to compare him to anyone else.
He seems to me someone who just specializes in making perfect or near perfect after perfect or near perfect film. Yeah, you know, it's just just cranking them out.
Yeah, and devoted to animation, you know, not one of these artists where you see like them transitioning out of animation into something else, like animation has been his key focus. He's an artist that I think is rather defined by his interest, certainly again with the medium animation and also to a certain extent, manga. But also there are certain frequently explored themes that I think come to define a lot of his, if not all of his films. Those
are themes of environmentalism, feminism, pacifism. Also of course soaring and flying, sometimes soaring and flying kind of at least in Ponio, they the same theme goes under water, but we still get this feel of soaring and flying only beneath the waves. But yeah, Miyazaki obviously has a lot of love enthusiasm for flight. I understand that he is, or at least was at one point, a scale model enthusiast, and you see that reflected in all the amazing airplane designs in this film.
You know, I realized if I hadn't seen it and someone had told me there are a lot of flying scenes in it, I might be like, oh, Okay, that sounds kind of boring. But it's like somebody telling you there's a movie with a lot of driving scenes in it.
You know, yeah, it.
Could very well feel like padding. But that is not my experience of these The flying scenes are as I said earlier, they're full of emotion. They're lovingly crafted, and they're intentional. It's not just like patting it out watching something move around, And.
It is the sort of thing that certainly during the time period which this film was made, you could not have done anything like this with a live action film, and even today with computer effects, like maybe if you had a big enough budget, you could do something along the lines of this, but I don't know. I don't think any wouldn't still still wouldn't be as good. But but yeah, yeah, because we're not just talking about oh, here's the here's the shot of this plane flying and
then here's someone in it. Like you have these complex fantasy aviation scenes in which people from one plane are boarding, a forced boarding of another plane, you know, landing on top of it, engaging in melee combat aboard the airplanes. It's it's phenomenal. But yeah, you can look at the various designs and there's each kingdom in Nasca. They have their own sort of material culture and their planes have
distinct designs. World War Two aviation buffs especially, we'll see the inspiration of various Luftwaffa designs that inform the Toolmikian aircraft that you see. So yeah, clearly Miyazaki's love for airplanes goes pretty deep. But also his love for natural movements is pretty deep as well. Again, like when when a person moves in one of these films, they move naturally, they move like a human being does, and you see
this throughout me Asaki's work. I think a really strong example of this you can find in the nineteen eighty eight film My Neighbor Totoro's a a classic film of his as well, if not a more famous one, just because it has like the cute elements of it are so overpowering that it's it's you latch onto it more with your heart in a different way, it's it's a film that very much speaks to the heart of a child, doesn't engage in a lot of fantasy world building for
the most part, not on the same level as Nasica. It does have a very interesting fantasy world in it. But the thing I noticed most recently, and I really was obsessing over when I rewatched it recently, was the attention to detail concerning the manner and movements of children. It's just spectacular to behold because you know, how would you have a character move from point A to point B in a scene? Okay, there might be a specific answer for that, and then how might you envision a
child doing it? And how would they do it accurately with no regard for budget or time, just so you have like all these wild and unnecessary flourishes that go into their movement, these strange decisions that children make, like oh, I'm supposed to take my shoes off, so my feet are dirty, I'm just gonna walk on my hands with
my feet in the air. That sort of thing, Like things that an adult might not realize unless they're actively watching the children and figuring out what they are and how they move, and then having the determination to make sure that that is reflected in the film.
That's beautifully put. I think that's exactly right. And well, it's less about movement. There's one moment in the film that stood out as amazing child behavior, which is when several characters are about to be taken hostage by a violent, threatening, invading army and the children are saying goodbye and give them as a parting gift, give them some nuts.
Yeah, it's so good. Now again, I can't give Miyazaki full coverage here. There have been great documentaries about him, but his work as an animator goes back to their early to mid nineteen sixties, and then in seventy one and seventy two we see him transition into some directorial duties. Also in seventy two we see his first writing credits on Seo Takahata's Panda Go Panda, which is pretty fun if you can find it. This is for young children, and it's pretty it's pretty great, like a kid and
her friend that is a giant panda. As a director, Miyazaki started off doing something like fifteen episodes of Loop in the third as well as twenty six episodes of Future Boy Conan, and then a couple of Loop and movies. And then in nineteen eighty four he wrote and directed NAUSICAA of the Valley of the Wind based on his manga of the same name. It would prove a huge hit that in turn spawned the creation of Studio Ghibli.
Now fun note on Studio Ghibli. It is named after the Libyan Arabic nickname for a World War II Italian aircraft, again the aviation love in Miyazaki, but it means there are three technically correct pronunciations for Ghibli, one in Libyan Arabic, one in the Italian usage of it is a nickname for an airplane, and then the Japanese usage of it.
So like the way you hear Japanese speakers like Miyazaki himself pronounced Ghibli is different than what I'm saying now, but I believe Ghibli as I'm saying it has become sort of the standard Ish English pronunciation. So you know, your opinion may differ, but there's suffice to say you can you have some choices if you want to get fancy with it.
This is a good thing to have strong opinions about.
I mean, their whole videos about it. But at any rate, the success of this film allows them to form stud Ghibli. He founds it with director is Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, and they acquire the assets of a company called top Craft. And if top Craft sounds familiar, it's because they're the company that worked with Rankin in bass on seventy seven's The Hobbit, nineteen eighty is The Return of the King, and the eighty two films The Last Unicorn and The
Flight of Dragons. The Flight of Dragons is a film that seth Nicholas Johnson discussed with me on an episode of Weird House Cinema. Is Takahata, by the way, he also is known for multiple films and a couple of particularly excellent ones, nineteen eighty eight's Grave of the Fireflies, and oh a film titled Palm Poco from nineteen ninety four which is about Tanuki's and there so you have a lot of like scrotal magic in that film. But it is very much a film for I mean, kids
can watch it. It's it's very enjoyable It has a very strong environmental message as well. You'll find that on your streaming channels as well, alongside Studio Ghibli Fair. It has a great English dub of Believe. Clancy Brown is one of the many talents that is on that dub, and yeah, it's really good. He also did a film titled The Tale of the Princess Kaguya from twenty thirteen. That was his last film before he died, but it's great to anyway, back to Nyazaki, Miyazaki would follow up
Nasaca with a whole list of highly influential films. Nineteen eighty six's Castle in the Sky, which seems to be the same world as that of Nausaka. It has the same fox squirrel that pops up in it. Nineteen eighty eight's My Neighbor Totoro, eighty nine's Kiki's Delivery Service, which is another favorite in My household, nineteen ninety two's Porco Rosso, which is a pig fighter pilot film, ninety seven's Princess
Mononok two thousand and one Spirited Away. Another masterpiece two thousand and four is Howl's Moving Castle, which is also amazing. Two thousand and eight's Ponyo, twenty thirteen's The Wind Rises, and twenty twenty threes The Boy and the Heron. This is intended to be Miyazaki's final film, though we should note that he previously retired in twenty thirteen. I don't know if the man will ever truly stop making things, because throughout that initial period of retirement he just kept working.
He did some shorts for the Ghibli Museum and so forth, and then elsewhere in his career. He also did some TV directing, he did some commercials, and he even did some music videos. I don't think I've seen any of the music videos he did, but there's at least one with like some sort of angelic being in it. Now. As we've already alluded to here, The Warriors of the Wind NAUSICAA had a pretty rough start in North America.
It was initially dubbed and cut by Manson International and Showman Ink, and then distributed by New World Pictures, which was a Corman Brothers company. H.
Roger Yeah, yeah, Well, I don't know if he had anything to do with it, but come on, you can't do this.
So yeah. Retitled Warriors of the Wind, released in eighty five. You know cut down in an attempt to make it more appealing to North American children, roughly twenty two minutes cut and the voice actors were allegedly not given much to go on. So it's supposedly not a great dub. And yeah, you can look at that ridiculous poster art and it kind of tells you everything you need to know.
I don't know if this is true, but I just read in comments and stuff on the internet the allegation that, like the voice actors didn't know what the story was, they were just sort of like given lines blind and like hear read this.
Yeah, so a very substandard dub for a superb film. New World Pictures would hold those rights until nineteen ninety five. Now, if you want more information about the words of the wind cut, there's a nice little article from James Lapierre. You can find this on the blog Cinema Thieck, pointing out that it made Niyazaki very touchy about cut in general, and rightfully so.
So.
When Princess Mononoke was a huge hit in nineteen ninety seven, Miramax Films then CEO Harvey Weinstein made a pitch to release it in North America, but with heavy cuts once more to make it supposedly appealing to that North American children's audience. Miyazaki was offended. He walked out of the meeting and studio Ghibli then sent Weinstein a Samurai sword with a note that read no cuts, and it was indeed released unedited.
That's a story.
Yeah, So in nineteen ninety six, Disney had made a deal to become the North American distributors of Ghibli films, including Princess Mononoke. Miramax was a subsidiary of Disney at the time, Thus that whole situation, and it wasn't long before they put in motion plans for a new faithful no cuts dub of the film. And yeah, this is
the one that we watched. So if you were watching, if you watch this film with an English dub prior to this, to the belief what two thousand and five, then you probably watched The Warriors of the Wind.
So essentially you haven't seen the whole movie, like you're missing about a fifth of it or something.
Right. Oh and by the way, the manga is a which I own and I haven't read all of it yet, but it is a great like two volume compendium of Nausica. It's in black and white with some colored illustrations and maps. The movie only adapts the first sixteen chapters, so that's something like not even half of the first book. So there's a lot more from the world of Nasca out there if you're intrigued.
You shared a map from this manga with me and I was looking at it and I was like, oh, interesting that, like it's showing two different oceans nearly meeting. But then what I realized is that there is one thing on the map that is a body of water.
It is the Acid Lake from the movie. There's another thing on the map that is called the See of Decay, And I realized later that is a translation issue because what is called the See of Decay in the manga, and I believe in the English subtitles of the Japanese that is what's called the Toxic Jungle in the dub we watched.
Is that right, Yes, that's correct, And I think there are additional details like those where things are a little bit different from the manga to the movie, from the Japanese to the English. But you know, for the most part, it seems like a pretty great translation.
But that does make me almost. It does make me curious to go back and watch the version with the subtitles, because there's I don't know, there's so much pleasure in the film already, that's little nuances of language, and that was just in the dubbed version, So I want to see what other options are available to.
Yeah, I was tempted to do the subtitled version this time when I thought I was going to watch it by myself, but I ended up watching it rewatching it with my family, and so we did the We did the dub, and it was a lot of fun, all right. So at this point I would typically go in a lot deeper on the cast. I'm not really going to do that with this episode, but I do want to just briefly go over like four main characters, and we're
going to start with Nausica. NAUSICAA in the original Japanese cut was voiced by Sumi Shiamoto born nineteen fifty four, a veteran Japanese voice actor with credits from nineteen seventy nine till today. I believe she's still active. The Disney voice talent again from two thousand and five is Alison Lohman born nineteen seventy nine American actor now retired. I think mostly did like independent type roles, and I think
this might be her only animation gig. I could be wrong on that, but she's notable for being in two thousand and two is White Oleander, two thousand and threes Big Fish, and two thousand and nine's Drag Me to Hell. Yeah.
I remember her from Drag Me to Hell. She has to act opposite a goat heead.
I believe that's the film where people get dragged to hell, right, like straight through the floor. Yeah, pretty much. Okay, they should have named it Don't Get Dragged to Hell.
That's right. But you know what, she's great as Nausica. Yeah, really good.
I agree. She puts so much emotion into this performance. It's it's perfect, all right. We mentioned lord Yupa already in the original Japanese audio voice by Goro Naya, who lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty thirteen, Japanese actor and voice actor who had also worked on the Loop and movies. But in the Disney dub it is the voice of Patrick Stewart born nineteen.
Forty really inspired casting choice.
He's perfect, absolutely any I don't need to tell you who Patrick Stewart is. You know. This is Captain John Luke McCard. This is Professor Xavier. This is Walter Blutt from Blunt Talk. This is Gerney Halleck from David Lynch's Dune. This is the Erotic Bakery owner from that one Saturday Night Live sketch. So I have a feeling we'll come back to Patrick Stewart in the future on Weird House.
Cinema when we do the episode on David Lynch's Dune.
I think I think that would be that would make for a good episode because, yeah, there's a lot of great stuff, a lot of weird stuff, some questionable choices.
Scenes where he's going into battle holding a pug.
Yeah, there's some great performances. There are some strange performances from great actors. It's it's a mass It's wonderful, all right. We have a character named Aspol. This is this is kind of like a male side character that you know, you can imagine that some of those North American producers saying like, why isn't this our hero? Why why is it the girl? We want? The boy is the hero?
He's a boy. Put him in the middle of the poster.
Yeah, why does he have a supporting role? But he's still an important character that The Japanese voice talent was Yoji Matsuda born in sixty seven, as a Japanese voice actor who's also in Princess mononok. The American voice talent is Shila Boof born nineteen eighty six. This is back when and he was mostly known as like a kid youth actor. This dub was made the same year that he was in the Keanu Reeves adaptation of Constantine.
Oh but can you imagine if they had gotten Keanu Reeves for this role.
I mean, hmm, I don't know. I have to think about that. Ask me about that later when I've had time to reflect. Okay, you've been a little too old for it.
I guess this is supposed to be like a character around the same age as Nausaca, right, like late teens maybe?
Yeah, so this is when when when Laboufe was was was pretty young. But yeah, I'm Reeves will have to come back. Maybe we'll watch a Keanu Reeves film at some point, because that's an interesting career trajectory. I believe there is a he's a performer that's that's matured like a whine to a large extent. But then again, I don't know.
Maybe you go back and you watch Francis Ford Coppolas Dracula and you notice things about him that you didn't before.
Maybe, Yeah, I don't know. That's that's that'll be the challenge, Like where do you dip in to the I mean, I guess you got to go early for some of the weirdest stuff. I will return to you, my love. All right. The next character we're gonna mention, and this is the I think the last one we're gonna mention in casting detail. Here here is the character of Kashana. Kashana is essentially the villain of the piece, but it's complicated, Yeah, because the thing about Miyazaki films is there's rarely a
like pure cinematic villain. I think the closest you get is in Castle in the Sky. But here we have a character that does largely line up with the idea of a villain and expectations of a villain, you know. But she's still defined and presented in such a way that we understand where she's coming from to some degree. She's we can we can relate to her on some level.
She's a warrior princess fighting for a nation's survival, and underlying all this determination and rage that we see, we also glimpse deep trunk and fear, so we understand like a lot of what's informing what she's putting out there.
I think the temptation with a villain is always to make them sadistic, to make them take pleasure in causing other people pain, because I think in most movies that sort of flips the switch that makes it feel okay when the hero who's supposed to be a good guy just kills them or lets them fall off a cliff at the end, it's because they were needlessly sadistic. You know that you can deal with them brutally and it's all right. She I don't think, is needlessly sadistic, though
she does do a lot of cruel things. They are things that she thinks she has to do.
Yeah, exactly. So she's a very fascinating character and a solid villain presence in the film. The Japanese voice talent here is Yoshiko Sakaki Bara born nineteen fifty six, another Japanese voice actor with a ton of credits. She also voiced the puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell two point zero. I think that's the one that has a bassot hound in it. Maybe they both have bassot hounds in them. Oh weird.
I have occasion to say the words basset hound later in this episode.
Oh okay. The American voice talent here from the Disney cut is Uma Thurman born nineteen seventy. She's great in this role, I think so. Yes. I think she brings all the appropriate levels to this performance, and I think it lines up with the kind of roles that she's built her career off of. She's had a ton of great roles over the years, a ton of not great but highly entertaining roles. She's always had a knack for playing, on one hand, action oriented characters as what but also
devious vixen's and fem fatales. She's played both Poison Ivy from Batman and Medusa from Greek Mythology.
Sorry, I was just thinking about Poison Ivy. I mean, that's an Oscar caliber role.
But you have to admit she's entertaining in it, So yeah, her range ultimately goes beyond all of that. I mean, her filmography is a great mix of big budget fair like Batman, movies and so forth, but also artsier films, and you know, it's just a bit of trivia. She's the daughter of American Buddhist author and academic Robert Thurman. Now, the rest of the Disney dubcast includes some other great performances by Chris Sarandon, Edward James Almos, Tres McNeil, Frank Welker,
Mark Hamill. He has a very fun role in this, and at the very beginning you get a little bit of narration from Tony j the late voice actor who really good at dramatic narration and also occasionally the voice of elder gods and so forth.
Actually, while talking about villains, you could argue that Chris Sarandon's character is the more villainous of the two, even though he's the lackey to her, like she's ultimately issuing the more evil orders. But Chris Sarandon's character, I think comes up is more just kind of a venal and totally self interested.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's a real snake. Yeah, He's like, is the has the princess died? Does it mean that I'm going to finally rise to the throne? And then she shows back on me. He's like, well, that dream died pretty quickly. He's lazy but once to advance and is kind of completely a moral in that direction. But also he's only going to put in so much effort, only going to stick his neck out so far exactly.
Yeah.
Finally, the music on this one is a composition by Joe Hisashi born nineteen fifty, Japanese composer and musician, noted for his work with Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki. In particular, he scored all but one of Miyazaki's films, and that one, I believe is nineteen seventy nine's Loop in the Third. So like everything you think of instantly as Ghibli and
Miyazaki he has had a hand in. His work is always great, and it's one of those things where you can't separate his sound from the Azaki's visuals because they're always together. But I especially love this score because I think this is definitely the synthia and more experimental of any of the scores from this composer that I've heard.
I didn't make notes of it at the time, but it seems to me the style of musical themes throughout the film is incredibly varied.
Yeah, I heard there's like an om theme that has kind of a sitar kind of a quality to it. There are some sort of harpsichord elements that kind of have a medieval European vibe to them. I think when we're encountering some of the kingdoms. There are other stretches that are very synthy, and then the other parts of it that are more like sweeping in traditional I think that's right and catchy. There are some very catchy tunes in it as well, so it's varied, but across the board great score.
So this is the part of the episode where we would usually do a plot recap. This is one of those films where I think it would not feel right at all to do that the kind of scene by scene look, so instead, I want to take a different tack here where I focus really intensely on the opening and then we can give maybe a very light broad synopsis and talk about some of the other major themes and scenes.
Sounds good.
So again we're going to be talking about the uncut version with the two thousand and five English voice cast, But I want to look at the opening shots because I think they tell a lot about the style of the film. So at the very beginning, we hear wind blowing, and the action opens on a barren, dusty landscape covered with smooth, round speckled objects, so presumably smooth stones, but
they look almost like eggs. There is a haze on the horizon and we again we hear the wind blowing, and in the distance a pair of dark figures are plodding toward us through the haze. Then there is a close up of the feet of the figures that were moving toward us as they cross the desert, and instead of human feet, we see strange, cross shaped talons, like the feet of an enormous bird tracking across the earth. And all around we can now see inclose up what
looked like the round stones before. Instead they are spherical white orbs plastered to the ground with a kind of elastic matrix of fiber, like big egg sacks of spiders wrapped in silk, And all around them are little tendrils of an almost fuzzy texture, kind of like woolen fern shoots.
And then there's another shot. The two figures we saw in the haze are enormous birds, like you might have guessed from their talons, they're giant bipedal birds like EMUs or rheas, except they are wearing masks over their faces, masks that look like they're made of leather with glass eye slots, kind of like World War One era gas masks.
And then stranger than that, one of the birds is carrying a rider who's riding it like a horse, a figure in the shape of a man draped in a long cloak with a drooping, wide brimmed hat that I would say is halfway between a samurai helmet and a sombrero. And the rider is also wearing a mask like a gas mask, with an elongated snout, so the mask makes
him look like a dog. And all three of these creatures, the birds and the rider, their masks, have these floppy appendages hanging off both sides of the snouts of the mask, kind of like the snood of a turkey, if you don't know that term, the snowed. You know, the sort of flap of flesh that hangs down over the beak of I think of a male turkey. And so they've got these things hanging off the snouts, except they're not exactly like a you know, like a like a turkey snood.
The floppy snoods are symmetrical and smooth, like the ears of a basset hound.
All right, there you go.
Meanwhile, there are white particles like snowflakes falling through the air all around. And then we cut to a point of view of the rider as he moves through the desert, and ahead of him are trees, but without leaves. They are dead trunks lofting these dead black branches, and they're completely covered in gigantic versions of the silk egg sacks we saw dotting the ground below. So it's like a forest that has been reduced to skeletons by a plague
of spider silk cotton ball tumors. Then in the distance, through the trees, we see a windmill. It comes into view, so now there's some kind of human habitation in this cursed land. Then the rider and the two birds begin to walk through the dead forest, and the giant cotton balls in the trees start to move, So maybe they are not big spider egg sacks. Instead, they are releasing puffs of gas containing pink particles, like they're big bladders
of pink dust just fumigating the earth. So now you wonder, oh, could this be why the rider and the horse birds are all wearing gas masks. Then when they reach the area of the windmill, beyond the dead cops of trees, we see the ruins of a town with walls and gates and towers and huts, all covered in the diseased cotton balls and the fuzzy fern shoots. It's like a city annihilated by a moldy, furry cancer that rides on
the wind. And all of this, by the way, happens in the span of a few seconds, So up to this point we're like less than a minute into the film. But I really wanted to drill into this sequence of shots because I love the way that each image and each reverse shot shows you something strange and imaginative that makes you reinterpret whatever you just assumed about the image you saw a few seconds before. So it's almost like sort of like getting you into the right frame of
mind to appreciate the film. It is priming you to like let your mind come out of hiding and willingly explore the light of an alien sun.
I think it's my understanding that all of this was cut from Warriors of the Wind. They're just like cut that crap let's get to it.
Obnoxious, But anyway, I would say this is illustrative of something I would say about the movie generally, and generally about my experience of Miyazaki, which is that NAUSICAA and the rest of his movies are mostly very free of
perfunctory cinema, of perfunctory screen time. You know, a lot of movies are filled up with shots that I feel like there's something that the director thought had to be shown, Like, Okay, he's going up to the big scene on the roof of the building, so you have to show him going to the elevator and getting in the elevator and pressing the button for the top floor. So you get a sequence of shots that are maybe necessary to move the action along and help people understand what's about to happen.
But there's nothing dramatic about the shots themselves. They're just mechanically sort of like giving you information to orient you for the next thing. Miyazaki movies, in my opinion, have very little of this. Instead, they seem to treat nearly every frame as an opportunity. Everything you see is a new chance to delight you or show you something interesting, make you feel something, make you feel like you can
inhabit the film's world. And there's almost nothing I can think of in this movie that is merely mechanical, serving solely to orient the viewer in time and space, you know, connect to one moment to the next, or set up future scenes. Pretty Much every moment is pleasurable, or reveal something interesting and strange, or is meaningful in itself.
Yeah, I agree. When Miyazaki shows you something, it's important on some level, even if in say and saything like Todoro, it just means you're going to stop and look at a frog for several seconds and you know that that frog is going to be exceptionally realized. So yeah, it's it's it's important when he shows you something and you have to you have to watch and take.
It in anyway. So the writer dismounts from the bird. In the scene, he takes out a rifle. He goes into one of the houses, and inside the house he sees like skulls and signs of a formerly happy life covered in oldest deadly silk, and on the floor there is a child's doll. He reaches down to pick it up and it crumbles to dust in his grip and he says to himself. Yet another village is dead.
So this is will come to learn as the shape of the world at the close of the Ceramic era, some thousand years after a cataclysmic time known as the Seven Days of Fire. So much of the world is hostile, it's poisoned, it's dangerous for human beings and other organisms from our time period, or like the birds, I guess, things that have evolved more directly out of our time period.
Far flung human kingdoms are feuding over the remnants of the earth, amid the constant threats of starvation, sickness, and the insects of the toxic jungle or the Sea of decay.
Yes, though we won't find all of that out all at once. Again, something that's very pleasing about the movie is sort of the pace at which the information about the broader world is revealed.
Yeah, it's teased out. There's some great stuff even in the opening credits, which we'll get too, that give you stuff to go on to figuring out where what has happened to the world and what might happen again.
But so after this figure picks up the doll and it crumbles, then suddenly we cut to the sky where creatures are swarming. And these creatures are sort of hard to describe. They're referred to as insects by the characters. They're kind of like giant teal hawkroaches with dragonfly wings
and the heads of not dragonflies but dragons. They've got like jaws and teeth and red eyes without lids, and pink tongues lashing, and they make bizarre yammering noises that sound halfway between like a locust swarm and something electronic like a you know, a speaker glitching with RF interference. So the rider sees this, he goes back to his horse birds and he says, let's go. Soon this place too will be consumed by the toxic jungle, and the giant birds sprint off into the desert with the sand
crunching under their feet. And then finally, there was no music in the opening, but finally we get music in the opening narration that tells us a thousand years have passed since the collapse of industrialized civilization, a toxic jungle now spreads, threatening the survival of the last of the
human race. And yeah, during the credits, as you said, we get images that are not explicit but they give us kind of hints of what happened before, Like there are these interesting tile mosaics that show things like boats but flying in the sky, and then giant, monstrous figures breathing fire onto the cities of humankind.
Yeah, it's the kind of thing where I mean the first, probably first couple of times I watched this film, I didn't really pay as much attention to these credits, but they do reveal a lot.
And I thought it'd be interesting to comment on the appearance of the giant warriors that are shown in the credit sequence, and then we'll figure into the movie later on. So this part seems to be showing how the old world perished in flames before the millennium, and obviously these
giant humanoid figures had something to do with that. So they are shown standing over burning cities, red and black, lit from below by the fires that are consuming the human world, and the way they're lit by the fires from below, their legs and crotches are like red going pink, while their shoulders and heads are covered in black shadow except for solid white eyes near the tops of their heads, and then their heads are strangely bullet shape, making them
look like mechanical men, kind of ghostly mechanical men.
Yeah, they're very streamlined. We don't have any like surface details regarding their bodies. You know, they mostly in profile, so you get more of a sense of giant robot, of something mechanical, something coldly mechanical. And yeah, this will be important for later on. And again, I just love the ancestral art we see depicting these events. It's really great.
And to further dwell on, you know, things we only see for a few seconds in the film, but there's full of interesting choices, Like even though the faces of these beings are hidden in shadow, they have a what I would say is a frighteningly unemotional posture. They look disturbingly free of malice, and I think they would look less scary if they looked angry or hateful.
Yeah, there's like there's a cold sense of awful judgment to them, like they are machines, Like they are giant robots that have you know, there's been some sort of air and they've decided, Oh, all the cities of the world are supposed to be on fire, so that's what we're gonna do.
Though, as the historical imagery of the credits fades away, we move up to the clouds, where we will spend a lot of the movie actually, and this is where we're going to meet our protagonists, to sort of where
she's at home. In the clouds, we see an outline of a pair of giant wings drifting over the cloud tops, and at first you might think it's a bird, but then we see up close and again with the theme of like showing you something and then making you reinterpret what you just saw, the bird shaped thing is a human, a young woman riding on top of a wing shaped
glider craft. It's kind of like a powered surfboard for the sky, and she looks over what remains of mountains that are kind of in the shape of monster skulls, and then she lands outside of a thick forest of monstrously oversized plants. Now, I think this might be a good moment to talk about the significance of the glider in the film. I struggle to think of another movie where a vehicle becomes such an emotional part of the story.
I mean, you could say, maybe like The Millennium Falcon or something, but even that maybe takes multiple movies to achieve this kind of significance. The glider that Nausca flies around with is such a special and powerful element of the story, such that when there's a part later where it seems like the glider is in danger of being lost or destroyed, it's as if a beloved character we're having their life threatened.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it is. All of the devices in this film, all of the vehicles, are really well thought out. They feel entirely real. You feel like every there are no mysteries to it, there's no like undefined portion of the thing. You know that there is an interior to the tanks, you know that there are seat belts on the seats inside of those airplanes, and you have the glider has this just intense physical reality to it as well.
And the way that she interacts with it, the different poses she goes into whilst using it, it's it's all amazing.
I mean, in a way to make a somewhat vulgar analogy, it's almost like Tony Stark's Iron Man suit. It is the device that she uses to like sort of upgrade herself from just a character into a superhero in a way, like it's the it's what she uses in a lot of the most crucial action scenes in the film.
Yeah, except it has more physical reality because in those films, those Iron Man films, especially later on, it's like it's it's like, at times it's a it's pieces of a suit that are applied by CGI robot arms, and then later it's like nanites that crawl on to Tony Stark and become a suit, and it's like, I'm so far removed from what that is, Like show me the shoes. The suit isn't real, you know, whereas the glider always feels real.
I already regret the comparison.
I just I think I think the comparison is apt and the similarities are apt, but the difference also helps define what makes the glider work so well, you know.
Yes, yes, So we follow Nausica as she explores the toxic jungle. She's wearing a gas mask. It also has the basset hound ears hanging off of the snout. She hops over giant lotus pods and ducks under tree roots and takes samples of the white fuzz we saw from earlier, the cancer that seems to have killed the villages, But she doesn't really seem afraid. In fact, there are like hulking insects like heaving around in the in the brush behind her, and she doesn't really seem afraid of them either.
She's just sort of exploring. And eventually she comes across the figure of an enormous arthropod that she calls an oom. But it's not the creature itself, it's the shell of an ome. The ome has molted like a you know, like a locust, and left behind its shell, and she like starts to climb over it. Well, maybe we should take a moment to describe the omes because they're very important to the plot.
Yeah, the omes are a wonderful mashup of several evocative, fantastic and natural world creatures. I think there's there's a clear sense of the cicada and the cicada shell to these creatures. That reminds me, especially of as a child finding a discarded cicada shell and playing with it or
just staring at it. And I mean sometimes as an adult, I'll do this, you know, to find a cicada shell is kind of magical because it is like this this thing that is the complete exterior of the original larval creature, you know, and you see the full legs you see the eyes and so forth, and you get a strong sense of that with the ome. But there are other elements here as well. In one particular's scene, I feel like there's a strong sense of gray whales inspecting a boat.
There's a scene where they come up through the water and they're floating around the boat, very much like whales in a breeding lagoon. Naturally, there's an element of the sandworms to them. Dune clearly was one of Miyazaki's many
influences here. They're very interesting physically. They have segmented armor plating that animates really really well, and really interestingly, many legs, multiple eyes, and rows their frontmost legs have a feel of grasping fingers, but they can also emit glowing golden feelers that are very important to the plot. Also, their eyes normally glow blue when active, but they glow red when they're enraged.
And the rage is a really interesting element because clearly these are by some characters viewed as monsters. They're certainly large insects, but they are also unambiguously presented as creatures that can feel. They have emotional lives of a sort, and there are things that upset them.
Yeah, so that's another way they have a strong whil feeling to them, because there's the sense that there is intelligence there, there is emotion there, but it doesn't directly communicate to humans, you know, but we are able to sympathize with them.
So Nausica climbs over this molted shell, and she even in a detail that I just it's hard to describe why this was so pleasing, but like what she does with it is she decides to harvest one of the discs covering one of its eyes. There's like a clear sort of shell material that she manages to blow out of the rest of the shell by using a bit of gunpowder and chips it out, and she's like, I want to take this ie back home with me. I just love that. And here, maybe we could do a
note on Nausca's you know, the character of Nausica. So even in this opening scene alone in the talks jungle, we see a lot of her temperament and her personality. She has a very strong affinity for the natural world, even the toxic parts, and displays a broad scientific curiosity. And there's that's that's not just an intellectual thing, there's like an emotional manifestation of that, which is a kind
of resting, happy sense of surprise about things. And she also shows a very fundamental kindness of spirit which comes through when she's like exploring this ohm shells. She's clearly delighted and interested by it. But then when she starts looking at it, she's like, oh, if I could you know, blow off one of these discs of the shell that covered the eye. This could be useful to people back home for making tools.
Yeah, Nausicaa is one of the amid all these fantastic elements, and it's easy to focus on the weirdness like Nausicaa herself is such a strong component of the movie. I was talking about this with my and my wife my son this morning. What were your favorite parts about Nausicaa. And of course my son loved the fox squirrel because it's cute. It's full of personality and believable animal energy. You know, so many great sort of catlike animations to
that that character. I guess, I guess it's a character. But uh, but then but then Nausicaa, Yeah, just so clearly defined, so much depth. I mean, she's she's strong, she's brave, she's loyal, but highly compassionate like we've been talking about, and she has this kind of determined sense of optimism for for what people can do, for what
we could accomplish. And yet it's not like blind optimism, like when like she's deeply hurt by our failings and by our persistence when it comes to you know, choosing at times the bloody path or the illogical path or the stubborn path, so she feels all of that. It's not like this this you know, eyes closed optimism about the world, like it's grounded in reality, but it's focusing on what we could do and what we can do.
I love the character of Nausica, not only as we were talking about earlier that you know, there are her heroic elements, like you know, the when it's thrilling to watch her as she races to the rescue or something, but also, yeah, her character is so fundamentally good, but in a very real way, not in a way where
she's just a lawful, good paladin. You know, she is just such a believably admirable human and embodies a lot of character traits that I literally just like getting excited about kids watching the movie and wanting to be like Nausica, because wanting to be like Nausica is a wonderful thing.
Yes, absolutely, my son had a poster of Nasca up on his wall for a bit, because one if you get the manga series, there's a nice little full color Nasica poster of her underglyder that comes with it. I think it finally got torn out by accident.
I was truly getting I don't want to get like this here. I was getting very emotional thinking about like when my daughter is going to be old enough to watch this movie, and you know, I don't know, maybe she won't even like it, who knows, but I feel like she probably will. And I was thinking about, oh, what imagining her like playing NAUSICAA wanting to fly around the house and stuff, and so I don't know, it is powerful, but anyway, sorry.
Yeah.
So in the story, so she's exploring this this shell and she she sits down on it, and there's a part where she's sort of like she gets covered in the you know, these dust particles that are coming off of these these toxic plants that they're calling the spores, And she says the Machigo poems are sending out their afternoon spores. It's hard to believe these spores could kill me. Five minutes without a mask and I'd be dead. So she's confirming that she recognizes that the jungle is deadly.
It's not like she's in denial about the danger of it. But she also just has this detached appreciation for its beauty and its own purposes. But she's interrupted when she hears a commotion in the distance. There are gunshots. Somebody must be fighting the insects of the jungle or trying to escape them. So she comes out of the jungle.
She like climbs up maybe on one of these big skull mountain statues, and she comes up to see that there is a huge ome, probably the same one that left behind the molting that she was just climbing on. It's chasing the man with the two horse birds from the prologue. It's bearing right down on him. So Nausica dashes to her glider. She flies off to the rescue, and in the end she manages to prevent it from
killing him. She manages to stun the ome with flash bangs and then pleads with it to go back to the jungle. She like talks to it as she's flying alongside it on the glider, saying, this is not your world, and she succeeds. She looks back and the rider on the horse this will turn out to be the character Lord Yupa who they know each other. But he looks back and he marvels that she's able to turn away the rage of the huge beast with nothing but some flash grenades and an insect charm.
He says, oh, yes, this is the cool little device that she twirls around in the wind and creates this soothing sound for the insects.
Her relationship with the insects is so interesting because she recognizes that they are dangerous. She's not in denial about them, and many times in the movie she has to act forcefully to prevent them from hurting people, you know, throwing flash bangs to stunt it and trying to charm it
and turn it away. But she also doesn't want to hurt the insects, and she speaks to them with a kind of strained affection, telling them to go back to their jungle, telling them firmly but compassionately that they have to calm down. And there's something she says multiple times in the movie to an insect or to an ome. That really stuck with me. I thought this was so interesting.
The phrase she says is please be good, which connotes this sense of familiarity and responsibility of one for the behavior of the other, like a parent would say to their own child, please be good.
Yeah, and you know, and this becomes important too at the backstory of nausica Things, we learn about her past.
So after she saves him from the insect, the two characters meet Nausicaa. She is the Princess of the Valley of the Wind we will learn, which is a small, humble, peaceful kingdom in this post apocalyptic world. And the man who's been riding the bird again is Lord Yupa. He is a servant or some kind of night of the Valley of the Wind. And when they meet, Yupa reveals that he was chased by the om because he's shot
at an insect. And this will be significant later because we learn that like any form of violence against one, tends to agitate and draw the rage of all the rest of the insects.
Yeah, this ties in well to the pacivism themes throughout the film that yeah, violence doesn't actually solve anything, It just causes more problems. The way you saw things is ultimately through communication and empathy.
I think violence is often shown to solve an immediate situation but create an even bigger problem in the near future. Yeah, but he says the reason he shot in an insect was lord Yupa is not shown as being cruel or malicious either. He says he had no choice to do it because he thought that the insect was attacking a
human baby. But it wasn't a human baby. It turns out it was a pocket sized mammal called a fox squirrel, and lord Yupa still has the animal with him here, and Nausica quite quickly takes it on as her pet, despite its viciousness. They talk about it, they say, you know these things are You know they're mean? And when she first meets the fox squirrel, it bites her hand and draws blood. This is another running theme I loved.
There are many scenes throughout the movie of Nausica tolerating and showing a sort of kindness or at least a lack of reaction to creatures and people that are threatening her and being unreasonable, and somehow by sort of deflecting and stepping back, she is often able to change the course of the action or change your relationship just by not reacting in kind to somebody who is being threatening or violent.
Yeah, so much of this film is about this idea that our relationship with nature is out of balance, both here in our world but also within the fantastic world of the film, and that things need to be put back in balance. And so even with the fox squirrel that is largely there as just kind of a mascot and companion that spends a lot of time looking cute and being like the loyal cute creature on her shoulder and so forth. But yeah, in this initial meeting is angry.
It bites her, draws blood, and I think that's important to the overarching themes of the film to see that this complex view of nature is evident even in the cute mascot character.
So, Nausica and Lord Upa go back to the Valley of the Wind. They go back to their home, and they're welcomed.
When they arrive.
Nasca is reunited with her family, but things the action of the story begins to really kick into gear when the people of the valley are confronted by interventions from the other nations around them who are maybe not so humble and not so peaceful, but are in fact at war with each other, and the valley is caught in the middle. And here I think maybe we should stop going kind of like seen by scene and instead just like talk about some things that stick out from the narrative as it progresses.
Yeah. Yeah, there are so many things to potentially discussed in the film. One thing, you know, every time you rewatch a great film, something hits you a little bit differently. Either something with you has changed over the years, or you've learned something new or been exposed to something new. In my case, one of these was the starship that we're exposed to. We see this on the like ruined on the shores of the of the sea there, and it looks very much like a submarine. It looks like
an old military submarine. But we're told, like, oh, you know, these things they used to also travel in the stars. They speak of it as a starship. And the way I used to interpret that and still kind of interpret it this way, is like, well, they're so far removed from the technology of the ancients, they don't really know what it was for. They think that a submarine may have also flown amid the stars, and I found that
rather enthralling. But I think another strong theory is that this is a reference to the fantastic flying submarine in the nineteen sixty three Toho film Atragon, which we previously discussed on Weird House Cinema. It's like, of course, submarines can fly and can go into space. I didn't.
I did not make that connection at all. That's amazing.
Yeah, So I don't know. I still hold both of those interpretations in my head, but it's something that I guess would have probably been clear to, you know, to sci fi anime viewers of the day in the intended you know, original intended Japanese audience.
What do you think about the super weapon theme. There are a lot of movies, especially like sci fi or fantasy movies, that have the plot device of a kind of super weapon that somebody has come into possession of that could annihilate the other side in a conflict, and maybe there's a struggle to possess the super weapon. That is a plot element here, but it's different than it
often is. There is something instead kind of frightening but also sad and pathetic about the super weapon plot line in this film.
Yeah, the concerning the Giant Warriors or the Giant God Warriors, I think is they're sometimes translated. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier in the film, we see those flashes of them during the Seven Days of Fire, and they look kind of like big robots, illuminated partially by the flames of burning sea, and they have these kind of like light staffs, and it's generally like kind of a clean, inorganic look
that the creature the things have. But later in the film, is the plot progresses, a part of the plot concerns some remnant of these things that has been unearthed beneath the city of Pegie that has become a contested artifact, and we come to learn that these are not quite robots.
They're at least biomechanical, if not entirely biological, and you know, there's a whole supply with them, like regrowing one of these things and trying to get it in a state where it can be used again, and there is a strong sense of the thing that should not be to them, a concept that certainly is used a lot in sci fi, horror and fantasy, but I think this is one of the most impactful examples of it as far as I'm concerned in my viewing, because when we start seeing this
thing again growing in power, and then when it's finally unveiled, when it's finally sort of resurrected again, there's just a strong, overwhelming sense of like, this was a mistake. This was a mistake in the past, and you've made an even bigger mistake bringing it back. And it's like it's destructive. Yes,
it has. There's strong allusions to atomic weaponry and the way it behaves and the way it sends out like this devastating death beam, but it's also like in a constant state of decay, you know, or or incomplete gestation. It's it's like malformed. It's like an unrealized dream that
is more nightmare than anything else. And what makes it more horrifying is when you have characters in the film that then double down on their dedication to their plans involving this technology, despite how just revolting and flawed and ultimately ineffective it clearly is.
Is the weapon itself sentient It kind of seems like it, and it seems like its existence is a nightmare that it would like to wake up from like it does not want to exist and it is not happy with what it is.
Yeah, and it's again it's it's horrifying. It's a horrifying thing. Just excellent vision on Miyazaki's part. It's my understanding. I haven't read this far into the manga, but I think we learned more about them in the manga, but in the film at least, I feel like we also know just enough. You know, there's a lot of mystery to what they are and how they worked, why they were they were created, and yeah, absolutely a perfect thing that should not be.
There's another thing I wanted to mention that Naska does better than most films that have this element, which it has a prophecy and fulfillment of prophecy element. This is something I often find kind of tedious in storytelling. I don't know. One thing I might compare it to is the solution of a of a mystery story, Like when there's a murder mystery and you don't know who did it, and you know that's very exciting to not know and want to find out. Almost always it's kind of disappointing
when you actually do find out. It's the rare story where the solution of the murder mystery is as interesting and exciting as it felt to be in the middle of the mystery and not know. You know, I sometimes call out the few examples I can think of, like you know, a name of the Rose, where like the
solution is fascinating and exciting. This is one of the few stories I can think of that has a truly thrillingly satisfying fulfillment of prophecy, which you know, often has the opposite effect on me when when a character fulfills a prophecy, I'm often just kind of like, okay, yeah, no, it was all foretold this then this movie, I don't know how you feel about a little but like the fulfillment is unexpected, like it causes you once again, like
I said, about many things, and you know, even mundane little things. From shot to shot, the movie is often just making you understand something you saw before, or an image you saw before and thought you understood in a different way. The fulfillment of the prophecy element does the same thing in.
This Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say another couple of examples that I think do the prophecy thing well would be the Never Ending Story and the
Dark Crystal. I think I like the way they handle it, but they but they both handle it in a slightly different way, so maybe not directly comparable to the Nausica but but yeah, I agree that sometimes the whole who will be the chosen One then can be a little trite because you know, of course, we know who the chosen one is going to be in any given picture. Usually can see it coming a mile away, or they'll
flip it. They'll give you a little twist, but you're only going to twist one or two degrees to the left of the right.
Really, the fulfillment of the prophecy here is so weird and so unexpected and so beautiful when it happens. I'm getting goosebumps right now thinking about it.
It is just a very goosebump bump inducing film, you know, it just hits all the right notes. Can you believe we missed being able to see this on the big screen by just like a week or two? I think earlier this month they put it back in theaters, But I think a lot of the A Miyazaki films are regularly put back in theaters, So I should have mentioned
that when we were talking about ways to see it. Yeah, keep an eye out because periodically you can catch a Miyazaki film on the big screen in North America at least, and probably in other markets as well.
All Right, I think that's going to have to do it for me. I can't say anything else.
All right, Well, this was a fun one, and again we encourage Well, I hope you didn't make it through the whole episode without having ever seen Nasca. Hopefully you went out and you watched it. But hey, if it's been a while since you've seen it, go out and watch it again. It's like I say, this is a film where the message speaks to us today, you know, just as well as it spoke to us back in
nineteen eighty four. Time. If you would like to check out other episodes of Weird House Cinema, what publishes every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but Fridays we set aside for just a discussion of a weird or fantastic film. If you want to see a full list of all the movies we've covered over the years, you can go to letterboxed dot com. That's l E T T e r box d dot com.
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