The VCD eventually stopped working a month later.īut now I was hooked. The subtitles made no sense, and the video was clearly captured off of a long-decaying VHS cassette tape. I was four.Ībout ten years after I saw Warriors of the Wind and thought “what the hell did I just see?” I finally got to see the real version of Nausicaä on a terrible, grainy pirated VCD copy from Hong Kong.

Of course, this was the first version of Nausicaä that I saw, since they broadcasted it on HBO in 1985. Honestly, I had no idea what the hell was happening in this version of the film. Nausicaä was no longer the protagonist the ohmu, the symbolic representation of nature’s cycles of rage and rebirth, were made the villains the plot just flat out didn’t make any sense. In what would set the stage for thirty more years of misguided attempts at re-editing films so that they made “sense” to American audiences, New World chopped almost 25 minutes out of the original film and rearranged scenes, sequences, and characters. When Nausicaä was brought over, the rights were purchased by Roger Corman’s long-dead production company, New World Pictures. Nausicaä herself is barely featured - look at the top right side - and she’s been transformed into an oversexualized version of her modest character in the film and manga. What the hell is going on here? If you’ve seen Nausicaä, you likely don’t remember anything that’s happening in this poster. The first American release of Nausicaä was a heavily reedited version that was renamed The Warriors of the Wind. There have been three distinctly different portrayals of the property, each with their own quirks and interests, that have been given to American audiences, and it’s worth examining what each of them represent.

All of these things would be featured repeatedly in Miyazaki’s films, but Nausicaä featured them first.īut the most curious thing about Nausicaä is how it has existed in the US. In Nausicaä, several motifs and themes that would dominate Miyazaki’s work would be established: flying, an inclination toward pacifism and eco-consciousness, a strong female protagonist (and antagonist in the case of this film). It is also the first feature-length film that Miyazaki based on an original property, following his entry into the Lupin III series, The Castle of Cagliostro. Nausicaä is famous for a number of reasons, not least of which is for being the film that more or less is the reason Studio Ghibli got off the ground, as its success led to the formation of the studio. Out of all of the Hayao Miyazaki films I have known and loved, only one has remained my favorite over the years: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

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