"Nausicaa: Of the Valley of the Wind" (1984)

Post-apocalyptic worlds often work best when they feel fully inhabited, as if, no matter how implausible, this strange world is only a few steps out of sync with the one we’re familiar with. To create that lived-in quality requires careful world building, and that makes director Hayao Miyazaki with Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind a well-suited match for crafting a world that bears almost no resemblance to our own yet eerily feels like the remnants of some formerly great civilization. In all of his films, Miyazaki cares an awful lot about attention to detail, and he often seems more concerned with world building than actually telling a story – it’s as much about texture, tone and atmosphere as plot and narrative. Nausicaa is an anti-war film and a conservationist tale, but it’s foremost about stepping into a fully formed world and being dazzled by the wonders that exist in it. This world feels something like a cross between Game of Thrones and Mad Max, but despite the violence and power politics the film’s world is filtered through far too much of a whimsical, bittersweet perspective to completely bare resemblance to anything else. This is partially due to seeing much of this world through the eyes of the protagonist Nausicaa, a free-spirited princess who is carefully attuned to the beauty of the natural environment. Nausicaa’s world is set in a time after the industrialized world has imploded in on its own destructive tendencies. Much of the environment bares this mark, bereft of vegetation or signs of human life. The few places where forests still exist are inhabited by super-evolved bugs and toxic atmospheres. Nausicaa gets caught in the middle of in-fighting between various feudal-like states vying for global domination. While the film often seems like an epic medieval struggle, it has a lot more of the qualities of a Japanese fable, drawing out deep emotion and themes from a seemingly simple narrative about human nature.  

Grade: A