From: [m--rr--w] at [fnalv.fnal.gov] (Lord Elmo) Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc Subject: REVIEW: Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind Date: 17 Aug 95 15:43:02 -0600 The Bottom Line: [an irregular review column] Nausicaa" of the Valley of Wind Perfect Collection 1, 2 by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Comics, @ U$17.95) Hayao Miyazaki is the godlike writer/director/producer of such classic anime as MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO, LUPIN III, KONAN BOY OF THE FUTURE, LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY, PORCO ROSSO, KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE, this year's Foreign Language Oscar(R) nominee POM POKO, and the eponymous movie taken from today's review topic. Miyazaki is probably the finest animator living today and certainly the finest active animator. [1] His works are beautiful, expressive, dramatic, fascinating, and endlessly wonderful. The title character is a conflation of a princess from Japanese folklore and the nymph named Nausicaa from the Odyssey. If you care, in Japanese, her name is pronounced Na-oosh-kaa (with "aa" being an extended "ah" sound). In the original Greek, it's pronounced more like "Naw-zi-ka". In the far distant future, there has been an ecological collapse. Most of the land is covered by forest of fungi inhabited by giant insects. The clouds of spores released by the fungi make the forest uninhabitable by humans, who sicken and die with exposures of more than a few minutes. A few human settlements persist in fertile lands. One of these is a small valley swept clean of spores by constant winds from the sea, the Valley of Wind. Nausicaa's father rules the Valley and its 500 inhabitants, but he is old and dying, and Nausicaa has taken most of his responsibilities on herself. The most dangerous responsibility she has is her requirement by treaty to fly the Valley's precious, ancient, powerful gunship in aid of the Torumekian Empire. Nausicaa herself is daring, intelligent, and capable of extraordinary depths of caring. Her relationships with animals, even insects, are empathic and virtually telepathic. She is a brilliant pilot and an excellent swordswoman. Torumekian adventurism quickly carries the reader along with Nausicaa into a wider world of conflict and mystery, from Torumekian Princess Kushana's conflicts with her brothers and the strange world-threatening activities of the Doroks and their allies, to the atrocities of the Torumekian armies and the secrets of the fungi forest as well as the troubling prophecy of the blue-clad one. NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF WIND is an ecological fable of extraordinary scope. Its major theme seems to be "harmony with nature and others". Nausicaa is constantly ground between her own instincts toward harmony and the expedience and shortsightedness of her comrades as well as her own need to survive. Miyazaki denigrates his own skill in comics (in the afterword to the first Perfect Collection), but he is blinded by his own perspective. His command of craft is superb. In every aspect of art, he demonstrates an exquisite mastery of visual language. [2] Miyazaki prefers small panels. His pages rarely have fewer than five panels and commonly have nine or more. This doesn't limit his scope; when his panels requires a greater vista, he gives it to them, but when he's doing "talking heads", all you get is a head shot. Even then, he manages to make the common repetition of the head of his main characters interesting and unique, every time. *Every* shot is worth looking at. The story here is vast. The five hundred and forty pages (on the order of four *thousand* panels) represented by the two Perfect Collections does not finish the story. Indeed, it's hard to even guess how much of the story remains. There are far more main characters than just Nausicaa. The people of the Valley of Wind; Master Yupa, Nausicaa's trainer; Princess Kushana and her aide Kurotowa; Dorok shamans; and various refugees and other people encountered by Nausicaa join the story and proceed on their own ways, occasionally interacting with each other or joining up with Nausicaa again. The effect is that of a carefully woven great tapestry. Admittedly, I haven't read the end; Miyazaki may blow it all, either by never getting to an end or by screwing the end up. [3] The bottom line: It's brilliant, it's subtle, and it's got damn fine art. 540 pages of story for 36 bucks is hard to beat. When the story and art are this good and this complex for that cheap, you owe it to yourself to give this a try. -- [1] Friz Freleng in particular and the Warner Bros team of animators in general are his closest American rivals, and they are thirty years past their days of glory and were primarily limited to comedy. Walt Disney Studio productions run a distant second. [2] American readers may have one small problem with panel flow. In the American page, left-to-right flow dominates over top-to-bottom. This is not the case in the Japanese page, with the result that the American reader may occasionally follow perceived panel flow right instead of down. This is something of an inconvenience, but it ceases to be a problem once the preeminence of horizontal flow is unlearned. [3] One of my personal shibboleths in comics is volume four of the Legion of Super-Heroes, which had an extremely promising, complicated beginning which eventually failed to deliver any of its promises; subplots weren't followed up, stories weren't concluded, the comic veered off in stupid and unproductive directions and forgot what it was about. Nausicaa could go that way, but at the moment I continue to believe that he knows where the end is and how he's going to get there. -- "In *my* afterlife, there'll definitely be modems."--Joev Dubach elmo ([m--rr--w] at [physics.rice.edu],[m--rr--w] at [fnal.fnal.gov])