Everything Nausicaa represents, you can garner from the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
While everyone else steers clear of the toxic jungle, she thrives in it. Effortlessly, she
maneuvers through without a care for the bizarre and monstrous flora and fauna around her.
In fact, she embraces them. She goes as far as to apologize to one for jumping on it,
and she exclaims with glee at finding the Ohm shell. As for me, I jump in terror when
I stumble across those little creepy cicada molts. But fear doesn’t ever seem to be
a thing for Nausicaa. Upon hearing the commotion caused by a giant angry stampeding bug, she
jumps into action. And the way she handles it is how she handles every other interaction
in the film. With understanding.
Normally the typical response to a giant raging insect out for blood is to kill it with fire.
But Nausicaa approaches it more interestingly. She says, “Be a good kid for me.” Her
first instinct isn’t violence, but rather examining cooly, and coming from a place of
good will. When this doesn’t work, she doesn’t take it as a chance to abandon civility. She
recognizes that it won’t listen, executes Plan B and charms it back into appeasement.
Nausicaa accomplishes this again and again. When meeting the fox squirrel Teto, she does
so fearlessly. Even when it bites her, she doesn’t back down. She understands at a
base level that it is just afraid… and doesn’t blame it for being so. Instead, she tries
to show that there is in fact, no reason to be. This temperment from Nausicaa is approached
with a kind of bewilderment from the other characters. Lord Yupa refers to it as a “mysterious
power.” But I don’t think it’s mysterious at all.
A central tenet of the movie is that humans often react to the unknown with fear. Instead
of trying to empathize with whatever it happens to be, we often try to assert our will upon
it, choosing control as opposed to mutual harmony. When the toxic jungle begins to encroach
upon society, the Tolmekians and Pejites have a simple solution, and it might sound familiar.
Kill it with fire. They place their bets on technology, a weapon of mass destruction that
threw back human progress by hundreds of years. (Now, I know that the Giant Warrior is technically
organic, but it’s treated as a technological invention in the film).
Nausicaa spits in the face of this. Despite being a product of fantasy, Nausicaa acts
very much like a scientist. In fact, Miyazaki describes her big revelation as a “Copernican
turn,” referencing the astronomer who pioneered Heliocentrism. Through careful analysis and
scientific curiosity, she finds out that the whole reason the jungle is toxic is the Giant
Warriors in the first place, and the Seven Days of Fire that they brought about. Instead
of taking this adversarial stance that the others do, she comes at it from a place of
love. We shouldn’t oppose the toxic jungle, we shouldn’t seek to eradicate the many
insects that call it home. We shouldn’t be afraid.
In the movie, Nausicaa is obviously right, and her acceptance of the Ohms and other insects
is what leads to stopping the calamity. The final image is one of hope, with new life
sprouting and a face mask that is not longer needed. But does this movie have any actual
real world applicability? Reality is often a harsh mistress, and it can be hard to imagine
standing in front of herd of stampeding… anything leading to a good outcome. What part
of Nausicaa can we actually take beyond the screen and into our lives?
Everything, the answer is everything.
At the heart of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is conservation. Nausicaa wants to
coexist with the toxic jungle and its denizens rather than oppose and eradicate it. She thinks
that the world is better with it existing than not, and that nature is a powerful force
that shouldn’t be trifled with. And she ends up being right, discovering the crucial
underlying process that is detoxifying all of the trouble of human action. Although the
movie was made in 1984, it’s message is more alive than ever. We have a number of
issues both metaphorically and literally plaguing the world, and there is immense value in revisiting
Nausicaa’s many, now prophetic lessons.
Humans in Nausicaa often place great faith in technology. The Tolmekians and Pejites
believe that they simply need to revive the Giant Warrior and they can finally be rid
of the toxic jungle. An article written by Jodie Bonicci explains how Nausicaa contrasts
against this quite well, titled “Ethics Animated.”
“Nausicaa’s search for knowledge [doesn’t] view knowledge as an object of inquisition…
Her aim is to observe nature’s workings, and not to calculate them. By gathering the
seeds and uncontaminated soil and water, and watching as nature brings-forth from, nature
itself reveals to her the truth. This is a stark contrast to the inquisition conducted
by the Tolmekians, who capture and attempt to revive a Giant Warrior embryo so as to
use it as a weapon to burn down the toxic jungle. The serenity and light and earthy
tones in the underground lab symbolise the poeisis of bringing-forth into unconcealment,
while the dark and gruesome imagery in Officer Kurotowa’s lab symbolises a challenging-forth
which sets upon nature and attempts to command it into standing-by to be called upon for
further commands.”
By leaving nature well enough alone, it rewards her with key and crucial revelations—the
unpolluted area and the almost magical power of the Ohm. Meanwhile provoking nature often
just leads to a whole lot of whoop-ass. E.O. Wilson echoes this thought in his book “Half-Earth:
Our Planet’s Fight For Life.” In it, he makes the argument that in order to prevent
catastrophic results, we need to set aside half of the Earth’s surface to safeguard
the bulk of biodiversity. Half the planet might sound extreme, but he argues that we
are living in an extreme world already. The bulk of his plan involves maintaining Earth’s
biosphere, which is the collectivity of all the organisms on the planet at any given moment
in time. It is all the plants, animals, fungi, and microbes alive as you hear these words.
While I imagine most people are familiar with the Circle of Life, I think few really understand
how much of a delicate balance everything is in. Wilson covers a few unintuitive examples
in his book. Like, did you know that wolves play a role in the promotion of tree growth?
The presence of wolves reduces the amount of elk, which in turn cause a larger amount
of aspen seedlings to propogate. You can actually manipulate the thickness of aspen groves by
changing the number of wolves you introduce, and in turn the amount of soil erosion. In
the mangrove forests of India, tigers play the same role, thinning various prey populations—producing
a lusher, more biologically diverse fauna and flora. Just as Nausicaa realized that
the toxic jungle shouldn’t be carelessly dealt away with, and eventually uncovers its
higher purpose of cleaning up the mess humans made, we also should strive to preserve nature
as much as possible. Yes, even the creepy crawly things that scare us. Because if we
knew how much the world could change without them—seek to attain understanding as Nausicaa
does—we may not be scared at all… okay at least maybe a little bit less.
When humans are afraid in Nausicaa, they often turn to technology. Exacerbating that reliance,
technology in Nausicaa is shown to be… kind of shoddy. Their planes are literally falling
apart at the seams—and at one point, in search of a weapon, Nausicaa just casually
rips a pipe off of the wall! Their greatest weapon and the crux of their plan to deal
with the Ohm stampede disintegrates pathetically, barely causing a scratch in their numbers.
But rather than the film denouncing technology completely, it shows many cases in which technology
is used beneficially. Nausicaa uses her gun not to shoot carelessly at the Ohm and potentially
enrage it further, but uses it to ignite the flares that eventually snap it out of its
frenzy. She uses her glider and simple charmer to great effect, and an article “Animated
Nature” describes Miyazaki’s tendency to “poignantly juxtapose images of human
technology that represent useful inventiveness… (quiet windmills, flowing canals…) with
others that highlight the dangerously driven and wild metastasis of military might.”
It is not technology itself that leads to bedlam, but misuse of that technology. Once
again, we can still apply that lesson to today. We are in the beginning midst of a pandemic,
and while risk to the average person is relatively low, that doesn’t stop people from cleaning
out supplies in terror. Across the United States, there is a shortage of face masks,
but the people using them aren’t the ones that need it the most. Wearing a face mask,
according to multiple sources including the CDC, doesn’t reduce the risk of you contracting
the virus, in fact it might just lull you into a false sense of security. But it is
so primal, so intuitive that a human invention might be able to protect you, that we listen
to our inner fears rather than the experts.
A lot of the appeal in Nausicaa to me is the lesson that hate only results in short term
gains, while care and understanding results in the long-term preservation of humanity.
Even though it’s an older work, made before Studio Ghibli was even a thing, its messages
are timeless. We could all benefit from mimicking Nausicaa, who coexists with nature, knows
too much of its strength to try and subjugate it, and loves each thing, be it human or not,
as if she were its own mother. We could use a little more Nausicaas, now more than ever.
Thanks for watching and be sure to like and subscribe for more content. If you’d like
to have some additional reading, I’ve included all of the sources I used in the description
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donate to my patreon! Thanks to Baluun, GorgePotter, CoDGamer632, Teddy Herzivelt, Animebounce,
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And of course, if anything I said was wrong, I’m sorry.
I must’ve stuttered.