Forum - View topicJason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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Truered
 Posts: 515 Location: Uni |
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The Nausicaa movie was one of the first Miyazaki films I saw, and still remains one of my favourites. I picked up the manga collection in 2007 (I think). If I look up from my laptop screen I can see it on the bookshelf in front of me
 Nausicaa remains one of my favourite anime/manga characters.
I've been feeling an urge to reread the series in the last few weeks, so this may have tipped me into starting it again
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redcar
 Posts: 172 Location: Texas |
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Ah, thanks for finally doing an article on Nausicaä. I liked the movie enough when I watched it years ago, but it wasn't until I read the manga for my anime class in college that I realized how amazing this version really was. Everyone says the movie is a masterpiece, but the manga truly puts it to shame. Everyone should read it at least once, no matter what their taste in manga happens to be.
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dan_bellucci
Posts: 20 |
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The ending of Nausicaa is morally bankrupt, hypocritical, unjust, indefensible, nonsensical rubbish.
I mean in my opinion the manga started getting worse with thespoiler[ "giant mutant mold that ate everything"] arc interrupting the war, and I thinkspoiler[ getting rid of Miralupa], who had such awesome, badass presence was a really bad idea, but even then it was still pretty cool. But the final volume just makes me sick. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
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Ah, read the Nausicaa perfect collections so long ago before Viz even knew they were doing omnibuses (same with Lum). This is the manga that took Miyazaki a decade and could see how his mindset changed along the way from some Marxist to someone more disillusioned.
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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I never thought of the similarity between Miyazaki and Daijiro Moroboshi, but you're absolutely right! The detail, their character design styles, their love of monsters and fairytales, the occasional (more frequent in Moroboshi) creepiness... hmm. Someone really has to translate some Daijiro Moroboshi, he's towards the top of my untranslated awesome manga artists list. The "quick-to-read" and "slow manga" thing was sloppy wording on my part. I should have said "high-volume manga" or "bulk manga" instead of "slow manga." Most mainstream manga artists (particularly in the weekly and biweeklys) draw for clarity and speed-of-reading above all else. Since there's not much to look at on each page, you can read it quick, almost like a flip book. Miyazaki, on the other hand, draws DENSE manga, much more like the typical pacing of Western comics. I don't think it's a bad thing, though -- just a different style, an artistic choice. Although I will agree that I think it would be an even better manga if he did have more slow moments, more empty spaces, in short, better pacing. If it used more of the strengths of manga as well as the strengths of Eurocomics. Nausicaa is a frantic rush of events, but it's still a great manga. |
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PingSoni
 Subscriber Posts: 195 Location: Lansing MI |
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I love the Nausicaa manga! The style is certainly very different, less polished, perhaps, more story-focused than art-focused. Brings to mind Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, (Fumiyo Kouno) or even Twin Spica, (Kou Yaginuma), both of which I also really like.
I think maybe the denseness and pacing may simply be due to Miyazaki's wanting to just finish the damn thing. Also absolutely worth getting is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions, both for the (in my opinion) stunning art and for Miyazaki's very candid comments. |
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Jacut
Posts: 140 Location: Paris, France |
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"The ending of the Nausicaä manga has a similar message, as if showing how Miyazaki's ideas evolved from Nausicaä to Mononoke over 12 long years hunched over his drawing board."
Actually, both endings were made the same year and also by different people. Nausicaä's ending was first drawn in 1994 when the 7th volume of the manga was realeased in Japan on Animage and Mononoke's in 1994 also when the end of the script was decided before starting the production of the movie. Funny fact is that even though both endings were written roughly at the same time, different people wrote them. Miya-san has stated many times that he didn't like Mononoke for two reasons : he didn't get to chose the name of the movie (chosen by Toshio Suzuki for marketing purposes - Miyazaki wanted the movie to be called Ashitaka no Densetsu -) and he didn't write the ending for the movie, which was decided on a shinkansen ride by both Toshio Suzuki and Joe Hisaishi when discussing about the story. Miyazaki envisionned something totally different with his ending, including Lady Eboshi being killed by the Deer God's head, the humans mostly destroyed like the forest and Ashitaka & San living together after that. He was denied this ending by Toshio Suzuki, and ultimately, it's one of the few cases when I think a studio did the film right by proving the author wrong. They simply made the perfect animation movie thanks to that and probably the best ever created (personal opinion of course). |
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marcos torres toledo
Posts: 269 |
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I did not know there was a manga no that not true I saw in Last Gasp offering of one of the manga. What I didn't know that it was a series thank you Jason for telling me about the series thou with the poblems with Borders I may be force to deal with Viz directly. I loved the animes because of ambiguity instesd of back and white thou there have been other anime and manga that have been made just as gray with endings that leave their stories open.
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E-Master
 Posts: 471 |
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I like the manga as well, just cause it explored the Nausicaa universe more deeply than the movie(which was also a Masterpiece). I liked how it had character development on new and already recognized characters throughout the 7 volume manga.
It's one of the fewest Miyazaki manga I've read as of now. |
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BleuVII
 Posts: 672 Location: Tokorozawa, Japan |
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Ah, but not only is it a manga and an anime, it's also a MODEL KIT:
I personally have the Möwe (Mehve) and the Gunship.
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Are you sure this is still in print from Viz? RACS is listing it as "discontinued" with slightly inflated prices for their remaining stock of 2nd ed. volumes. Amazon.com doesn't seem to have stock of most volumes anymore, though there are still some new copies from Marketplace sellers.
Mostly concerned with cost of shipping if I order online versus special-ordering from a local bookstore, which only works for in print stuff. Only have volume 2 of the 2nd ed. right now. |
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Ian K
 Posts: 250 |
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I'd like to see you unpack that some. I thought Nausicaa's choice was debatable but defensible, spoiler[destroying an AI that had manipulated humans - and life in general - to its own ends, instigating repeated wars, ecological disasters, and massive suffering.] I'm curious what you saw in it that I didn't. Personally, I side firmly with the majority - I see in Nausicaa (the manga) a literary ambition unequaled in any graphic novel, period. Perhaps part of what makes it stand out so much is that it is more 'zoomed out' than is usual with manga (or western comics, I think). This is partly in how the characters are physically represented - they are actually drawn smaller. There are no two page spreads devoted to a sparkly embrace or a brutal beatdown, there are no close ups of widened, teary eyes. And the background almost never disappears so that all we have to look at are the characters. Granted, this is probably as much a result of Miyazaki's old-school sensibilities as a considered selection from a host of stylistic choices, and you could probably see similar approaches taken by other older manga artists, but here it is so appropriate for an epic fantasy with dozens of characters, depicting wars and destruction and suffering and hope. Oh dear, I'm starting to rant. I'll just echo what almost) everyone else has said: If you haven't read it yet, do so. You (almost certainly) won't be disappointed. |
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toddc
 Posts: 164 |
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There's one thing I dislike about Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: for someone who allegedly hates easy answers, Miyazaki hangs his entire manga on one. See, Nausicaa's never wrong. She's constantly shown as the avatar of compassion and moral rectitude. Even when she's making harsh decisions, the manga never stops reminding you that she's right.
And despite the bleak tone of the story, Miyazaki pulls his punches when it comes to Nausicaa's darker moments. The soldier that she kills "in the heat of battle" is a faceless, armored non-person. When she later spoiler[wipes out the remnants of the real human race, they're shown as a ghostly fog and a bunch of egglike embryos that, as one character points out, can barely be called human.] And throughout this scene, that same character exclaims that Nausicaa's "a chaos of destruction and mercy." Just in case the reader can't tell. Miyazaki overdoes the idea of commoners and soldiers sacrificing themselves for an idealized female character, whether it's Kushana or Nausicaa, and that damages the story's gritty feminist angle. After all, it's easier to survive as a woman in a man's world when you have dozens of men and women and giant post-nuclear pillbugs willing to die for you. Still, that's the only thing that bothers me about Nausicaa. It's an excellent comic for the reasons outlined in the article, and it's among my first choices whenever someone wants proof that manga's not just preteen drivel. |
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gerbilx
Posts: 138 |
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I raise an eyebrow high at the thought of Howl being confusing, but besides that, thank you for another excellent read.
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dan_bellucci
Posts: 20 |
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With pleasure. Spoiler warnings for this whole post. I don't want to make a wall of black text. My main complaint is with Nausicaa herself. She is fully aware that the humans alive today cannot breathe clean air. She knows that in a thousand years time the forest will have purged the poison from the ground and the world will be full of clean air and at that time nearly every human on the face of the planet will spew blood and die. And yet she turns her back on the one hope for saving most of humanity, the source of technology capable of preparing current humans for when the air will be clean. And she destroys it! She destroys it on an utterly arbitrary, bigoted basis. She thinks "Grr you're just a wicked relic from the wicked people who destroyed the world" AND YET SHE KNOWS that it's those same people who engineered the insect-forest ecosystem that she worships so. She loved and worshipped the forest and its insect inhabitants, earlier on she approved of it cleansing the world. And yet there is still this inexplicable hypocrisy whereby she rejects the plan of the people of the past even though they are the architects of everything she has championed. So she is willing to doom humanity to be all but wiped-out save for a few lucky mutants who might be able to breath clean air, possibly, just because of her bigotry. And when confronted with this fact by the artefact holding all the secrets to humanity's salvation she just shrugs and says "that's up to the planet", never mind the fact that it was the humans of the past who constructed most of what she considers "the planet" to be, and this is exactly what the master of the crypt of Shuwa says it is, nihilism. In addition she's even confronted with the fact that all of humanity save maybe the forest people are likely to be wiped out before the purification has come to pass simply from hardening disease and infant mortality. In the kingdom of Torumekia the population is on a rapid decline, there are barely any people to occupy the city's grand streets such that it looks deserted. Even Nausicaa's own valley of the wind shows unmistakeable signs of slowly perishing as the village gets older and older and the number of children becomes fewer and fewer as teh forest grows larger and larger. AND STILL she rejects the solutions offered by the crypt of Shuwa. She's even prepared to kill however many hundreds of humans in the crypt of Shuwa were being kept in stasis for when purification was complete. And the only thing even approaching a logical justification for any of these actions is that she's stopping anybody from using weapons from the crypt in the future. But let's think about that for a second. On the one hand hope for humanity, and cures for the diseases wiping them out which must be closely guarded in case of tyranny; on the other hand certain doom to virtually all of humanity unless "the will of the planet" magically decides to save them. HMMMM GEE I WONDER WHICH IS THE RIGHT PATH TO TAKE. Nausicaa chooses the latter because she wants the easy route. She wants "the planet" to somehow save them despite a mountain of evidence to suggest that that will not happen because it's easier to hope that "the planet" will save humanity, than to have to try and take responsibility for humanity's salvation yourself, attempt to find the technologies which will save it and do everything you can to ensure wicked people will not use destructive technologies for themselves. She just wants to give up. In summary, Nausicaa dooms humanity by rejecting countless solutions to humanity's numerous problems due to sheer, unadulterated, irrational bigotry; cognitive disconnect on a grand scale; and nihilism. Okay. Most of the above I had alreay written before. In response to your post , Ian K, I do not recall any evidence for the allegations you're amking about the crypt of Shuwa. As I recall, the master of the crypt simply wants to be left alone, perhaps with a cult of people deciphering and tending to it, for a thousand years until the purification is complete. I do not recall it ever going about instigating war or famine or anything else. All it is is a resevoir of knowledge with the directives: chil for the next thousand years while staying intact. The technology for those cactus-looking golem things and the Dorok emperor's immortality ar simply things that the cult of monks residing inside the crypt found out from hundreds of years of deciphering. And yes, there are probably other dangerous weapons people could find out about, but to resign humanity to eradication from hardening sickness, spreading poison forests, inevitable wars for the remaining habitable land likely even more violent and horrible than any seen so far, just so that somebody in the future doesn't say, get a nuke is preposterous! There is medical technology in the tomb that can save humanity. I'm sorry to repeat myself but it's just so blindingly stupid that Nausicaa's decision can be portrayed as a sound and just one when she's just doomed them all out of biggotry. edit: and there's a lesser complaint with an earlier part in the same volume about Kushana. Yupa says "Blood has not sullied you, but cleansed you." Think about that. I mean first of all that's just a piece of nonsense to begin with. How the fudge can anyone be cleased by blood? He's saying that Kushana has become a good person by virtue of the fact she's killed thousands of people. And no, not just soldiers, she wiped out every man, woman and child in Pejitei. She basically committed her own rape of Nanking. And this woman is meant to have been cleansed by doing all these reprehensible, irrefutably evil things? No. No, that's patently bullshit. she's every bit as wicked and guilty as the the Holy Emporer of Dorok, his brother , or any of her own family. She deserves to be killed by Asbel's hand. And after this page where Yupa sacrifices himself for short-lived peace Chikuku even goes as far as to report that Kushana is a "wounded bird", a "gentle bird with broad wings and a kind heard." No. No! That is such a load of unnacceptable bollocks. 'Gentle birds with kind hearts' don't massacre entire cities full of non-combatants. For us to accept this ridiculous character assessment we're being asked to just clean forget about how she killed every single living human being in Pejitei. That's stupid, and it's mind-boggling how we're meant to swallow it. |
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