The Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival will be dredging up three Hayao Miyazaki titles from the vaults this year, offering a mini crash-course in Anime. The following reviews are from a non-savant's point of view, so proceed with caution (if at all). By DAVID LEVINSON.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Hayao Miyazaki | Japan | 116 min | Voices: Sumi Shimamoto, Mahito Tsujimura, Hisako Kyouda, Gorou Naya.
CHAPTER I: NAKED LUNCH
KICKING THINGS OFF, chronologically wise, is the 1984 film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. With all of the similarities at play, it's hard for this eco-prop piece not to get a little lost in the shadow of its more polished descendant, Princess Mononoke. Like that film – mixing blood-and-dirt mysticism with antiquated Japan – Nausicaä seems to be a study in contrasts, a case of medieval windmill-dwelling meets post-nuclear fallout. Naturally, water is sparse and clean air almost non-existent. But Miyazaki has more important things on his mind than dwelling in misanthro-chic. He's more interested in the sight of nature swarming technology, punctuating the general flow of machine decay and gas mask-strapped faces with dense forest-havens. Meanwhile, the two come to meet in the intoxicating opening scene, where the eponymous protag shields herself from pin drops of snow.
As things progress, Miyazaki arranges a triumvirate of forces at conflict over the state of the land: the Torumekian army are hell-bent on starting things over, and wiping out the Wastelands – a creeping forest area that discharges poison – in the process. In between trying to occupy Nausicaä, they also come to grind wills with the smaller colony of Pejite, over possession of an exhumed demigod, along with a steadily amassing herd of Ohmu (which are insects that would make Bill Lee sputter with glee).
Wearing its ecologically-minded heart on its sleeve, as these threads come to coalesce, what the plot amounts to is really just a convoluted way of saying that pollution sucks. Yet, in spite of his unfortunate habit of falling back on your typical underdog-versus-the-faceless-masses-of-imperialism binaries, Miyazaki tweaks the fantasy blueprint enough to maintain interest. This comes to surface particularly during his co-ordination of a series of empowered female figures, who circulate their more submissive male counterparts. Nausicaä – best thought of as a raven-haired Doolittle cum eco-warrior – is a given; she talks with the animals, but may still tear things up a little when inclined. She also tends to skirt about on a hand glider – which, combined with her scanty lower-end fashion sense, ushers in a small lineup of nymphet ass-shots, strangely undercutting the more asexual strains of grrrl power. There's also Kushana, who carries obvious echoes of Princess Mononoke's Lady Eboshi, in both her graceful and charismatic depravity, along with her myopic bend on technological progress. Filling out the obligatory wise and/or old person slot is the blind shaman, Grandmother.
Conceived largely as a string of set-pieces, the narrative moves along in locomotive shunts. However, while all the blowing-stuff-up does tend to get a little tiresome, there's a weird sense of fascination that propels the insect-machinery encounters; the site of giant maggot-like creatures huddled over an aircraft wing faintly rings with that Cronenberg-ian frame of biological transformation and the juncture between flesh and metal. A little levity does go a long way though, and it's no coincidence that what comes to hail tall is one of the movie's quietest interludes, one shared by Nausicaä and Asbel of Pejite, where they wax ecological in an ice-encrusted cavern beneath the Wastelands.>>
Illus: © Ally Ikutani / Lumière 2004
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