Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (1984) animated fantasy
Rating: 7/10
Plot: Most of Earth consists of toxic jungle inhabited by giant insects. The titular princess of the titular valley has befriended the insects somewhat and roams the jungles freely. Her people’s halcyon life in the valley is disrupted when the Tolkmekians, led by a gal with one arm and a metallic vagina (I’m guessing) and an irritating son of a bitch, invade and kill their king.
The Tolmekians have plans to unleash a Big Fire Man, one of the seven giant warriors who destroyed most of mankind. They want to use it to fight the insects. A blind lady reminds everybody of a prophecy about a hero in blue who will reunite mankind and nature, and if you’ve ever seen any movie at all like this, you can probably guess that it’s going to be Nausicaa.
This predates Studio Ghibli but helped launched Studio Ghibli and should get a little credit for that. It’s Miyazaki, so you can guess that it’s a fantasy that oozes the fantastical. It’s colorful, a world filled with stunning landscapes and a variety of interesting insects. This might not be as textured as his later films, but it’s still beautiful to look at. There are a lot of action sequences with various spaceships maneuvering through clouds and pew-pewing at each other, and that all looks good, too.
In fact, there’s not a lot that I would complain about with the animation. The characters and their story, unfortunately, are all a little boring. Fantasy’s not really my bag anyway. I really have to be in the right mood to watch it, and my brother forced it upon me. I couldn’t really protest because I was eating his pizza and farting on his couch. The female protagonist is your typical Miyazaki heroine, but the boy she later befriends, a guy voiced by Shooby LeBoof actually, doesn’t add much to the story.
The bad guy warriors look interesting enough in two types of armor, but about half of them are bring swords to a gun and tank battle which doesn’t make a lot of sense and they all shoot about as well as Stormtroopers (the Star Wars ones–not the Nazi ones) in dogfights. Uma Thurman voices the main evil woman character, one that is almost interesting. She did get my mind wandering when she made reference to something the insects did to her body that only a man lucky enough to marry her would find out about.
The main evil guy character irritated me, but I did like how he looked visibly bored or annoyed a lot of the time when things were going on that had little to do with him. And he got my mind wandering a bit, and I wondered how difficult it would be to get into Disneyland or Disney World dressed like him just to see how many people wanted their pictures taken with me. And then I started thinking about dressing like other characters–Poppins’ chimney sweep buddy, for instance–and instantly put that on my bucket list. But back to this movie.
I did enjoy how a lot of this looked, but I didn’t care for the story too much, and the music was really irritating, especially a high-pitched la-la-la-la-la-la-la theme song that accompanied what I think was a flashback and a pivotal scene later in the movie. There was also a generous portion of disco music. The voice work wasn’t great in this thing either. I might not have known exactly where this story was going to go, but by the time it all resolved, I wasn’t surprised a bit at how it was resolved.
And I wasn’t surprised a bit that it dealt thematically with man’s relationship to the environment and the dangers of war. I don’t speak Japanese, but I can only assume Ghibli means hippie. It’s nowhere near upper-echelon Miyazaki, but it’s pretty enough and has those cool-looking insects. No metallic cooters though. That’s disappointing.
