Response 8: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

I can’t remember how old I was the first time I watched Nausicaa. I do remember it, but I can’t remember when it was. I think I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. I absolutely loved the film, though I don’t think I understood it. Watching it again, for the first time in years, I can see a lot more of the politics that went into it. It’s very environmentalist and anti-war.

This can be problematic for childrens’ media. For one thing, impressing our own opinions and political associations on young children is not the best way to raise them, and could bias them in unfortunate ways when they are older. For another thing, movies for kids that deal with real social, economic, or environmental problems still need happy endings or kids won’t like them. Often, as in Fern Gulley, the solution to the problem is not difficult and does not require any sort of sacrifice on the part of the characters or the audience. If the main conflict of the story is exclusively some social or environmental problem, then often a film for children will wrap up the problem completely even when the problem is still there in reality.

I think Nausicaa does a better job than most environmentalist films for children. While the politics are definitely there, the problems are a little more complicated than usual. In real life, these sorts of problems are much more complex and difficult to solve than in films, even Nausicaa, but the fact that the environmental situation is so complicated in the film helps to counter the strong bias that the writers of the film obviously felt toward the issue. The environment in Nausicaa, is literally trying to kill off the human race, or at least it seems to be. What it’s really doing is cleansing the earth, but in that process, it is also making people sick. The line between the right decisions and the wrong ones is a lot thinner in this movie than most environmentalist films.

Nausicaa also doesn’t end with a simple solution, and not all of the problems in the world have gone away. Nausicaa saves her valley by sacrificing her life for it. She doesn’t quite die, because the ohm work together to heal her, but she was willing to give up her own life to save the lives of her people. This sort of character is a much stronger role model than a hero who saves the day by fighting hard enough, or getting lucky. After the valley is saved, the work isn’t over. There is still war and danger in the world. There are trees to replant, and political issues to resolve. The people of Earth, if they want to live, will have to learn to make sacrifices and work with the toxic jungle instead of against it. Nausicaa is not about solving the world’s problems, it’s about taking the first step in the path to solving them.