By: Charlotte Bistodeau

‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ was released in 1984 and was Hayao Miyazaki’s first ever film he did. It’s also the first ever film I watched by Miyazaki followed up by ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ and the like.

‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ is a post-apocalyptic fantasy based in a world covered in plants that make up the Toxic Jungle. Nausicaä is a princess who loves her people of the Valley of the Wind and would do anything to protect them. But she also loves the insects of the Toxic Jungle and knows that harming them would only hurt her people.

‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ has got to be my favorite movie and I must have watched it over twenty times. From the writing to the screenplay, I love it all. The story is about a girl, Nausicaä, who is taken as captive and ends up in the middle of a feud between two other empires, Tolmekia and Pejite. In the end, she ends up getting back to the Valley of the Wind and stopping the Ohmu, an insect from the Toxic Jungle, stampeding across the land destroying everything in their path. I love Nausicaä’s character and what she believes. She is strong and caring and she would do anything to protect her people, even if it meant dying.

I also think that my favorite sound track from any of Miyazaki’s films has to be from this movie. All the songs convey different feelings that you can really feel.

I also have to talk about the voice acting. I have watched it in the original Japanese and the English version and I have to say, surprisingly, the English version is better. Nausicaä’s voice in the Japanese version is extremely small and baby like, which doesn’t suit her at all, while in the English version she sounds like an 18-year-old girl, which she is. The audio quality is also way better and also the subtitles on the Japanese version are really bad. For example, there is little emotion and some of the sentences don’t make any sense whatsoever. It’s one of the only films where I like the English dub better.

Overall, I rate this movie a 10/10 but I might be a little biased. The only real complaint would be that they did skip over some parts in the book, which Miyazaki wrote. But it doesn’t take anything from the movie, probably because Miyazaki was the author of the book and one of the directors of the movie.

You can find the movie on Max, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube TV, and Google Play Movie. You can also purchase the Blu Ray/DVD set for 15 dollars at Target. In any case, I would recommend the movie to anyone, young or old.