There’s something notable about the earliest films of Hayao Miyazaki, something viewers get to experience only for a moment. It’s the work of an auteur at the start of his career. With almost four decades of work to hold up in comparison, they feel humble. It’s that certain something in the editing that looks old and bypassed, but the stories themselves? They’re images of an apocalypse that feel like places we’ve been.

Miyazaki has been creating his own tiny apocalypse again and again, if you’re looking closely. I’ve often noted that fans have too often overlooked his background, a turbulent childhood colored by the events during and after World War II. He’s a celebrated auteur, but I don’t think that he’s always taken seriously as a human being. As with any artist we consider a genius, there’s been considerable sacrifice to support his zealous work habits.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind might just be my favorite of his labors of obsessive love, and it also happens to be overtly apocalyptic. Nausicaa’s story spans over a decade, as both an early Ghibli film release in 1984, and an epic manga that reached completion in 1994, but it’s best to look at them as two separate universes. No, there is no Studio Ghibli multiverse, (and my God, I hope there never is) but they compliment each other as well as they divest.

Our film version Nausicaa is the princess-chief of a scrappy post-apocalyptic kingdom that’s struggling to hold its own against hyper-militarized neighbors who boast fleets of flying warships and far-reaching armies. In both versions of her story, the planet Earth has been reduced to ever-expanding toxic forests ruled by oversized swarms of vicious insects who are mysteriously endeared to our protagonist. 

This is all thanks to the “Seven Days of Fire,” a not-so-subtle allusion to nuclear war and the capacity for an industrial society to destroy itself by its own weapons. Instead of bombs, humanity burned under the watch of the great God Warriors, a handful of bio-engineered humanoid giants with the capacity to annihilate a planet over the course of a single week. The invading armies present in the film have managed to rebuild such a God Warrior to be used in combat, but when the big reveal occurs, we’re treated to a melting, explosive, half developed being that drips flesh while attempting an attack. Fans of my other favorite apocalypse anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, may find it delightful to learn that the God Warrior sequence was directed by none other than Hideaki Anno in his pre-NGE career. After encouraging harmony between all warring factions and insects, film Nausicaa completes her hero’s journey as a messiah figure, much to the chagrin of critics who noted how suddenly her narrative halts. Can she be reduced to a Mary-Sue who really likes bugs? It’s a fair criticism to consider!

Enter our new and improved Ultimate Girl, the manga iteration of Nausicaa. While the first volumes of the graphic novel series more or less follows the plot of the film, we’re treated to a more fully developed version of the protagonist who is willing to commit acts of violence and defiance to achieve her goal of discovering how to save the world that she lives in. Here we find Hayao Miyazaki at his most unexpected, when Nausicaa meets a fully developed God Warrior. Instead of dissolving into a putrid pile of flesh and gristle like we saw in the movie, our manga God Warrior is a killing machine that’s developing a personality. It calls Nausicaa, “Mama,” and imprints on her in the same way a duckling attaches to his mother. Just like the thousands of world-ending weapons that are buried all around us in our real world, this reanimated weapon is someone’s responsibility, to be taken as seriously as the power that it could unleash. It’s an obvious response to our modern nuclear question, as we try to ignore the fact that there are currently over 5,000 missiles in the United States’ stockpile alone. How do we continue to exist, despite the presence of godlike destruction? Does this not strike anyone else as absurd? Is the Seven Days of Fire prophetic, or have we already lived through it, stuck with the aftermath and destined to repeat the ecological destruction?

Far from the bombs and bugs in Nausicaa’s world, two little girls in postwar Japan began to imagine their own in 1988’s My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro is a family favorite, the kind of movie you’d use to introduce a small child to Miyazaki. Instead of blood and flames, big sister Satsuki and pre-K Mei experience a quiet apocalypse, something that we can relate to in the current pandemic. This is a story about a family and their move to an enchanted countryside, but the mother is missing for most of the film with a serious illness that has kept her living in a city hospital while the father raises his two young daughters. For Sasuki and Mei, the absence of their mom is the end of their world, and so they seek refuge and adventure in the realm of nearby spirits and forest sprites.

Satsuki and her duty as a big sister without a mother nearby speaks to the experience of a young Hayao Miyazaki, who had to serve in a similar role in his youth when his own mother was ill with tuberculosis. In her book Miyazakiworld, Susan Napier describes several instances when Miyazaki himself made overt or implied admissions of Satsuki being a version of his childhood self. Totoro is a sweet movie, a slow tale that takes its time, and I wish I had seen it when I was a little kid. I wonder if I would have picked up on some of the sadness behind it, and sought inspiration from the perseverance of two children determined to make the most of their situation. 

Two years prior to My Neighbor Totoro, Studio Ghibli had their first official release with Castle in the Sky in 1986. Our apocalypse in this movie is gloriously bittersweet, and the result of a great sacrifice made by two young teenagers. In Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki plays with the idea of floating cities, going as far as to name this one Laputa as an homage to the floating island in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Our story begins in a town in a country with no name, but it is based off of the Welsh mining towns that Miyazaki had visited earlier in the decade, where he also observed the Miners Strike. It’s a version of Earth that is lost to time and disappearing all the while, as the mines are becoming less and less fruitful for our teenage male protagonist, the orphaned Pazu. When he discovers a princess named Sheeta floating down from the sky, they make fast friends before fleeing to Laputa in a tiny aircraft when pursued by sky pirates and an airship wielding military led by an egomaniac. 

Sheeta is the rightful princess to the throne of Laputa, an enormous flying city-tree surrounded by hurricanes and hidden away in the atmosphere, where it was never to be discovered again after being abandoned. To the horror of the children, we discover that this pristine paradise maintained by compassionate robots can be used as, surprise, a weapon of mass destruction! I wish we had more time to explore Laputa itself, because I love how technology is shown in tandem with nature in this place. It’s a very optimistic view of the ways in which both can work harmoniously and could be a perfect paradise for Sheeta and Pazu to escape their struggles, so the sting comes extra sharp when the children are forced to use a spell of destruction and bring the city crashing down. We get a happy ending, but at the moment the spell is used to keep the city out of the hands of a fascist prince, these kids have bravely accepted their own deaths as part of the sacrifice to protect humanity. They do not hesitate. There’s a swashbuckling pirate rescue, and the children descend to the earth below to get back to their own world after ending the one above. Maybe they can make something new here, and begin again.

Miyazaki would go on to continue pushing the bounds of hand drawn animation, and continued to show us reimaginings of a world in peril. I don’t think that there’s any comfort in the fact that all these years have passed and the themes here feel so fresh, but I do look at the optimism they radiate for inspiration when I need somewhere to escape to. Hayao Miyazaki makes his frustration with reality known, so if he can paint us so much joy among the pessimism, maybe we can build these lush and beautiful worlds in our own imaginations.  

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. Even sites owned by billionaires and millionaires have Patreons so please don’t hold that against us. And we’re paying all of our writers, photographers and graphic designers. So please consider our Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.