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First off, thanks to everyone who helped me with this op. I couldn't do it without you! "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Japanese: 風の谷のナウシカ Lit: Soar Through The Apocalypse! Bug-Princess Violence Saga) is a manga written and illustrated by anime director Hayao Miyazaki. It tells the story of Nausicaä, a princess of a small kingdom on a post-apocalyptic Earth with a new, bioengineered ecological system, who becomes involved in a war between kingdoms while an environmental disaster threatens the survival of humankind. On her journey, she struggles to bring about a peaceful coexistence among the people of her world, as well as between humanity and nature." Anyone who likes Ghibli stuff has probably seen the movie already, but I'm gonna take this moment to turn into one of those book supremacy d bags and tell you that once again the book is the superior version and you're missing out by not reading it. The movie only covers about 2 of the 7 volumes, so there's obviously gonna be some big changes and omissions. If you want to read it, you can either buy 7 volumes for $70, or you can just get the box set that was released like 2 years ago for $40. I got it a while ago and wasn't disappointed. Never got the original volumes though so I can't really compare the two. I'm bad at reviewing things and don't like effort so just read the first amazon review or whatever cuz it has a bunch of pictures too. Talk about Nausicaä!
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Jan 14, 2015 19:11
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his talent was not recognized until the release of his work on Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Running short on animators, the film's production studio posted an ad in the famous Japanese animation magazine Animage, announcing that they were in desperate need of more animators. Anno, in his early twenties at the time, read the ad and headed down to the film's studio, where he met with Miyazaki and showed him some of his drawings. Impressed with Anno's work, Miyazaki hired him to draw some of the most complicated scenes near the end of the movie,[9] and regarded his work highly
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Jan 15, 2015 01:55
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Yeah, the movie is really awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl8fD3QOs2c
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Jan 15, 2015 03:17
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Nausicaa is Good I said this about it somewhere else: There's a good chance you've heard of Hayao Miyazaki, the master animator and director from Studio Ghibli. Well, way back when the studio was starting out he had to do a manga version alongside the film version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The film and the manga's stories diverge pretty drastically early on and the comic is one of the best science fiction epics I've encountered in any format. Strongly written characters and fantastic art make it exciting, thoughtful, and moving.  Here's a picture of the Nausicaa box set.  And here it is on my Nerd Shelf:  (Not pictured: Yotsuba&, Paradise Kiss, Sailor Moon) The only thing I don't like about it is how sound effects are handled. Putting the translations for all of the them in the back of each (huge) volume is actually more annoying than if they didn't even bother translating them at all. Redraw them or stick it in the gutters; no one wants to flip to the back of the book to see if those characters mean "vrmmmmm" or "whooooosh" It's the only thing I miss about the old Perfect Collection, which (other than the translation, which is the same) is a bit worse with its way smaller format and flipped artwork. a kitten posted:Nausicaa is kind of on a whole different level than most of the other suggestions in this thread (or in general). It reminds me of the quote about The Sandman books "if this isn't literature, nothing is".
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Jan 15, 2015 03:24
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And just for good measure, the bottom panel on this pages is one of my favorite single panels in all of comicdom: (reads left to right since this scan is from the old flopped version) 
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Jan 15, 2015 03:26
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Nausicaa is really, really, good, but Miyazaki considers it one of his lesser works (both movie and manga), and when you compare the environmental messages with those of Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, it's hard to fault him on that.
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Jan 15, 2015 03:35
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Nausicaa and Battle Angel Alita are among the manga I'd rank as the very top of my favorites, with Nausicaa being #1. I try to reread the story and reabsorb all of it at least once a year. The art is vivid and expressive, and has that incredible, mythic, yet lived-in quality that most Ghibli films do, art that draws you in for a while and makes you part of that world. The multiple interleaving themes -- death, rebirth, the power of religion and spirituality, politics, and the environment -- make it possible to read and reread the story again and again and absorb a little more each time.
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Jan 15, 2015 05:20
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a kitten posted:And just for good measure, the bottom panel on this pages is one of my favorite single panels in all of comicdom: If I had to pick a panel from the same area of the story it'd probably be the one where she has the worms on her. All the pages around this are pretty ridic though. I remember reading this for the first time and being kinda surprised how she just comes back from the forest, skips over being kinda annoyed or mad, and goes straight to being livid. Starts talking crap and picking fights the second she lands. I mean, to be fair her country was being invaded but still Effectronica posted:Nausicaa is really, really, good, but Miyazaki considers it one of his lesser works (both movie and manga), and when you compare the environmental messages with those of Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, it's hard to fault him on that. Haven't seen Spirited Away in a minute but I rewatched Princess Mononoke recently and I guess I can probably see why he'd say that. I'd have to read through Nausicaa again though cuz I don't remember finding it too lacking in the environmental messages department
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Jan 15, 2015 16:05
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lil baby anime posted:
They both definitely have strong environmental themes, but their opinion on humanity in general seems really different. In Princess Mononoke even with all the conflict there is, you still get the sense humanity and nature can survive together in the long run. In Nausicaa, after learning the purpose of the vault to reseed the earth with normal, unaltered life after the Sea of Corruption has done its thing she basically goes "gently caress you, and gently caress that. We'll take our chances" and
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Jan 15, 2015 19:32
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lil baby anime posted:If I had to pick a panel from the same area of the story it'd probably be the one where she has the worms on her. All the pages around this are pretty ridic though. I remember reading this for the first time and being kinda surprised how she just comes back from the forest, skips over being kinda annoyed or mad, and goes straight to being livid. Starts talking crap and picking fights the second she lands. I mean, to be fair her country was being invaded but still Miyazaki's reasoning is that he feels Nausicaa isn't consistent enough because he spent too much time writing it and didn't have a clear conclusion in mind. a kitten posted:They both definitely have strong environmental themes, but their opinion on humanity in general seems really different. Well, those really are the same messages. After all, the Master of the Crypt's offer is basically saying that the Sea of Corruption, and the Ohmu, should be wiped out because they'd be in people's ways in the future, and Nausicaa refuses to treat humanity as inherently so worthy that all other life lives and dies at its command. Also, the death of Miralupa suggests that the Master of the Garden was lying to Nausicaa about the effects of the cleansed land on humans.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:21
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Double post but who cares, right? One thing that's interesting about Miyazaki is that he's semi-openly a Marxist alongside being an environmentalist and feminist and pacifist, and this comes out in some fascinating ways in many of his movies. Nausicaa, both manga and film, has less of this, but it's still present in the movie when the Valley discovers toxic spores and then rises against the Torumekians. It's most obvious in Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, but I think it's only really Totoro and Howl's Moving Castle where it fades almost completely. Maybe in The Wind Rises.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:50
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Izumi Konata posted:his talent was not recognized until the release of his work on Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Running short on animators, the film's production studio posted an ad in the famous Japanese animation magazine Animage, announcing that they were in desperate need of more animators. Anno, in his early twenties at the time, read the ad and headed down to the film's studio, where he met with Miyazaki and showed him some of his drawings. Impressed with Anno's work, Miyazaki hired him to draw some of the most complicated scenes near the end of the movie,[9] and regarded his work highly Anno and the assistant director Kazuyoshi Katayama did an audio commentary on the Blu-Ray. 
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Jan 16, 2015 17:56
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A Doomed Purloiner posted:Anno and the assistant director Kazuyoshi Katayama did an audio commentary on the Blu-Ray. hahaha Welp
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Jan 16, 2015 18:24
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Still my favorite movie, I even got the comic for my birthday a few years ago. One thing that's always bugged me, I swear there was a preview or something for the movie where it shows her gliding along side a massive ohmu. No music, just the rumbling of the thing running. Its not on the DVD and I can't find anything about it on youtube.
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Jan 16, 2015 18:58
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A Doomed Purloiner posted:Anno and the assistant director Kazuyoshi Katayama did an audio commentary on the Blu-Ray. Hahaha Anno wanted to do a Kushana spinoff series but Miyazaki saw through him and told him hell no
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Jan 16, 2015 19:56
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lil baby anime posted:Lit: Soar Through The Apocalypse! Bug-Princess Violence Saga Holy hell that's fantastic. Edit: fixed for stupid phone post.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:11
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Thanks again drsunshine
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Jan 16, 2015 20:21
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Ringo Roadagain posted:Hahaha Anno wanted to do a Kushana spinoff series but Miyazaki saw through him and told him hell no Manga Kushana is one of my all time favorite characters. I wanted to do a big effort post about her and how well-realised she is and then I remembered that I'm not very good at actually articulating things like that. So have a bunch of kick-rear end pictures instead.          
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Jan 17, 2015 03:16
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lil baby anime posted:Thanks again drsunshine Haha! I'd totally forgotten about that until now. I don't even remember which thread I posted it in!! But yes -- Kushana is quite an extraordinary character, primarily in two opposite, yet somehow complimentary ways. First, it's that she changes so much during the course of the story. Second, it's that parts of her don't change at all. Allow me to explain. At the beginning, she is essentially a villain, a hardened and unempathic person cruelly and single-mindedly pursues her goals. She formed this shell just in order to survive the harsh "viper's nest" that was the Torumekian court. Essentially, at the start of the manga we see her as having become her shell, this hardened person has become her true self. However, as the story progresses, thanks to her interactions with Nausicaa, that shell of hers starts to crack open, revealing a more mature and thoughtful person inside. Despite this, she still remains a very brutal person -- as can be seen in the sequence that a kitten posted. Kushana says as much at some point in the story, that she would "never be able to forgive people the way [Nausicaa] can", but she can at least find closure. The most telling scene is when she begins singing in midst of the chaos of a bug attack, after seeing her villainous older brother perish. I think that this scene is a bit more than just her finally seeing a hated figure in her life die -- it's that she witnessed it at the hands of the insects. Seeing him wiped out by the careless whim of essentially a massive natural force, I think, brought it all into perspective for Kushana. Essentially, Kushana realized that the struggles and hatreds that had characterized her life up till then were insignificant, that things could be whisked away by a random twist of fate. It was in realizing the transience and meaninglessness of concerns like politics or family feuds that Kushana gained some measure of closure and peace, that she was able to let go some of the karma from her past trauma as a child. In a sense, the story of Kushana is a very Buddhist-like story: one finds relief from pain and suffering (dukkha) from being able to let go and pass over things in peace. Yet Buddhism counsels not to abandon the world to asceticism, but rather to find peace in the earthly world through balance. We can see this in how Kushana still maintains the strength and some of the ruthlessness that characterized her throughout the story even by the end, even though she has chosen not to walk down the path of endless cycles of revenge (the "path of Ashura" as Master Yupa puts it in the fifth or sixth volume). By gaining a measure of peace through letting go of her past hatreds, while simultaneously staying rooted to the struggles of reality and worldly affairs, Kushana develops and matures as a character on an archetypical Buddhist journey. The epilogue supports this by saying how she chose to remain as regent, ruling over her people in peace to the end of her days.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:04
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Nausicaa and Kushana are two of my favorite characters ever and I'm super stoked about this thread.
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Jan 17, 2015 08:32
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a kitten posted:They both definitely have strong environmental themes, but their opinion on humanity in general seems really different. I agree with this 100%, I always recommend that people give Manga Nausicaa a read because it's a fantastic story as a whole and a totally different experience to the movie, but I always give the caveat that the ending feels a bit inconsistent since Nausicaa basically commits genocide and possibly destroys the last hope of the human race out of spite and at best has merely committed mass murder and destroyed huge amounts of scientific knowledge which feels somewhat extreme even given the circumstances. Possibly it just rubs me up the wrong way since I empathise much more strongly with the sort of environmentalist message put across by Princess Mononoke and even the anime of Nausicaa is a lot more forgiving.
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Feb 8, 2015 22:49
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She aborted a bunch of unborn lobotomized pod people designed by the same assholes who destroyed the world in the first place. Humans can save themselves, they don't need a robot god planning their lives for them. Nausicaa might never get to walk in the pure lands without a mask. But a thousand years from now?
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Feb 8, 2015 23:11
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As I recall in the end of the comic Nausicaa find out the elites basically hid away to wait for their own mess to clean itself up so they could come back and dictate again and Nausicaa basically tells them to get bent and that the people of the future can handle itself. What she rejects is the world that lead to the seven days of fire and sea of corruption, which is the correct thing to do. But I haven't read it in a while. Am I forgetting something?
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Feb 8, 2015 23:13
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Robotnik Nudes posted:As I recall in the end of the comic Nausicaa find out the elites basically hid away to wait for their own mess to clean itself up so they could come back and dictate again and Nausicaa basically tells them to get bent and that the people of the future can handle itself. What she rejects is the world that lead to the seven days of fire and sea of corruption, which is the correct thing to do. Well I guess it comes down to how much you believe the 'tomb god' - either they want to just fix the horrible mess they made and make it so it doesn't happen again, or they want to rule the world and presumably make it into a postindustrial wasteland again. Either way Nausicaa orchestrates the destruction of the remaining human life from the pre-catastrophe civilization and she even says so herself that she has done something loving terrible. I think that the pacing of the last chapters is sufficiently quick that it gives the impression that she's a person with a very powerful weapon who uses it perhaps somewhat hastily. Even if you aren't going to go along with their original plan, there's presumably a lot of scientific information inside the tomb-god-supercomputer which could potentially be used to avert human extinction, but Nausicaa decides unilaterally on behalf of all of the remainder of humanity that they'd rather just tough it out and see what happens (for which she is called out on for being nihilistic / fatalistic as gently caress). 7c Nickel posted:She aborted a bunch of unborn lobotomized pod people designed by the same assholes who destroyed the world in the first place. Humans can save themselves, they don't need a robot god planning their lives for them. Nausicaa might never get to walk in the pure lands without a mask. But a thousand years from now? I never got the impression that the "eggs" were supposed to be anything other than normal unmodified human embryos or foetuses but reading the end chapters again I can maybe see some suggestions that they have been modified to be less aggressive and more peaceful, presumably so that people won't just start more loving wars again, is there anything that I've missed which makes this more of a clear cut reading? RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 23:55
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It's a bit less ambiguous when you consider Miyazaki's political beliefs. Accepting and allowing the Old Order/Capitalism to return to power, or to try to learn from their tech and science would ultimately lead down the path of returning to what caused the problems. Whatever good stuff they knew, they also had the knowledge of how to make God Warriors. Also their talk about humanity needing whatever they had to offer rang hollow to me. It's a lot like 1%ers calling themselves job creators, elites saying the lower classes need them to get by. Ultimately the corruption of the old order is linked with their knowledge. The revolutionary way is to purge, not to try to integrate systematic evils of te past in hopes of getting some of the perks.
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Feb 9, 2015 02:55
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One of my favorite things is how it humanizes it's "villains". One of my favorite things about the ending is the Torumekian king, who has been nothing but a blustery power hungry dick, when he hears Nausicaa lay down the law to the tomb he's all, "hahaha this lady rules. gently caress this mess." It's great because it's a redemptive moment that feels totally in line with his personality. And of course Kushana is the best.
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Feb 9, 2015 06:34
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Pretty much the only way the Guardian (or indeed, most of the details of the world purification plan) makes sense is if you don't take the marketing spiel at face value. Its habit of carefully releasing only select bits of scientific information to people, knowingly supporting expansionist military powers, the fact that it was clearly designed to make it easy for future people to revere as something mystical. I've always felt that by the end of the story it's pretty clear that the people who made the forest only really regarded those who survived the Fire as tools at best, and a threat to their plans at worst.
Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 11:09
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Nausicaa gif dump! Thanks people I downloaded these from.   
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Feb 11, 2015 03:01
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Ernie Muppari posted:Pretty much the only way the Guardian (or indeed, most of the details of the world purification plan) makes sense is if you don't take the marketing spiel at face value. Its habit of carefully releasing only select bits of scientific information to people, knowingly supporting expansionist military powers, the fact that it was clearly designed to make it easy for future people to revere as something mystical. I've always felt that by the end of the story it's pretty clear that the people who made the forest only really regarded those who survived the Fire as tools at best, and a threat to their plans at worst. It's also worth remembering that this comes right after the technology from the crypt made most of the Dorok lands (so what, a third/half of the known world?) uninhabitable and killed god knows how many people. And that's as the result of a war that started because the Torumekians were after what's in the crypt, as well. So the claim that their technology is ultimately a force for good rings hollow in the face of the atrocities that it engenders simply by existing. It really seems that people can't be trusted to have it and not gently caress everything up, and that the master of the crypt either can't predict events as well as it claims or that it just plain doesn't give a poo poo as long as the plan isn't seriously disturbed because the end justifies the means.
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Feb 11, 2015 11:29
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Kassad posted:It's also worth remembering that this comes right after the technology from the crypt made most of the Dorok lands (so what, a third/half of the known world?) uninhabitable and killed god knows how many people. And that's as the result of a war that started because the Torumekians were after what's in the crypt, as well. So the claim that their technology is ultimately a force for good rings hollow in the face of the atrocities that it engenders simply by existing. It really seems that people can't be trusted to have it and not gently caress everything up, and that the master of the crypt either can't predict events as well as it claims or that it just plain doesn't give a poo poo as long as the plan isn't seriously disturbed because the end justifies the means. Or hell, that the crypt's whole deal is safeguarding the cloneslugs and ensuring that they (and maybe some reformed muties) wake up in the happy disney forest world that Hari Seldon intended, and that intentionally giving stupid doomsday weapons technology to the latest Great Humongous is a way of triggering daikaisho in a controlled manner, while simultaneously destroying any post-Fire civilization that's advanced enough to potentially wreck that plan.
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Feb 11, 2015 12:19
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After any number of moves and shedding comics over the years, I only have the VIZ Perfect Collection , vol. 2 left, which is annoying if I ever wanna read it again :/
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Feb 16, 2015 23:27
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Get the new version! It owns. Edit: gave my Perfect Collection to my sister, she loves it.
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Feb 17, 2015 00:01
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Oh, totally! I'd forgotten that they'd even done that new collection til I saw your pics, so it's going on the "To Buy" list  I used to love gawking at the monthly issues for the artwork alone.
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Feb 17, 2015 00:50
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Here's Nausicaa drawn by Moebius: I have nothing to really contribute except to say that Nausicaa is a loving seminal work that should be read by absolutely everyone. It blew my mind completely when I first read it as a teenager, and it hasn't aged a bit. The thing comparing it to Sandman is pretty fair, except that it's better than Sandman in nearly every way. It might be my favorite graphic novel / manga / whatever you want to call it of all time bar none.
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Feb 17, 2015 01:33
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