I’ve been taking advantage of the Stanford library’s film section to watch a bunch of movies this month. Some of them have been classic films that I hadn’t seen before, but I’ve also been rewatching Miyazaki’s films in order. So far I’ve seen Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky, and I have THOUGHTS. Seeing these two back-to-back as Miyazaki’s second and third films (the first is a Lupin III movie that fits into someone else’s continuity), I noticed that the two movies have a lot in similar, in terms of both register and themes. His subsequent films move more into kid’s material for a while, and the themes from Nausicaa and Laputa don’t come back with this strength until Mononoke. So I mostly have been thinking about how those three films work together.
Nausicaa is interesting because it’s different from Miyazaki’s subsequent films in two key ways: it’s explicitly a science fiction story, and it’s adapted from the first part of a manga Miyazaki wrote. The rest of his films are mostly set in fantasy settings, with some in set in our world. Nausicaa has the same steampunk flavors that Miyazaki uses as his calling card, but they are place in a world that’s far in the future after an ecological apocalypse. This has the immediate effect of making the movie much more pessimistic. Miyazaki’s movies are always concerned about the effects that humans have on their environment, and how the clashes between humans and the forces of nature can lead to the destruction of both. In Nausicaa, that destruction has already happened. Nature has struck back against the destruction wreaked by human technology, and humanity is hanging on by a thread from the backblow. This means that instead of focusing on how to stop the destruction, Nausicaa is focused on how to recover from it. This makes the film very melancholy.
The melancholy tone of the film is enhanced by the fact that it only covers the first part of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga. This means that the movie itself end with all the problems it sets up fixed. That’s not to say that the narrative arc isn’t complete; the movie is very satisfying as a narrative. It just is more open ended than Miyazaki’s other movies. They key resolution is that Nausicaa manages to save her village; the key revelation that the deadly forests are actually purifying the soil and water from centuries of human pollution is something that Nausicaa will have to pursue further in her future adventures. I actually think that narrative strategy works well, and it’s interesting Miyazaki decided on more closed narrative in his next films. And we don’t need to know what happens next in the manga to appreciate the movie on its own.
In general the setting and atmosphere of the movie are very good. The aforementioned melancholy feel of the post-apocalyptic world matches well with the art direction. The world looks desolate, but there are pockets of life and beauty in surprising places. The war and monster scenes are appropriately horrifying. I was thinking throughout the movie about how much of the design reminded me of early Final Fantasy games, and reading wikipedia, it turns out that the art of early Final Fantasy games was copied off the manga! Complete with taking the birds Yupa rides as the design for chocobos. This makes sense since there’s a lot of setting synchronicity between Miyazaki and Final Fantasy, including the steampunk aspects and the obsession with airships. This movie features a lot of Miyazaki’s obsession with flying, centered as it is on a valley dependent on wind power and featuring a heroine with her own air glider.
I’d say the biggest issue with the film is how fast it ends. I remember reading an interview with Miyazaki where he said part of his approach to Mononoke was to fix the problems with Nausicaa, and this included the ending, which in Nausicaa is too much of a deus ex machina. Basically Nausicaa is presented as the only person who can bridge the human and natural worlds, because unlike the other humans wants to understand the Ohmu and the forest. At the end, in order to save her village, she offers herself as a sacrifice to the Ohmu, and somehow she survives and stops the Ohmu, somewhat because she sheltered an Ohmu when she was a kid. It’s a little Jesus-y. And after that the movie basically ends, with a few scenes playing over the credits. There’s not much resolution, and not much cost. I’ll have more to say on this when I watch Mononoke, but in that movie there’s more weight to the ending. Somehow Nausicaa sacrificing herself convinces the invading army to leave too, though it was helped by the fact that they lost their super-soldier to waking him up too early. Part of it is that Nausicaa is not quite a well rounded character. It’s fine to have her as super-human, but I don’t think Jesus works quite well in a doomed post-apocalypse. Though I guess these characters do show up a lot.
Moving on to Laputa/Castle in the Sky. I watched this movie a lot as a kid, and I think I had reduced it in my memories as being overly simplistic, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. Compared to Nausicaa, it’s clearly written more for kids, in a progression that Miyazaki would continue (his next movie is Totoro): the moral lines are clearly drawn and the story’s implications are clearly laid out and less delicate. But the central characters are super charming, and the movie relies a lot more on humor, which helps make it engaging when the plot is a little too obvious.
Despite being pretty different films on paper, when you watch Nausicaa and Laputa back-to-back they have a lot of similarities. Laputa has a fantasy setting with magic crystals but also coal miners, but there still are the same gears and windmills and military airships from Nausicaa. Both movies have a military government threatening our heroes’ small village, and the militaries both are pursuing superweapons in ways reminiscent of the atomic bomb program (it’s a Japanese movie!). The design of the Laputan robots is similar to that of the super-soldier in Nausicaa, and Pazu looks a lot like a younger version of Nausicaa’s love interest Asbel. Some of the shots even are similar: Sheeta in the airship at the start of the movie looks a lot like the Pejite princess who’s been captured on the airship that crashes in the valley of the wind; both movies have a scene with airships chasing each other through clouds and lightning storms. So it’s clear that both films were borrowing from the same creative drawer!
Laputa is clearly shifted towards the positive from Nausicaa, though, and it’s reflected in most of the movie. The animation uses a color palette with more color saturation, whereas everything in Nausicaa is washes out. In Nausicaa the night is pitch-black; in Laputa, even the dark is softly lit. Pazu’s village is suffering from economic decline due to exhaustion of the mine, but the world itself still has hope and prospects. The pirate gang seems threatening but they’re really adorable softies. And the ending is more conclusive: once Pazu and Sheeta destroy Laputa, they can go off and live happily every after without having to worry about the ongoing extinction of humanity.
It’s the relationship between Pazu and Sheeta that makes the movie work. As two people they just click. From the first, they’re partners who work together. If this were an American movie or a modern anime, they would start out awkwardly denying that they like each other, and go through some phase where one of them thinks the other has betrayed them, and Pazu would be a teenage boy who thinks touching a girl is weird. But instead trust each other and are instinctively close with no hesitation about it. Sheeta believes Pazu about his dad and Laputa, and she trusts him to be with her when she needs him. Pazu listens to what Sheeta wants and figures out how to deal with Laputa in a way that fits her values. They’re so cute together I love them, and so does basically everyone else in the movie who’s rooting for them.
The strength of the relationship makes up for the lack of imagination in terms of gender roles. Miyazaki is known for centering young girls in his movies, and giving them roles they wouldn’t have in most kid’s movies. However, here Pazu and Sheeta settle in a stereotypical division of labor, with Pazu having to save Sheeta multiple times and taking charge of the action stuff, and Sheeta being the moral center and doing domestic chores. Some of this is remedied by the head pirate Dola, who is a great character. For me some of the discomfort at how Pazu and Sheeta are presented is remedied by how clearly they are partners and how the power dynamic between them is as equals, but it does make the film less boundary-pushing. The movie as a whole feels like a classic adventure story — it draws inspiration from Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island — which means that it settles more into the boy-meets-girl-and-goes-on-adventure-with-her groove, but there’s no reason that couldn’t be pushed against more.
In general the adventure story feel works really well for the film, which feels familiar in a comforting way. There are a couple a incredibly beautiful sequences where Pazu and Sheeta discover new places, including the cave scene and the sequence where they first arrive on Laputa and visit the garden. These scenes capture the sense of the wonder of exploration and discovery that is important to adventure stories and that Miyazaki loves. This kind of scene also appears in Nausicaa when Nausicaa and Asbel discover the caves under the death forest. The animation and art in Laputa really focus on this discovery of beauty aspect though.
And that’s all I have! There’s of course a lot of to say about the nature vs human theme of both movies, and how the film uses visual language the emphasize that idea (the overgrown tree roots on Laputa save Pazu and hinder Muska!) but most of it has been written about already. I’ll have more to say when I see Princess Mononoke, which uses a lot of the same themes and plot structures (Mononoke has basically the same plot as Nausicaa but the character of Nausicaa gets split into the characters of Ashitaka and San, which works better because those two aspects of her are more interesting as characters who can be in conflict), but that will have to wait!
