Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind 風の谷のナウシカ (1982-1994)

Begun in 1982, two years before the film was released, the manga ended not in the literal heights of the movie’s climax but in an abyss, the crypt of Shuwa, to which Nausicaä has journeyed to seek enlightenment. The crypt, however, becomes a mass grave for much of the human race where the dead of ages past are brought back to life only to die again.

And who is it that brings about this genocidal moment? It is Nausicaä herself. In the manga’s dozen years and thousand pages she has gone from a radiant messianic figure to what one character describes as a “chaos of destruction and mercy.” The movie ends with what some viewers criticized as an artificially redemptive message symbolized by its almost too perfect heroine. In contrast, the manga ends in dark ambiguity, still offering a flicker of hope for survival, but one dimmed by its suffering protagonist’s decision to destroy much of the human race.

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By denying life to the technologically created artificial eggs of the “new morning,” Nausicaä issues a challenge to the “twilight world,” which is the only one we have. As she says, “We are birds who, though we may spit up blood, will go on flying beyond that morning, on and on. To live is to change… the Ohmu, the mold, the grasses and trees, we human beings… we will go on changing…”

In her final holistic vision Nausicaä rejects the artificialities of eternal unchanging life to plunge deep into a world where light and darkness, death and life, blood and purity intermingle. Whether humanity can remain in that world is, she suggests, up to us.

Riot X Arcane by Envar studio #3