Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
★★★★ — Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
I built a Dungeons and Dragons one-shot around this film. I think that tells you everything you need to know about how it landed with me.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is one of those films that makes you feel genuinely embarrassed on behalf of modern fantasy. Here is something made in 1984, entirely by hand, and it still looks more alive, more imaginative and more carefully realised than most of what gets greenlit today with budgets the size of a small country's GDP. The hand-painted skies alone. Those vast fungal forests, strange and poisonous and somehow beautiful. The airships catching thermals over a dying world. Every frame feels like someone loved it into existence.
And the world-building is extraordinary precisely because it never stops to explain itself at you. You are dropped into this post-apocalyptic landscape, with its toxic jungles and massive insectoid creatures and warring human factions, and the film trusts you to keep up. It is confident in a way a lot of big-budget fantasy simply is not. The atmosphere is so thick you could practically choke on the spores.
Nausicaä herself is one of anime's genuinely great heroes. She is compassionate without being weak, brave without being reckless, and the film gives her a moral complexity that still feels rare. Her relationship with the natural world, including the creatures most people in her world treat as monsters to be destroyed, sits at the heart of what makes this more than just an adventure story. It is a proper eco-fable, a meditation on war and nature and what it means to truly understand something rather than simply fear it. Heavy themes, carried lightly.
I will be honest about the pacing, though, because if I am sitting down with you and telling you to watch this, I want you to be prepared. There are stretches here that are slow. Meditative, you might charitably call them. And I do think that is partly intentional, the film wants you to sit inside this world rather than race through it. But there are moments where even I felt it drift slightly. It is not a dealbreaker, not even close, but it is worth knowing before you settle in.
When it hits, though, it hits properly. The final act is the kind of thing that burrows into you and stays there for days. I was thinking about it when I was sketching out encounter tables for that one-shot. I was thinking about it weeks later. That is the mark of something that has genuinely got under your skin.
If you have been working your way through Miyazaki's back catalogue, as I have been, this sits beautifully alongside Castle in the Sky as a window into where so many of his obsessions, flight, nature, the cost of human greed, began to take shape. And if you have already seen Howl's Moving Castle and want to trace those ideas back to their roots, this is where you come.
Not quite a perfect film, the pacing genuinely does wobble in places, and I would rather be honest with you than oversell it. But as a vision? As a world pulled whole from someone's imagination and laid out on screen with extraordinary care? Pure genius. Four stars.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1984 | Watched: 2025-07-22
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Hayao Miyazaki: Castle in the Sky (1986) · Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) · My Neighbor Totoro (1988) · Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
