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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Director: Hayao Miyazaki Number of Items: 2 Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen Format: Color, Widescreen, Animated Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Running Time: 118 minutes Studio: Buena Vista Home Vid Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2005-02-22 Buy from Amazon |
 "A True Animation Masterpiece"Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is Miyazaki's anti war epic. Disney has released this film in a 2-disc set. This set contains an interesting documentary on the birth of Studio Ghibli. Unfortunately Disney didn't include an option to watch the documentary with its original language and subtitles. I highly recommend this DVD to all animation fans.  "Original voice actors were better"I just wanted to say that i used to own the original Warriors of the wind and that the new voice actors in "Nausicca of the valley of the wind" are terrible compaired to the original. There was nothing wrong whatsoever with the original voice actors in "Warriors of the wind" and now here they go and change them for the worse.I was very upset that I had lost the original to a theft in my home so i ordered "Nausicca of the valley of the wind" because Amazon.com reffered me to it seeing as how i cant find one with the original "Warriors of the wind" title. When i recived it and watched it... my jaw dropped at how terrible the new voice acting was , i almost started crying.Despite the terrible actors i think the storyline is still damn good even if the voices over do it every chance they have. "Finally! An unabridged US version of a Miyazaki masterpiece"In the early nineties, one of my pre-school daughter's favorite videos was something entitled WARRIORS OF THE WIND. As an adult, I found much in it to be of interest, and much of the animation to be of an exceedingly high quality, but overall the film lacked balance and a cohesive structure to make it a truly great animated film. Later I learned that the animator/writer/director Hiyao Miyazaki had been horrified with the way his Japanese original had been transferred into English and that many of the ecological concerns of the film had been muted by aggressive editing on the part of the American distributors. During the past two decades the English-language revision of NAUSICAA AND THE VALLEY OF THE WIND, the film which through reediting became WARRIORS OF THE WIND has generated as much anger as any film ever made. Now, however, arguably the greatest injustice in the history of animation has been redressed with a marvelous new edition of what is easily one of Miyazaki's greatest achievements. There is a lot of debate about where NAUSICAA AND THE VALLEY OF THE WIND stands among all of Miyazaki's films Even while there has been a growing consensus that Miyazaki is the greatest maker of feature length animated film ever, there is controversy as to whether this film is or is not his greatest film. I'll confess my bias that it is his finest film, though I certainly can understand why someone would defend the assertion that THE PRINCESS MONONOKE or SPIRITED AWAY deserves that designation. Both of those films are a bit more polished and even more lavishly and elaborately drawn. My own reasons for preferring NAUSICAA are several. First, I personally believe that NAUSICAA is the first truly great Miyazaki film. Although he had done many superb films before this one, it was at this point that his art reached an apex that he has matched on other occasions, but never unquestionably surpassed. Second, I loved the story, both the scope of Miyazaki's vision, the cohesiveness of his narrative, and the richness of the moral message underlying the film. Finally, the animation of the film just blew me away even in the bowdlerized version of the film, and does so even more in this fully restored version. Miyazaki pioneered in animation the framing of images in cinematic fashion. For instance, Miyazaki manipulates in scenes in which Nausicaa flies her glider beside a larger ship to be from the same point of view a camera would be if it were a live action scene. His perspective is always driven by an imaginary camera, unlike, say, the Disney films, in none of whose films from the forties to the eighties can be found a similar manipulation of perspective. Several Disney films from the late eighties to the present display such perspective at times, but I would suggest that it is not an accident that these were made after Miyazaki had perfected the technique in a number of films. Perhaps Miyazaki has made minor improvements in his films since NAUSICAA, but none represent the quantum leap forward that this one did. One reason my daughter watched and rewatched WARRIORS OF THE WIND, until she literally wore out the video, was the lead character. If my memory serves me correctly, they changed the central character's name from Nausicaa to some far blander name, a change that is emblematic for the production as a whole. But even in that version, Nausicaa stood out as not merely one of the most compelling heroines in animated film, but in all films. In fact, even today Nausicaa compares favorably with such characters as Ripley from the ALIEN films and Buffy Summers as a compelling heroine. She is at moments subject to the kind of preciousness that mars many moments in anime in particular and Asian film in general (think of key moments in films when Jackie Chan ceases his chase of the villains to save a baby in danger, or the way in this one where Nausicaa cuddles with the half cat/half fox creature that attaches itself to her), but all in all, she is utterly courageous, amazingly inventive, unstintingly moral and compassionate, fiercely uncompromising in her principles, and unfailingly resourceful. In scene after scene after scene, Miyazaki invents new and strangely believable ways for his diminutive heroine to resolve seemingly impossible crises. By the end of the film, one has as much confidence in Nausicaa to save the day as Superman or Batman or Indiana Jones. As the father of a girl I can't express how important it was to her when she was young to have such a female heroine to enjoy. Male or female, heroic characters do not come any better than Nausicaa. No review of this film would be complete without adding some praise for the score. Although I had a tad bit of trouble with the childlike voice that intentionally intones lyrics slightly off key (Sarah Vaughan would famously sing out of tune when she would sing the Ira Gershwin line "The way you sing off key," but she even sang off key musically in a way that enhanced the song as a whole) to produce a decidedly irritating effect, the score as a whole is amazingly effective. The wonderful thing about the entire series of new issues of the entire Miyazaki catalog is that they consistently provide both the original which can be watched with subtitles and an extremely high quality dubbed version. In live action films I am an unstinting purist. I simply won't watch a dubbed version of a film with live actors, since one gains so much from hearing the actual voices of the actors. I always get a kick on the X-FILES DVDs listening to the various foreign language dubbings and chuckling at the gap between, say, the voice of Gillian Anderson as Scully and the voice of the low-voiced actress dubbing her into German. But with animation it is a different matter. For one thing, the animated characters do not possess actual voices, but have only what any actor gives them. Additionally, animation is even more than live action films driven by the images on the screen. I find I always enjoy the visual aspect of the film more by not having to focus both on what is on the screen and on subtitles. Luckily, one can with this DVD set do both, watch it first in the dubbed version and then in the subtitled, or vice versa. I very much enjoyed the actors used to dub the English version. There were some obligatory big names-Patrick Stewart, who is outstanding as Lord Yupa, Alison Lohman (who voiced Nausicaa), Uma Thurman, Edward James Olmos-but most of the people were highly appropriate for the character they were dubbing. My only complaint with the DVDs is the way that Disney programs the DVDs to try to steer you to an endless series of Disney commercials when the discs are first inserted. Such spamming is just not appropriate to DVDs and especially not to an otherwise high quality version of a Miyazaki classic. Still, I applaud Disney for taking the effort to make almost Miyazaki's entire incredibly impressive corpus available. Only a few years ago, before the release of PRINCESS MONONOKE, Miyazaki was still unknown to most American filmgoers. He still doesn't enjoy the reputation that he deserves, but the release of his films on DVD is treated as event even by Wal-Mart and Target. He truly is without his peer in the world of feature length film animation, for not only does he do an amazing percentage of the animation himself, he also writes the stories, and acts as both producer and director. No other great animator has involved himself in his films at such great length and in such detail. "A movie I always loved but never really knew"One night when I was about 14, I was staying up late watching HBO as I often did, when a movie came on that captured my imagination, Warriors of the Wind. At the time, I was not an animation fan outside of the cartoons like The Transformers I stopped watching at around 12, OK 13. Anyway, at 2 a.m., sitting alone in a dark room, I was drawn into the mind of Master Miyazaki and his amazing vision. I was completely amazed by the alternate world this story took place in and the characters involved. After the movie was over I tried desperatly to find the name of the movie, since I had picked it up after about 15-minutes. I found it in the HBO guide and proceeded to tell all my friends about the movie. None of them had ever heard of it. Up to just a few months ago I continued to mention it whenever the topic of animation came up. I could never find a copy of the movie and few spoke to had heard of it. The film always represented this phantom thing that I could share with no one or find out more about. Until just a few months ago a co-worker, and real anima fan, told me how this movie was a bad redoing of an original creation by Master Miyazaki. She told me the original name and mentioned it was supposed to be released in its original form. When it came out, I rushed for my copy. Needless to say at 31 I still find the concepts and images of the movie amazing and I can't wait to share it with my young daughter when she is old enough to watch. Now the movie I always tried to find out more about has a name and sits in its proper place in my video collection. "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind! A Must Have!"I watched this movie in Japan when it first came out. I was only a child then and even made a VCR copy before we left. Unfortunately, my fatehr taped over it and I had been searching for it ever since. When the DVD came out, I immediately bought it. It is still as beautiful as I remember. A definate masterpiece. This is my favorite movie! |
