Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Warriors of the Wind
1984 · Hayao Miyazaki · Warriors of the Wind on Sightlines
A girl stands on a wing. Not in it: on it, a single curved blade with a small engine at the nose and no fuselage at all, her body the only ballast the thing has. To turn, she leans. To climb, she shifts her weight and lets the air take her. Miyazaki animates flight as something done with the stomach and the shoulders, and once you have watched Nausicaä ride the Mehve you cannot unsee how most films treat the sky, which is as empty space to be crossed. Here the air has grain. She reads it the way a sailor reads water.
Begin there, because the glider is the film compressed into one object.
Deleuze, following Bergson, argued that a shot is never a slice of space. It is a slice of duration, what he called a mobile section: movement inside the frame is how we feel a change in a whole that is never shown to us entire. That whole he named the Open. Put plainly, the world of a good film is one continuous thing that keeps changing, and motion is the instrument that lets you feel it changing. Most adventure films spend movement getting people from A to B. Miyazaki spends it convincing you there is weather.
In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind the Open is not a figure of speech. The poisonous jungle has been swallowing the habitable world for a thousand years, since industrial civilization fouled the ground. It is a totality in change at a rate no character can perceive, because it is slower than a life. The kingdoms fight over the margins of something none of them can see the shape of.
This is why the lens is worth the trouble. Without it the film flattens into an ecological message movie, and the message was never in the dialogue. It is in the drawing. Air feels like a substance pushing back because bodies here have mass, and that mass was worked out five years earlier on The Castle of Cagliostro, whose weight-and-momentum animation of figures running rooftops and clinging to sheer walls is the exact craft debt underneath the Mehve chases. Joe Hisaishi's first score for Miyazaki does the rest of the lifting, and began the most durable composer-director partnership since Herrmann and Hitchcock.
Structurally this is an epic of the kind Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: a situation so vast it presses on everyone, an act that answers the pressure, a situation transformed. It needs two things. First an encompasser, a milieu that calls action out of people, and here it is the spreading Sea of Corruption, the spores riding the wind, the buried war machine one kingdom digs up because burning the forest is the only idea anyone has left. Second, the bond Deleuze calls the imprint, by which a character and a world stamp each other. Nausicaä is that bond made literal. She belongs to the valley because the valley is where the sea wind holds the spores off, and she is the one who can read the wind.
What the film withholds is the duel. Large-form epics run on a binomial, force against force, hero opposite villain, and the genre's whole architecture reserves a slot for an enemy. Miyazaki keeps the architecture and leaves the slot empty. The soldiers who want to torch the jungle are not wrong about the danger. The insects are not malevolent; they are guarding something. There are no tidy villains, and once you notice that, the climax cannot be a victory, because there is nobody to defeat. It can only be an interposition. She puts her body where the duel is supposed to be. That structural decision is the invention, and everything Miyazaki made afterward is an elaboration of it.
The ohmu are animation's great crowd. Deleuze has a word for a mass rendered as one feeling rather than as many bodies: the dividual, a collective that functions as a single affective unit. The herd works exactly that way. Cathedral shells, and above them a bank of eyes that shift, so the state of a thousand creatures is legible at a glance as one state. Notice what this does technically. The affection-image, for Deleuze, is normally the close-up of a face, an emotion registered and held before it discharges into action. Miyazaki builds a face out of a creature that hasn't got one. The eye-field is the face, and the close-up is the size of a building.
There is a whole tradition the film quietly raids. Deleuze's impulse-image describes naturalism's move: beneath the ordinary setting lies an originary world of raw drives, and everything in it slides down a line of slope toward exhaustion and death. Nausicaä sets out all the furniture. Poison jungle, enormous appetites, the hulls of tanks and gunships corroding in the sand, a used-future texture learned from Star Wars and redrawn by hand so the rust has a surface you could cut yourself on. Then it reverses the vector. The slope downward belongs to the human hardware, the war engines and the thousand-year-old relic. The jungle is running the other way. It is a lung, not an appetite. That inversion is the argument of the film, and it is structural rather than sentimental.
None of it arrives from nowhere. Future Boy Conan had already given Miyazaki his vertical staging, children clambering over ruined mega-structures and riding the wind, and Nausicaä lifts that grammar whole into the ohmu-and-glider action. Panda! Go, Panda!, which he designed under Takahata's direction, worked out the staging of a curious child inside a benevolent natural world, the tenderness toward a very large animal that becomes a girl's hand on a shell. Horus: Prince of the Sun, where he keyframed crowd and nature scenes, is the template scaled up: a village under ecological threat, moral seriousness in a medium nobody was granting any. And on Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon, his first credited work, he reportedly reanimated the ending, which tells you the instinct to bend a commercial cartoon toward parable was in place before anything else was.
Then the film travelled, and something instructive happened. New World Pictures cut twenty-two minutes, retitled it Warriors of the Wind, and sold it as children's science fiction. Cutting is a form of reading, and what a distributor removes tells you what a film was doing that there was no shelf for. What survived an edit made for a monster movie was a monster movie. Ghibli's absolute no-cuts policy came out of that injury and changed the terms on which animation crosses borders: the film arrives whole or it doesn't arrive. The box office at home paid for the studio a year later, so this is also, plainly, the film that bought Ghibli its first building.
Watch it again for the air. Watch how long Miyazaki holds on the eyes of things that cannot speak. And carry the question out with you: what becomes of an adventure film when its last act is not a win? Nausicaä answers by stepping into the gap where the enemy should be. Watch what the wind does then.
Concepts in play
- the Open — The poisonous jungle has been changing the habitable world for a thousand years since industrial civilization poisoned the earth: a whole in change at a rate slower than any character's life, which the kingdoms fight over the margins of without seeing its shape.
- the mobile section (plan) — Nausicaä gliding on the Mehve, a wing with no fuselage steered by leaning body weight — movement animated as a change in the whole (the wind) rather than as transit from A to B.
- action-image-large-form — A global situation (poisoned earth, the encroaching Sea of Corruption, kingdoms unearthing an ancient war machine) presses until a single decisive act transforms it — the epic SAS' structure Miyazaki scales up from Horus: Prince of the Sun.
- the encompasser — The Sea of Corruption itself: the spore-bearing wind, the insects guarding the jungle, and the buried god-warrior relic form the milieu that calls action out of everyone in it.
- empreinte — Nausicaä belongs to the Valley of the Wind because the sea wind is what holds the spores off it, and she is the one who reads that wind — character and milieu stamped into each other.
- binomial — The duel slot the large form reserves is deliberately left empty: the dossier's 'refusal of tidy villains' means the soldiers who want to burn the jungle are not wrong about the danger and the insects are not evil, so the climax can only be an interposition, not a victory.
- dividual — The ohmu herd — cathedral shells and shifting eyes — renders a thousand bodies as one affective state, and Miyazaki uses the eye-field as a face, making a close-up the size of a building out of a creature with no face.
- originary-world — The toxic jungle first presents as naturalism's savage world of appetites beneath the derived milieu of the valley and the kingdoms — before the film reveals it as a purifying lung rather than a devouring drive.
- entropy / degradation — The irreversible downward slope is assigned to the human hardware: tanks and gunships corroding in the sand of the Sea of Corruption, hand-drawn with the tactile mechanical wear Miyazaki took from Star Wars' used-future texture.