Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds 1984

All the hallmarks of Miyazaki’s greatness are present in full in his first Studio Ghibli feature. There’s a self-confident, compassionate action heroine, striking composition, an optimistic humanism, lots of flying, and a startling sense of the natural environment as a vast, pulsing organism, agitated by unruly mankind. A remarkable departure from genre expectations when it first appeared, Nausicaä is now a Japanese classic, and Miyazaki a genre unto himself. (The epic adventure was further elaborated by Miyazaki, after the film’s success, in a thousand-page graphic novel, or manga, widely considered a masterpiece.) 

“Set a millennium after a biowarfare holocaust has destroyed our civilization, Nausicaä is the story of the eponymous princess who seeks to somehow reconcile the last remnants of a still-warring humanity with the monstrous new biological order overcoming the Earth… A stirring, sweeping epic of war and adventure, and one of the best science-fiction films to have been made anywhere in the world during the 1980s.” — Carl Horn, Pacific Film Archive