Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind has been my favorite film for about a decade now. Until I got to study critical literary theory (quite recently), it wasn’t always easy to explain exactly why. It’s a gorgeous film (both auditorily and visually) with a remarkable heroine at its core (a character exhibiting bravery, sensitivity, compassion, and ferocity) and fascinating worldbuilding. More centrally to my fascination, it sends a message of coexistence with the planet.
Now that I have better tools to analyze why my favorites are my favorites, I want to introduce the term “biocentrism.” It means, essentially, viewing the world from the perspective of life itself, not of only humanity, which is termed “anthropocentrism.”
I composed a brief presentation on some of the ecological science fiction themes in Nausicaa, both the film and the remarkably complex manga. I’ll narrate the slides below.
Slide 2
Film: the world as we know it was destroyed in the “Seven Days of Fire,” a nuclear apocalypse brought about by the bioengineered god warriors, and now a toxic fungal forest is spreading over the remaining land while humans live at its margins (its air is literally deadly to anyone who gets too close to the forest).
Nausicaa is the princess of a tiny, peaceful nation, the Valley of the Wind; they get caught up in a war between two larger nations when they accidentally harbor an embryonic god warrior.
Manga: the graphic novel expands the original storyline: the war is much bigger; the warring nations have different religions and philosophies and both use advanced technologies to make war on each other (warships/the god warrior vs bioengineering). There are elements of an arms race. Nausicaa acts as a bringer of peace and advocate of pacifism between warring human nations but also between humans and the Sea of Corruption and its inhabitants.
Slide 3
Various common themes from science fiction as a genre show up in Nausicaa.
Slide 4
Ecological sci fi is both a way to get us to confront otherness by expanding our view to a systems perspective and also a way to think about how our actions affect the world around us—from the list we have alien ecologies and examples of how other intelligent species exist within them (within networks), and we have alterations to our own terrestrial ecology and the consequences of those alterations (the alterations extend from human environmental devastation to the immensely long process of evolution).
For this timeline, I chose a range of books and some films that think about ecology in different ways. There is commentary on the nature of humans as insignificant to evolution, humans altering ecology, and totally alien ecologies that are examined in detail. Nausicaa is kind of a combination of all those ideas—humans as being in some ways insignificant from an ecological perspective, humans affecting evolution and ecology, and novel ecologies.
Slide 5
Nausicaa and her mentor, Lord Yupa, both seek to understand the forest and its processes and organisms, but mostly why it is spreading and taking over human settlements. Nausicaa approaches the task with a more scientific mindset—she conducts experiments in a secret basement where she cultivates plants from the forest to learn more about them. She acts as an ecologist or biologist.
Science can be used to better understand otherness. It allows Nausicaa to live more in harmony with her surroundings. Her story focuses on not just understanding her environment, though, but in living in peace with it and with other people.
Slide 6
Nausicaa is an ambassador between groups of people and also for nonhumans—this means she is a metaphorical ambassador for the viewer/reader. She allows agency to nonhumans; she considers their perspectives and desires.
Miyazaki purposefully chose giant insects as the guardians of the forest because they would be difficult for the viewer/reader to relate to. Nausicaa befriends or at least empathizes with wildly diverse creatures: cute and cuddly like the squirrel-fox and horseclaws, a little monstrous but still “natural” like the insects and Ohmu, to completely monstrous like the bioengineered god warrior. In the graphic novel, she becomes sort of the accidental guardian of this newborn god warrior by empathizing with and trying to understand it.
Slide 7
Miyazaki uses perspective in the graphic novel to get the reader to view the world in nonhuman terms as well, manipulating the distance and focus of his drawings.
He uses eyes and vision as a visual motif (Nausicaa is literally looking through the eye of an Ohmu in one image).
He also blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman.
Slide 8
Biocentrism vs Anthropocentrism:
Biocentrism is related to deep ecology, which values the fluorishing of human and nonhuman life in all its diversity regardless of usefulness to humanity.
Nausicaa makes choices that could be considered biocentric over anthropocentric, especially in the manga. These images serve as smaller examples: in one, she risks her safety to guide a giant insect back to the Sea of Corruption (though it would’ve been easier for her people to just chase it away or kill it). In another, she rests against a dying Ohmu as it sacrifices its body to start a new Sea of Corruption forest; she decides, in a moment of despair, to join it in its sacrifice.
This circles back to the question of scale that sci fi addresses: some sci fi is about the vastness of space, but ecological sci fi deals with the vastness of life and evolutionary time as systems. Nausicaa recognizes an equal moral standing between all living things.
The Portal 