The master at work, alone

What do you say about Hayao Miyazaki, about whom so much has been written, upon whom so much praise has been heaped? There’s your clue, in my first sentence: I want to talk about Hayao Miyazaki, alone, not Studio Ghibli.

(If I was going to talk about Studio Ghibli, I’d talk about Kiki’s Delivery Service, my favorite: which proves, definitively, that you can tell a story that cap­ti­vates with hardly any con­flict at all.)

Before there was an ani­mated movie titled Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, there was a manga, which Miyazaki began in 1982, writing and drawing it himself, seri­al­izing it in the mag­a­zine Animage. (Work pro­duced in these years, 1979-1983 or so, always trig­gers deep nostalgia. I think of baby Robin bur­bling unaware in far-off Illi­nois as news­stands in Tokyo begin to cir­cu­late this work that will, decades later, mean so much to him … )

Miyazaki was appar­ently pleased with the story, because he adapted it almost imme­di­ately into an ani­mated movie, which appeared in 1984. Its suc­cess led directly to the founding of Studio Ghibli. (Anime fans will enjoy this nugget: a very early-career Hideaki Anno was one of the movie’s animators.)

But Miyazaki didn’t stop drawing. All throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as Ghibli released Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and more, he toiled on the manga — when? at what hour?? — steadily expanding its world, pushing it far beyond the bounds of the movie. It is a sci-fi fan­tasy in the Dying Earth subgenre, with rich eco­log­ical themes, a bright thread of quasi-medieval adventurism, some excel­lent swords. Yes, Moon­bound drank from this well.

The manga he ren­dered in pencil, without an inking pass, yet his line is so sharp and sure there’s hardly any­thing “rough” about it. I mean!

Like most manga, it was an improvisation, always fin­ished at the last minute. Or, not always fin­ished: Miyazaki’s apolo­gies for missing install­ments are a mini-genre unto themselves.

Fans of the Ghibli movies tend to talk about their subtle moments — all the sen­si­tive inter­sti­tial motion — and they are right to do so. The movies are captivating, totally convincing, all without much explicit worldbuilding. They do a lot with a little, and that little is nearly all image.

Nausicaä the manga, by contrast, is totally built out. Its world has a clear history; we meet com­peting cul­tures with dif­ferent languages; there’s a map! The fusion of aes­thetic elements, the images Miyazaki has chosen, the res­o­nances he has dialed in … it’s all pitch-perfect, just incred­ibly cool, and there is a LOT of it.

If you’ve seen the movie but never read the manga, you are missing out on huge chunk of story: a crescendo and con­clu­sion of a whole other magnitude.

In particular, I think often of Miyazaki’s portrayal, near the finale, of a fac­tion of dead souls who seek to exert influ­ence on Nausicaä’s present. It is, obliquely, one of the best depic­tions I’ve seen, in art, of capital:

I read Nausicaä the manga when I was in college, the year 2000. I remember plowing through the four dense paper­back volumes, as glued to those pages as I’ve ever been to any­thing. My response com­bined enjoy­ment with astonishment: that someone — anyone — one person—could DO this. I’ve written about imagination as a muscle, and if Miyazaki, in Nausicaä, doesn’t ven­ture quite as far in time and space as Iain M. Banks, he adds a pro­found visual dimension. From his con­fi­dent pencil springs a whole future ecology.

I love fiction, and animation, and video games — I really am enchanted by all media; you know this by now — but/and I believe that comics are the best. Maybe you don’t think there can be a “best” medium. You are wrong.

My judg­ment has to do with the bal­ance of uncom­pro­mising author­ship with spec­tac­ular effects, of inte­ri­ority with exteriority. Maybe it’s eas­iest to say: comics are the richest medium that one person can manage alone.

Most of Hayao Miyazaki’s work was accom­plished in deep collaboration. If he is the acknowl­edged auteur of the Studio Ghibli movies, they depend on the craft and care of many other artists. Nausicaä the manga, he did alone … and as much as I love the Ghibli movies, I love Nausicaä more. I love its scope, its personalities, its politics.

I’m not much of an artistic collaborator; I always want to do every­thing myself. This impulse, con­sis­tent throughout my life, is prob­ably stupid, def­i­nitely limiting, but/and, it does open up a few narrow, pow­erful opportunities: and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind shows just how far they can go.

First published: April 2025
Last updated:  June 2025