Recommendations from our site
“Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a manga comic written in the eighties by Hayao Miyazaki, who would go on to become an acclaimed director. It would inspire his early feature-length film of the same name, which would go on to lay the groundwork not just for Studio Ghibli, not just for Japanese animation, but, I would argue, for animation in general, and for so much of what we’ve been able to see that medium accomplish over time.” Read more...
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies
Walt Hickey, Journalist
“Hayao Miyazaki is less well known for the fact that he is a great manga artist. Nausicaa is probably his manga masterpiece. Nausicaa is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Industrial toxins have pretty much destroyed the earth and there are just a few human communities left hanging on. He based this idea on what happened in Japan a decade or so earlier: a bay in Japan was accidentally poisoned by a large industrial chemical country. He drew on that to imagine what the whole world would be like with unchecked industrial toxicity. In his world, insects have grown bigger; humans are trying to get by under these new conditions; there’s still violence; there are still military maneuvers. It’s an epic manga, and a very entertaining work. What’s particularly appealing is it has a very strong female protagonist, a woman named for the Greek princess in Homer’s Odyssey.” Read more...
The best books on Manga and Anime
Susan J Napier, Literary Scholar
