Serdar | Genji Press

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind belongs in the same canon of films as Lawrence of Arabia or The Leopard: epic and sweeping, but never losing sight of their characters or their true conceits. With a movie this ambitious, especially an animated movie, it’s easy to get lost in the scenery. It says something that Nausicaa has characters that upstage most of the action, and a story that lingers long after the images fade.

Nausicaa is the product of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki is rightly regarded as the grand living master of Japanese animation, and based on the total body of work he’s produced so far—which includes Spirited Away, Porco Rosso, Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke and many more films—he deserves to be recognized as one of the greatest living directors, period. Nausicaa only drives that point home all the more: until now it remained unseen outside of Japan except through bootlegs and fly-by-night screenings. Absolutely shameful.

Tatsuya Nakadai has one of the blankest, most impassive faces possible for an actor, and Sword of Doom is a showcase for him projecting the most chilling emptiness possible with that face. Most people confuse acting with emoting: they think of Jack Nicholson or Dennis Hopper throwing an on-screen tantrum. Then they see the films of Robert Bresson or Jean-Pierre Melville, or many of the newer Japanese directors (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kore’eda), and see acting that has been dialed so far down that, paradoxically, nothing but pure emotion remains.

For the most part, Nakadai’s face is passive, his eyes large and unresponsive, showing all of the emotion of a mirror. Then, even more chillingly, he smiles. The smile is worse, because it is the rictus of an animal of prey. This is appropriate for a movie that is about a man who would at first glance appear to be nothing but a moral void. Then we look closer.