still the best

Nausicaä was the first movie Studio Ghibli ever made. It was the first Miyazaki movie I ever watched, and it has always been my favorite (okay, at least, until I saw Whisper of the Heart). So I was a little worried to watch it again on DVD, lest I discover I didn't appreciate it as much as I once did.

Nonsense.

Granted, it's an old movie. Scarlett Johansson had not even been conceived when this movie was released. By the time I first watched it around ten years ago, the animation seemed clunky in comparison to Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. But Miyazaki's decade-old stills blew away those state-of-the-art Disney blockbusters.

All the elements of Miyazaki's formula were already there. Spunky princess battles one-armed Amazon in a fight to save the world from the deprecations of human warmaking. The gorgeous backdrops are all there. The expert pacing makes this 2-hour movie seem much too short. The aerial stunts are as exciting as any I've seen animated or live action.

But what really makes Nausicaä the best animated movie of all time is the extraordinary story. What is it about this story that makes all the magic work for me, while I find myself saying things like "those wacky Japanese" when I watch Mononoke?

I think Nausicaä fares better because it stays on a human level - we empathize with the Princess's desire to save her pet. Mononoke goes further into animism, with talking-animal demi-gods and gelatinous forest spirits, while the main characters' motivations remain sketchy. It's not just that Mononoke is a near remake of Nausicaä; Mononoke follows a formula, whereas the story in Nausicaä seems bigger than Miyazaki, to grow from somewhere beyond the little boy who liked comics and airplanes.

Next up: Bambi. The 1984 movie still holds up -- will the 1942 movie? Tune in next time...