Lesson Planning: Teaching basic film theory through Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Same as I did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (and continue to do to Mad Men) only this time about Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.  The standard caveat applies. 

The formal elements of the opening five minutes of Nausicaä conspire to disorient the audience.  For example, the film opens with a medium close-up, i.e. one that captures the upper torso of a character in a manner that allows the audience to clearly read a character's face without making it seem, as close-ups often do, as if the camera (and with it, the audience) are violating that character's personal space.  In short, a medium close-up is designed to create a sense of comfortable intimacy between character and audience, e.g.

That's obviously a terrible example, because Miyazaki's deliberately flouting film convention in order to make Lord Yupa seem inscrutable.  The audience is disoriented because its members know how medium close-ups are conventionally employed (even though they might not know they do) and the violation of those conventions creates a little anxiety.  If Yupa were to remove that mask, the audience would experience a slight sense of relief because the shot now conforms to their expectations.  But if a director continues to confound them, the cumulative effect will create an uncomfortable audience, which is what Miyazaki wants:

First: in conventional terms, this shot sequence is backwards.  Establishing shots like the one above are intended to introduce the principle elements of a location and their spatial relation to each other.  They are typically framed as extreme long shots in deep focus (as it makes little sense to introduce an audience to a collection of unfocused blobs), and they typically appear before medium close-ups of the characters contained within it.  Reversing the typical shot sequence, as Miyazaki does here, results in the audience being surprised by the surroundings.  

This formal trick works even when those surroundings are less alien than they are here.  For example, imagine a medium close-up of a couple of men standing around outside:

Because the naturalistic lighting flatters their faces in the customary manner and the costume is conventional, the audience is taken aback when the director cuts to an establishing shot and sees this:

The Syfy show Caprica, from which these frames were taken, relies on the disconnect created by this reversal to discomfit an audience who already knows who (aliens) and where (another planet in the distant past) these folks are.  That the technique remains effective despite this knowledge demonstrates just how deeply intuitive audience understanding of filmic convention becomes over time.  

In sum: the formal elements of the film (the off-putting shot sequence) works in tandem with its content to produce a narrative moment that is more disturbing than it would be if either of these elements were doing all of the heavy lifting.  In rhetorical terms, that means an argument about Miyazaki wanting to unsettle his audience is more convincing because there are multiple bits of evidence (form and content) supporting it.  Moving on.  The next shot is a long shot:

Because a long shot almost shows the entire human body, it functions somewhat like an establishing shot because it provides information both about the character and his or her surroundings.  But notice what Miyazaki does here: by showing Lord Yupa approach the windmill from a distance in the establishing shot, the audience assumes but can not be positive that the door he stands before leads into it.  

To the already accumulating effects of the discomfort produced by the formal arrangement and foreign content Miyazaki adds a more basic uncertainty: should the audience trust their conventional interpretations of a film that seems committed to violating them?  Put differently: are the members of the audience competent enough viewers of film to accurately assess what is going on?  

The next panel tries to convince them they aren't:

This seems to be a point-of-view shot from Lord Yupa's perspective before the open door to the windmill.  Such, at least, would be the conventional interpretation.  Miyazaki has two choices now: he can completely flummox the audience and undermine its confidence completely by continuing in this vein or he can reassure them a bit because he knows he can easily confound them in the future.  He seems to do the latter: 

This is also a point-of-view shot and also from Lord Yupa's perspective, but it's also an extreme close-up.  The general effect of an extreme close-up is that the object zoomed in on is of great significance to the director.  The effect of an extreme close-up that is also a point-of-view shot is slightly different: because the audience is in the character's head, the object is important to the character.  It might be of little consequence in the overall scheme of the film, but it is important to the character who made it important by paying closer attention to it than anything else in the mise-en-scene.

The next shot is equally odd: 

If the skull were a face instead of a skull, this would be a shot/reverse shot because the frames show one head (or skull) looking to the left, then another head looking to the right in a familiar conversational sequence.  The left-right dynamic is so typical of continuity editing that there even appears to be an eyeline match between Lord Yupa and something that no longer has eyes.  The creepiness is partly the result of the editing: when eye contact is established between things with eyes and things without, our in-the-narrative-moment-brain sees a skull but our trained-by-convention-brain sees an eyeline match.  Our discomfort is not simply because the skull represents death but because half of our brain is attempting to reanimate the dead.

After a few more moments in what is most likely the windmill, Miyazaki cuts to this close-up of a bug:

Because that's a close-up, right?  It can't be a medium or medium long shot, because if it were ... and here is where I'll stop transcribing for online consumption, as I want to work through the following sequence with my students in class tomorrow and don't want to cheat them out of the experience of figuring it out for themselves.  But feel to discuss how he plays with angles and perspectives in the comments if you so desire.  Have at it:

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

There's nothing wrong with an environmentalist story. But it's a subtle failure of analysis to say that Nausicaa is an ecological story.

I didn't insist that Nausicaa conforms to female stereotype in every aspect -- she clearly doesn't. But again, what I originally mentioned was her outfit. It's quite common in film to have active heroines that are super-competent, charismatic, and risk-taking, and who are presented as somehow feminist or at least not anti-feminist because of that, but who are also unreasonably male-gaze-conforming. Lara Croft, for instance -- scroll down to the "Sex Symbol" section. It is possible to defend Lara Croft, especially as a transitional figure? Sure. But to just not understand the issue only means that you don't understand.

[NickS]

I think this is an interesting conversation, but I feel like we're starting to go in three different directions in terms of what we're arguing, and what we take the significance of it to be.

I will try to write something when I have time to be coherent, but I would also say that if SEK is thinking about commenting at some point today that I might wait for him to see if he can bring some structure to this debate.

[Bill Benzon]

... It's quite common in film to have active heroines that are super-competent, charismatic, and risk-taking, and who are presented as somehow feminist or at least not anti-feminist because of that, but who are also unreasonably male-gaze-conforming. Lara Croft, for instance...

Or Major Motoko Kusenagi in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, who's a cyborg into the bargain.

[Bill Benzon]

There’s recently been an English translation of a book of interviews and occasional pieces by Miyazaki that was originally published in Japan in 1996. There are a number of pieces about Nausicaä. Here’s a brief segment from an interview that took place the day after the theatrical release of the film in 1984 (the interviewer is unnamed):

— Nausicaä, the girl, is so attractive.

Miyazaki: Nausicaä’s breasts are rather large, aren’t they?

— Yes. [laughs]

Miyazaki: That’s not so she’ll be able to breast-feed her babies in the future or make love to a man who will steal her hear away. I think her bosom has to be large so she can embrace all those poor old men and women in the castle when they are dying.

— Oh, I get it. [shocked]

Miyazaki: Her bosom has to allow people to feel secure; she embraces them as they are dying.

— I understand.

Hayao Miyazaki. Starting Point: 1979-1996. San Francisco: Viz Media 2009, p. 338.

[Rich Puchalsky]

It is starting to go in different directions, I suppose. So I'll try to sum up.

If someone starts to tell you a European folk tale, you know a number of things about it before one word has been spoken. You know that there will probably be a talking animal, for instance. And that this will not be particularly remarked upon. If someone jumps up and down and says "Look! In this folk tale, the fox talks! And no one is astonished!" the response would probably be a shrug. It's a genre convention, and you expect it from knowing the genre. Now, if you go to an anime, you expect an inappropriately sexily clad woman in the same way as you expect the talking fox. It's just there, for more or less well understood historical reasons.

But now let's say that you're talking about a particular anime as a work of art, not as an example of its genre. Let's say further that the piece has a documented history of its creator having trouble with the genre conventions, feeling that the art has to in some way go against them. Then it becomes important again. That's when I feel that there's a critical point in shaking people awake, so to speak. Saying "There's a reason why real protective clothing doesn't look like that and never has and wouldn't even in this SF universe. Why would she be dressed like that?" Getting them to see the genre conventions newly again. Whatever makes the work individual must in some sense go against genre conventions, or react to them.

So the focus on shot-by-shot analysis makes me impatient, I suppose. I mean, it's fine as a teaching tool. Like diagramming a sentence. But when Bill elevates it to a major critical method, he seems to miss out one the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest simultaneously. There's a reason why people -- ordinary fans of these works -- tend to be talking about these genre conventions, as evidenced by the snippets of wiki pages I've been referring to. It isn't some trendy critical theory, it has to do with historical changes in society and the friction between those and a more or less ossified set of conventions. And diagramming every sentence in this novel just won't get you to that, especially if you go in looking mainly at what I consider to be a sort of critically impoverished interest in basic technique.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Her bosom has to allow people to feel secure; she embraces them as they are dying."

Once again: not really sure how to parse this. I called this a sex-and-death thing at the start, which it obviously is, but ... now it's more respectable to now that it's in an interview? I talked about Nausicaa having to fill a stereotyped female role of desirability and nurturance, and now we can take that as confirmed? But I already thought it was pretty clear.

Parenthetically, what would people's response be to someone saying "Oh, you thought the hero had a big bulge in his pants just as an aspect of masculine attractiveness. But it's really to show that he's such a creative person." Is there a point at which this can be seen as being as odd and silly as it is?

[Bill Benzon]

Ah, Rich, the notion of "a sex-and-death thing" ("thing"?) is so vague as to be all but worthless. We got sex, we got death, ergo, we got sex-and-death. OK, you called it, you get two gold stars.

As for stereotypical female desirability and nurturance, I'm trying to figure out what bugs you, the desirability and nurturance, or the stereotypical. Are desirability and nurturance bad? Is Miyazaki wrong to create a story requiring a character that needs to be desirable and nurturing? Or is he just wrong to make that character female (even if she's a whole bunch of other things that don't go along with that stereotype)? Maybe Miyazaki should have made Nausicaä a big ugly cross-dressing guy who goes around with a sign on his back saying that he's desirable and nurturing. Does your aesthetic allow for stories in which women are sexy and nurturing at all, or is that simply forbidden as being stereotypical?

What about Lord Yupa? He's a stereotypical male warrior who's wise in the ways of the world. Wanna kick him out too? King Jihl, stereotypical benevolent ruler on his deathbed. Kick him out! And certainly, Obaba, the Old Crone who's Blind and Wise. Outa' here. Oh, and Keto, Nausicaä supercute animal sidekick. Banished!

But when Bill elevates it [shot-by-shot analysis] to a major critical method, he seems to miss out one the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest simultaneously.

Rich, this is nonsense. Do I think it's important? Yes. Do I think it's all we need to do? No, and I've never said that. If you want to know what I do when considering a film at some length, look at the work I've done on Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues. I've collected links on a page, The Sita Chronicles, where you'll find a handful of short essays, all pegged to what's there on the screen, but not merely descriptive. You'll also find segments of an interview I did with Paley. The interview centers on screen shots from a segment of the film but ranges widely around those shots, getting into Paley's views on animation and art in general.

Oh, and there's also this little piece on Nausicaä itself, which isn't shot-by-shot, but it isn't obsessed with Nausicaä's secondary sexual body morphology either.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Bill, if you don't understand at this point, I don't see the value in explaining it to you. But your "I'm trying to figure out what bugs you" paragraph is so tiresome that I think that it illustrates the problems with your critical judgement. If someone points out the problems with e.g. Lara Croft and someone else replies with a guffaw that hey, what do you want, an ugly cross-dressing guy -- yeah, I'd expect to hear that from a teenage boy who plays video games and who has never thought about it at all. The same as I'd expect to hear "what's wrong with stereotypes, anyways? I don't see how using lots of stereotypes weakens a work of art" from maybe one of Scott's freshman students. If you were an 18 year old, it might be worth explaining it again, but as you're not, there's no point.

[Bill Benzon]

What I think, Rich, is that your concern about Nausicaä's breasts and costume is way out of proportion. This isn't a harem flick or even a boy-girl story. Nausicaä is not on erotic display. That you put that front and center in your thinking, while being embarrassed about it at the same time, that's a real problem. But it's your problem.

[tomemos]

And why couldn't a slave see the beautiful romance of the South? And why couldn't Barbie just happen to think that math is tough?

As for your tone…Bill, it seems like you have gotten way, way more snotty and condescending recently. As far as I can tell it hasn't won you any arguments (although it has ended some of them abruptly) or made people more interested in conversing with you.

[NickS]

It's funny, after Bill posted the passages from the Miyazaki interview I assumed that was a concession that Rich was correct that Nausicaa's appearance was a topic worth considering when assessing the work.

What about Lord Yupa? He's a stereotypical male warrior who's wise in the ways of the world. Wanna kick him out too? King Jihl, stereotypical benevolent ruler on his deathbed. Kick him out! And certainly, Obaba, the Old Crone who's Blind and Wise. Outa' here. Oh, and Keto, Nausicaä supercute animal sidekick. Banished!

My comparison to Dune was hasty, and I'm not sure that it added much to this conversation, but let me make another comparison.

I recently watched a community dance performance which was unusual in a variety of ways. It was a set of original pieces composed over a couple of months of rehearsals. They included both trained dancers and community people who may or may not have had any dance training. The theme of the performance was health and it grew out of a research project and interview series that had been done. All of the non-dancers were people who had participated in the research project and been interviews, and the pieces were (loosely) based on those interviews.

I thought that it worked in places and didn't work in other places. I thought creative and artistic resources that they had to work with weren't up to its ambitions but, at the same time, those ambitious were interesting and those limitations were entirely predictable. Looked at from one perspective the real theme of the performance was not health, but the process of attempting an artistically challenging project under restricted circumstances -- and entirely appropriate artistic project.

One of the things that I found myself thinking about repeatedly during the performance were cliche's and the nature of a "creative vocabulary." I really believe that, if you're creating something from scratch, that it's the easiest thing in the world to fall into cliche -- it takes training, attention, and effort to not do something cliched. Particularly in this case where the people without dance training had a relatively limited vocabulary of movement you could see them falling into patterns over and over again.

Even the most successful pieces contained a significant proportion of familiar gestures and themes (for example, there was a very nice piece about and by someone living who has been living with a chronic disease over a period of 22 years. It had many interesting elements but that structure for a narrative is, itself, a familiar and well trodden one. The piece didn't do much to re-invent that narrative framework but used it, as something easily at hand, as a structure).

In the case of this dance performance the relationship between the original creative elements and cliche was extremely prominent and one of the first things that I thought about in evaluating it.

I see Rich's argument, in part, as the simple and obvious observation that in something like Nausicaa the original creative elements may be much more developed than those in the dance performance but that its still necessary to pay attention to the ways in which well-worn cultural tropes comprise much of the skeleton of the story.

[NickS]

I should add that this debate seems to match, in miniature, my very approximate sense of the debate over "close reading" in literature.

Rich is taking the position that you can't take a text in isolation and that you have to consider it as it relates to the environment in which it is produced, in terms of genre, cultural tropes of the day, and readers' expectations.

Bill is arguing back that this sort of "contextualizing" makes it all to easy to fall into lazy analysis and the grinding of ideological axes.

[Bill Benzon]

Meanwhile, I observe that someone following this conversation, but not knowing the film, is going to get a very distorted impression of what the film's about. Nausicaä and her people form a small polity that lives in a relatively protected valley. They appear to be farmers. They're caught in a war between two much larger polities, the Pegites and the Torumekians. The leaders of both of those states have declared the other state to be evil and have asserted that their own state wants to rule the world for good purposes. Nausicaä and her people have become the battleground over which the Pegites and Troumekians are fighting. Both want the people of the valley to unit with them and Nauscicaä thinks both of them are nuts and wants them to stop.

Now, the film came out in 1984, before the collapse of the USSR (the manga continued until, I believe, 1996). In 1984 how many Japanese saw Japan in much the same position vis a vis the USSR and the USA? Note that Article 9 of the Japanese constitution forbids Japan to engage in armed warfare.

I certainly don't know how many Japanese saw or resonated to a parallel between their situation in the Cold War and the situation of the people of the valley vis a vis the Pegites the Torumekians, but I do know that, in 1951, Osamu Tezuka published a manga, Next World, the placed Japan in the world in just that way. We have the socialist state of Uran (standing in for the USSR) vs. the capitalist state of Star (USA) and we have Japan in neither camp. In that manga Star and Uran were held in a stand-off by a superadvanced people called the Fumon, when then rocketed off the planet. The Fumon seemed to have been the result of mutations caused by atomic radiation acting on human beings somewhere in the South Pacific (the details on just how this happed don't exist). The radiation caused other mutations as well.

So, in some ways, there's a parallel between the geopolitics Tezuka worked out in a 1951 manga and the situation Miyazaki depicts in this 1984 film. Just what kinds of stories were being told in the 30 years in between, I don't know.

[JPool]

I've been hanging back in this discussion, wondering where it would go, and I appreciate NickS's attempt at a summary (though tomemos's comment makes me feel like threre's some essential element of context happening on one of the many blogs that I don't read).

If I were to do a parallel sort of meta-parsing I would say that I also see Rich arguing that because Nausicaä is stereotypically sexualized, in a way that's typical of anime conventions, it fundamentally undermines the other ways in which the character can be argued to deviate from gender stereotypes. Bill Benzon, on the other hand, seems to be willing to stipulate the stereotypically sexualized depiction and at the same time refuses to engage with the idea that that might be problematic in any cultural or political sense.

Personally, I can see why both positions would be annoying. I agree with Rich in the issue of forrest v. trees. I would say, for me, it's less about impatience (When are we going to get to the fireworks factory??) than about not seeing the point from a reading strategies point of view. Or rather, I can see the point if you're trying to teach people how to produce/direct their own (animated) films, but otherwise I don't see how one understands the experience of watching the film any better by dissecting its minutia. I thought that I understood what Scott meant by "historicism," but if scene by scene autopsying is a fundamental part of it, then I really have no idea. I'm particularly puzzled by Bill's use of scare quotes around "critical reading."

On the other hand, Rich's all or nothing approach to Feminism 101 is extremely limiting for those of us who feel like we've moved on to at least 303. A character can both embody some sexist genre tropes and defy or challenge others at the same time. Arguably, tying the destabilizing elements to established stereotypes can make them stronger, because it allows for a both/and portrayal: both nuturing and rash/vengeful; both selfless and selfish; both heroic and conflicted about the consequence of ones heroism. I would say for me that some parts of Nausicaä work for me on this level, creating a more complicated and ambiguous gendered image of heroism and villainy, and other parts don't (ie, Nausicaä's "I'm a girl who feels everything SO ACUTELY!" breakdowns).

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jpool, I have no objection to moving on to Feminism 303. I don't even object to disagreement with Feminism 101. But in order to disagree usefully, you have to understand what you're disagreeing with. Bill just doesn't, as far as I can tell. He can write clueless things like "This isn't a harem flick or even a boy-girl story. Nausicaä is not on erotic display." and not understand firstly that yes Nausicaa is on erotic display, as everyone including the creator agrees although conflictedly, and secondly that if it was a harem flick or a boy-girl story, this wouldn't be problematic in the same way at all.

So the basic problem is that Bill just isn't a competent critic that I can discuss this kind of thing with. I can deal with someone immediately going to feminism 303 and saying that "Arguably, tying the destabilizing elements to established stereotypes can make them stronger [...]"; I'm not going to bother with trying to explain feminism 101.

I will say something else about stereotypes, since you mentioned them, Jpool. The primary mode of aesthetics in America is still, as far as I can tell, the same "make it new" modernism that started with Pound. NickS' example was interesting, because it brought up alternate aesthetic values, such as a community aesthetic where what matters is the community, not the (often stereotyped) creation of any individual within it. I do a lot of that sort of thing with poetry. Or someone might favor one of the various postmodern aesthetics. But they are not easily applied to this work. Miyazaki is being treated here as a classic auteur, and it's very difficult to justify stereotype in that framework.

What was really new in this anime? Not Nausicaa. Miyazaki was hardly the first to use the "strong, beautiful heroine who participates in the male world as a protagonist in her own right yet is stereotypically desirable". Not the semi-pacifist politics, not in post-war Japan. Try, I don't know, _Godzilla_ in 1954. What's new about the anime is the world itself, which is a horror-world, inimical to human life, which yet does not throw the inhabitants of this world into the usual horror movie position of destroying or being destroyed. Instead, the necessary relation of humans to this world is basically to convince themselves to get out of its way, and it will repair itself. That's why it's (somewhat inaccurately) called an ecological movie.

I've already mentioned why the "ecological movie" thing is a bit inaccurate. It's really best read as a sort of psychological movie, I think, in which the whole world is a sort of hysterical projection of the fear of death writ large. That's what all those giant insects, mold, and skulls are about -- it's a grave-world, essentially, like a dead human body. And Nausicaa's role is basically to tell people that if they can avoid hysterically burning it, new grass will grow over the grave.

That's why the whole constellation of sexuality and nurturance that Miyazaki throws onto Nausicaa is important. It's not just a Feminism 101 thing pointing out that her costume is inappropriate. (Although it absolutely has to start with that. What's the use of looking at stills if you can't see what's there?) It goes to the fundamental question of whether you feel that Miyazaki is using a stereotyped female role appropriately or inappropriately for this case. You certainly could pull out Joseph Campbell's _Primitive Mythology_ and the rities of seasonal renewal etc. if you wanted to.

[Bill Benzon]

JPool: A character can both embody some sexist genre tropes and defy or challenge others at the same time. Arguably, tying the destabilizing elements to established stereotypes can make them stronger, because it allows for a both/and portrayal...

Let’s step back a moment and go back to SEK’s remarks about the opening scene. Miyazaki manipulates standard stylistic conventions in an unsettling way, in service of introducing us to an unsettling and unsettled world – form foretells content. Then we have the title credits, which open with text telling us that industrial civilization was destroyed in war a 1000 years ago and that mankind is now threaded by the toxic jungle. As the credits roll we see a tapestry depicting scenes which will be meaningful once we’ve seen the film, but which aren’t meaningful the first time through. We also see the giant warriors striding the earth amid scenes of burning cities.

Then Miyazaki cut’s to the sky and introduces Nausicaä. Here’s what I said about this scene in a comment above:

As for her skin-tight flesh-colored leggings, yes, we need to think about them. And we need to think about the fact that the first time we see Nausicaä we're above her as she flies right to left across the screen. But she's so small that all we really see are the wings and can't really see her. Then we cut to a closer shot, still above her, and can now see that she's holding onto the flyer. [Note that in this shot we see the glider fly over the skull of one of the giant warriors.] In the next shot, we're behind her and much closer. We're looking at the soles of her feet, along the leggings, to those flesh-colored tights up under the flapping lower portion of her jacket. We do need to think about the fact that, in the first reasonably close shot, we're looking up her legs at her buttocks.

At this point Miyazaki has hooked us with a sexy heroine. And then goes against the stereotype and has her go exploring in this mysterious forest of large fungi and large insects. We see her collecting a spore sample, cutting the cornea of an ohmu from the abandoned shell, and then she rests for a moment and the spores filter down. She’s obviously very comfortable in this strange world, which is presented as being eerily peaceful.

She senses something’s amiss, goes exploring, and discovers that someone’s angered an ohmu. She goes to his rescue. Now she’s in full action mode and uses her knowledge of ohmu behavior to divert it away from Yupa. Once the rescue’s been effected – with Yupa remarking on her skill and empathy with the ohmu – she and Yupa meet. Happy reunion time. Also, she acquires her fox-squirrel companion. And then mounts her glider and flies back to the village. Yupa: “She certainly knows how to read the wind.”

All this time she’s wearing her short form-fitting jacket and skin-tight leggings. She may look like a sexy babe, and she is, but her actions are entirely out of character for that role in its standard presentation. It’s not simply that Miyazaki has presented a heroine who is more than a cute face and shapely body, but the way he has revealed her to us. First he teases us with the sexy image and then he presents us with a series of actions that demolish the stereotypical implications of that image.

Miyazaki’s not a passive victim of the stereotype; he’s using it for his own purposes. At this point his purpose is to bring the viewer to commit to one reading of Nausicaä and then to force the viewer beyond that reading. He’ll do this again, and again, at larger scales.

At this point we’re about 15 minutes into a film that’s almost two hours long. Now we move into the larger geopolitical plot, but Miyazaki presents it in such a way that our expectations and identifications are destabilized.

First we get the crash of the Tolmekian ship carrying the Pegite princess, who dies. Nausicaä once against demonstrates physical courage and resourcefulness. The valley becomes infested with spores. And Lord Yupa discovers the dormant giant warrior. The Tolmekian warships arrive, King Jihl is murdered, and Nausicaä kills the men who’d killed her father. Lord Yupa stops her rampage and . . . . she urges her people to cooperate with the Tolmekians. What else could she do?

At this point the Tomekians are looking pretty bad, the people of the valley are a conquered people, and Nausicaä and Yupa . . . Are they quislings?

In the next set of episodes Nausicaä and five hostages are flying back to Tolmekia when the Tolmekian plans are attacked by a Pegite gunship. All the Tolmekian ships are destroyed. Nausicaä and the five hostages manage to escape along with Kushana, the Tolmekian ruler. This is when Nausicaä meets Asbel, brother to the Pegite princess who died in the airship that crashed in the valley. Nausicaä and Asbel discover that the air is pure in the underground cave. As they make their way to Pegite, Meto and the others, along with Kushana, make their way back to the valley.

Nausicaä and Asbel get to the main Pegite city and discover that it’s in ruins. Then a Pegite airship lands. The King and others get out of the ship and are happy to see Asbel. And this point it looks like Nausicaä has made it to the Good Guys. Who knows? they may help free her people.

And then WHAM! Miyazaki destroys that bit of comfort and hope. It turns out that the Pegites are as hell-bent on world conquest as the Tolmkians. They’ve already initiated an action against the Tomekians that will also destroy Nausicaä’s home valley. Nausicaä is taken prisoner.

Again, Miyazaki’s set us up, sucked us in, and then yanked the rug out from under our feet. Let’s review: He does it in the opening scene from one shot to the next. He does it again, on a larger scale, when he introduces Nausicaä, first presenting her in a stereotypical aspect, and then demolishing the stereotype. And now we’ve seen it on a scale that spans the first two-thirds of the film.

First, we get the peaceful villagers who are being threatened by the jungle. They get conquered by the Tolmekians, who thus become the Bad Guys. The Pegites are introduced as the enemies of the Tolmekians and thus, by implication, as Good Guys. As the proverb has it, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But not in this case. In this case the enemy (the Pegites) of my enemy (the Tolmekians) turns out to be MY enemy as well.

So, we’re two-thirds of the way through the film and once again Nausicaä is held captive. How do we get out of this mess? I don’t want to run through it move by move – though that would be worthwhile in a larger and more complete analytic context. At this point the what happens is mostly between Nausicaä and the ohmu, a story that Miyazaki’s been developing throughout the film (including a flashback to Nausicaä’s early childhood when she tried to hide a baby ohmu).

I note, however, that Miyazaki has a surprise for us at the very end. No, not when he has the ohmu bring Nausicaä back to life after she’s died. The surprise, just a little one, comes after that. Early in the film, Obaba, the Wise Old Crone, brought up an ancient prophesy about a man in blue in a field of gold who’d restore mankind’s bond with the earth. In her final scene Nausicaä is wearing a long blue coat (which had been red, it was stained blue the the ohmu’s blood, cf. 1:42:55) and is supported on a sea of golden ohmu feelers. Obaba says this is a fulfillment of the old prophesy. But is it? The prophesy is about a man, Nausicaä is a woman; and the prophesy said nothing about ohmu feelers. So there’s a mismatch between the prophesy and what actually happened. The story’s over; we have our happy ending. But what of that mismatch (which I examine in more detail in this post)?

Here’s a remark Miyizaki made about the film's ending the day after the film opened (Miyizaki, 2009, p. 333):

For my part, I wanted to stop the ohmu in front of Nausicaä. But there was no way they could have stopped. So Nausicaä, who put her life on the line, died. That couldn’t be helped. But when Nausicaä is held up by the ohmu and bathed in a golden color by the morning light, it becomes a religious painting! [laughs] Mitsuki Nakamura-san and it said to each other, “We’ve got a problem.” . . . I didn’t intend to make her a Joan of Arc and I wanted to get rid of any religious undertone. But in the end it became a religious picture with that scene. I really wavered.

Is the mismatch between prophesy and actuality an expression of that wavering? Note that the way you decide that question affects your reading of that entire world. A world in which Nausicaä’s actions are the fulfillment of a 1000-year-old prophesy is very different from a world where the prophesy has been made, but its relationship to actual events is adventitious. And for Miyazaki end with a scene that throws the entire story to the metaphysical winds . . . why, isn’t that but an extension and elaboration of the ambiguity that SEK identified in the film’s opening shots?

It betokens an artist of considerable craft, daring, and imagination.

[Bill Benzon]

I thought that I understood what Scott meant by "historicism," but if scene by scene autopsying is a fundamental part of it, then I really have no idea.

Historicism is NOT about close analysis of the text.

I'm particularly puzzled by Bill's use of scare quotes around "critical reading."

"Criticism" is the generic term for what students of literature do with texts and what students of film do with films. In this sense it has nothing whatever to do with evaluation; it's not about asserting whether or not a work is good or bad and providing reasons why. One of the long-standing issues in academic literary study, however, is over whether or not literary criticism shouldin fact be evaluative. The basic stance of the profession is, and has been for years, that it need not be evaluative.

This is an issue that's be hashed over at The Valve. Rich wants evaluation, whereas I'm not much interested in it. Hence my use of scare quotes. Those Valve discussions (and others) also provide the context you're wondering about.

[tomemos]

"First he teases us with the sexy image and then he presents us with a series of actions that demolish the stereotypical implications of that image."

Bill, I haven't seen the film, but this seems to clash pretty directly with your own description of the first sighting:

"we need to think about the fact that the first time we see Nausicaä we're above her as she flies right to left across the screen. But she's so small that all we really see are the wings and can't really see her. Then we cut to a closer shot, still above her, and can now see that she's holding onto the flyer."

So, by your account (and again, I haven't seen it), when we first see her she's not Sexy Helpless Lady, she's Sexy Action Hero, a tradition that certainly predates Nausicaa: think Leia in Return of the Jedi, or any number of sexy jungle women from Edgar Rice Burroughs. I don't see where this "demolishes" any "stereotypical implications"; to paraphrase The Onion, this would seem to shatter no stereotypes (and Rich's Lara Croft comparison would seem to hold up). In that sense, it's different from Eowyn's "I am no man!" moment in Return of the King, which does genuinely subvert the reader/viewer's assumption that a warrior in a face-obscuring helmet must necessarily be a man.

Since I haven't seen it, I don't intend to take a position on the movie (and I wouldn't open my trap at all if I didn't remember your reading-free take on Jeeves and Wooster). But it does strike me that 1) your defense is really inadequate and often not even to the point, and 2) your attempt to use a shot-by-shot analysis to indicate why Nausicaa is unique (and stereotype-demolishing) not only fails, but seems to misunderstand what shot-by-shot analyses are useful for.

[Bill Benzon]

Tomemos: ". . . Eowyn's "I am no man!" moment in Return of the King, which does genuinely subvert the reader/viewer's assumption that a warrior in a face-obscuring helmet must necessarily be a man . . . "

In this film that would be Kushana, leader of the Tolmekian army.

On Nausicaä's entrance into the film, the shots and scenes I'm describing are short. You don't get to dwell on them. Once we see her go into the jungle and actually do something it's Sexy Scientist first, then Sexy Steward of Her People (thinking how usefull the omhu shell for tool making) and then it becomes Sexy Action hero. A bit later in the film we see her assuring a bunch of children that she'll be OK (she's being taken to Tolmekia as a prisoner), so she's Sexy Mother.

She's a lot of things. To insist that her bra size trumps all seems is reductive. What she looks like becomes obvious from a screen shot or two. What she does, if you've not seen the film, then you really don't know what's going on. This discussion gives you a rather narrow and distorted view of it. Even if you've seen the film, thinking through all of it, gathering it together, analyzing it, that's difficult.

With all that's going on in this film, whether or not Nausicaä is stereotype demolishing is beside the point. Rich insists that any discussion of the film must start with Nausicaä's appearance, and his discussion is confined to that, the poisonous jungle, and a vaguely articulated connection between the two. In fact, the film has a fairly complex set of relationships among a large set of characters, including the ohmu and other insects. I'm interested in those relationships and believe that you need to understand the characters, including Nausicaä of course, in the context of those relationships.

As for my use of temporal analysis, at the shot level but also at higher levels of organization, films unfold in time and so our experience of them must necessarily be temporal. We see something and, on the basis, develop expectations about what's to come next. How does a film-maker manage our expectations? Miyazaki sets up expectations and then subverts them, and he does it to the very end of the film.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Rich insists that any discussion of the film must start with Nausicaä's appearance"

Oh, I know that I shouldn't be baited, but ... no. *This discussion of the film* started with Scott inviting us to look at a number of still shots. I'm not going around the Internet, finding random discussions of Nausicaa, and insisting that they must start with her appearance. I'm not even giving a complete reading of the film. I'm continuing this conversation, which started with those stills and your insistence that going shot-by-shot was not only a good teaching tool but also a useful method of analysis.

And yes, I think that this thread is a good example of why that doesn't work. You're capable of seeing the stills, reading the various quotes from critical reception and authorial interviews -- some of which you turn up yourself -- and still insist that "Nausicaa is not on erotic display". That's different than insisting that it in some sense works within this piece, that you've considered the feminism 101 objection and rejected it. It's just a denial of what's in the piece. It's useless to go shot-by-shot unless you have some sense of what you're looking for at more than a technical level, and if you try to build up from the technical level, you don't build an edifice of un-theoried neutrality, you just build something out of your unexamined assumptions. Which in your case are that this can't be important.