Escapism has never gone out of fashion, although the past year has been a banner era for it. With the canon of Studio Ghibli films arriving on HBO Max in the United States and on Netflix in many other regions in 2020, the tantalizing worlds they present have gotten more play than ever. Even setting aside the pastoral venturing many of them possess, there’s a comfort in watching likable protagonists perform their mannered heroism in a world where hard work is rewarded and community is paramount. There will be struggles, they all seem to say, but you can count on a good work ethic, the drive to make a better tomorrow, and the people you love to carry you through.
It was Miyazaki’s stated goal in his works to “offer a sense of liberation to present-day young people who, in this suffocating, overprotective, and managed society, find their path to self-reliant independence blocked and have become neurotic.” All of that is tremendous. And yet, in times of insecurity where you can’t help but regularly wake up baffled and soured, most brands of escapism bring me no comfort. In times such as these, I want my feelings of frustration validated, to see art acknowledge the failings of our so-called chosen ones, and the ugly particulars of the world reflected back at me. You would think that Studio Ghibli offers no such film to echo this feeling and, in a way, you’d be right. But there is a film more or less under their umbrella that depicts a broken, laughable world – one where its leaders are almost too broad and emotionally stunted to resemble real people: the ill-fated 1985 attempt to localize Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, retitled as Warriors of the Wind.
Attempting to capitalize on the recent success of Nausicaä in Japan while also hubristically altering the film (nearly 30 minutes of scenes are removed), it is flawed in all the ways you’d imagine what was only the seventh anime film released in North America would be. While this undoubtedly makes for a thematically inferior and less conventionally compelling film, what its English production team could never have predicted is that the resulting product makes for surprisingly prescient viewing 35 years later.
Perhaps the clearest encapsulation of the project’s rejection of its own source material can be seen on its most infamous poster. Nausicaä – renamed “Princess Zandra” in this dub – is reduced to a second class citizen and pushed to the back corner of the frame (for marketing reasons that likely boil down to “Ew, she’s a girl”). Her prominence on the poster is slightly less than that of an unidentifiable man on a flying horse that, though admittedly cool, does not appear in the film in any capacity. The bulk of the poster is given to a Giant Warrior being ridden by a robot who also doesn’t appear, a minor villain flaunting his Second Amendment rights, and what might be a tiny version of the same Giant Warrior they’re also riding. The modus operandi of this localized version, distributed by New World Cinema without writer/director Hayao Miyazaki’s blessing or awareness, seems to be to get to any visual set piece akin to this misleading poster as efficiently as possible. This is largely accomplished by taking what was once a thoughtful science fiction film and cutting out anything resembling science or thought.
“[T]he manner in which people engage with the nature surrounding them and upon which they are dependent” was Miyazaki’s core theme for the work, and it’s not surprising that the world of the film crumbles without it. Nausicaä’s academic streak, so crucial to what motivates her in the original film and what sets her apart from the other characters, is rendered absent with the deletion of two key sequences: when Nausicaä’s mentor Yuba finds her science lab, and later when Nausicaä awakes in the Sea of Decay and discerns that the insects are protecting the toxic jungle so it can purify the air. These removals effectively flatten out the ecology of the film, although this does not prevent Princess Zandra from witnessing the world beneath the toxic jungle and coming to the rather different, evidenceless conclusion that “All this can be given birth to a new life.” It’s the type of foundationless statement that used to net an entry in IMDb’s ‘Goofs’ section. In Warriors of the Wind, it’s the national discourse.
Perhaps this new rendering of Nausicaä — blunt-spoken, incurious, and steadfast in her approach to crises despite no evidence to support her theories whatsoever — was considered a more believable leader to American audiences by the localization team. Harder to rationalize is her vacantly chipper line deliveries, always one octave higher than a situation should dictate, that paint her as a delusional, emotionally detached figure. Without Nausicaä discovering the significance of the Sea of Decay and, as Miyazaki put it, “trigger[ing] a Copernican-like revolution in understanding,” Zandra instead focuses on getting everyone to drop their fights and unify rather than address the complex origins of their issues. Within the first ten minutes of the Japanese original, Miyazaki ensured that Nausicaä gets a quiet, character-building moment in which she holds a discarded Ohmu lens over her head, literally seeing the world through another perspective. Warriors of the Wind has no time for such contemplation or consideration of other viewpoints. What was once a principled heroine fueled by empathy has been diminished to a vacant figure gibbering about unity without a clear vision of how to actually achieve it.
The dub presents a deeply stupid world, one where the antagonists are actually as transparently evil as they seem. Kurotowa, originally portrayed as something of a Chessmaster playing the long game and waiting for a chance to usurp his leader, is here reduced to a doofy failson. He oscillates between sounding angry and bored within seconds apart, too dumb to root for and too pathetic to root against (in one of the dub’s more curious changes, he allows the rioting villagers of the town he’s occupying to have their flamethrowers returned to them as long as his men “watch them carefully”). Similarly, Queen Selena’s (née Kushana’s) tactical brilliance is replaced by a more generic villainy. “I don’t think you are as evil as you pretend to be, Queen Selena” Zandra baselessly yells mid-way through the film. “Aha, but I am!” replies Selena, in what may be the only logical and emotionally honest dialogue in the entire film.
Bits and pieces fleshing out Nausicaä’s hometown are cut too, rendering the townspeople undeveloped at best and idiotic at worst. (“Kinda scary if you sit around and think about it,” muses one character after being informed that the demonic, pulsating, giant egg in front of him is incubating a God-like warrior.) With no one to root for and the original optimistic ending all but eliminated, the film instead becomes about watching a toxic world burn.
Not that this was the end of Nausicaä’s world per se. Disney would later get the North American rights to the film, and in 2005 produce a new, uncut localization whose spirit is much closer to the Japanese original. Yet recent history has transformed Warriors of the Wind into something beyond what could’ve ever been intended, an old humiliation accidentally rehabilitated not for its own assets but rather due to the dilapidation of reality around it. There’s something darkly comical about Warriors of the Wind when interpreted through the grimy lens of a future where masks are mandatory, leadership disregards science in the face of a crumbling environment, armed rioting is treated with a shrug, and the brink of apocalypse feels more boring than anything. Nothing about Warriors of the Wind was intended to be textually complex, much less visionary — it was an attempt to make a quick buck and then disappear, although maybe that’s the perfect headspace for the Trump era too.
While it is comforting to look at Warriors of the Wind the way it’s nice to look at a grubby mirror that hides your own features, that’s not the sort of thing you want to look at forever. Although not explicitly mentioned in Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man, a memoir on Studio Ghibli’s challenges distributing their films overseas, its specter hangs over everything discussed within: the infamous fights against Harvey Weinstein over cuts to Princess Mononoke, the directive to be involved in script translations, and Miyazaki’s specific note to have “good voices.” Over time this new approach largely rendered Warriors of the Wind a historical curiosity, something to be treated as a learning experience and not to be repeated. Sure, that first American rendition of Nausicaä might be an unlivable hellscape, but with the right lessons learned, it didn’t stay that way forever.
