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HAYAO MIYAZAKI

Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. In 1963, after graduating from Gakushuin University, he joined the largest animation firm in Japan, Toei Doga. While working for Toei Doga and several other prominent animation studios, he helped create or directed many of the best animated TV series in Japan, including Konan, the boy of the future; Lupin the Third, and,The Girl of the Alps. He also wrote, directed, and designed the characters for the animation feature films Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1984), Laputa Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), all of which have been phenomenal successes in Japan. My Neighbor Totoro was released in English by Fox Videos in 1994.

ON NAUSICAA
by Hayao Miyazaki

Nausicaa was a Phaeacian princess in The Odyssey. I have been facinated by her ever since I first read about her in Bernard Evslin's Japanese Translation of a small dictionary of Greek mythology. Later, when I actually read The Odyssey, I was dissapointed not to find the same splendor in her there as I had found in Evslin's book. So, as far as I'm concerned, Nausicaa is still the girl Evslin described at length in his paperback. I can tell that he was particularly fond of Nausicaa, as he devoted three pages to her in his small dictionary, but gave only one page to both Zeus and Achilles.

As Evslin describes her, Nausicaa was a beautiful and fanciful girl, quick on her feet. She loved playing the harp and singing more than the attentions of her suitors or pursuing earthly comforts. She took delight in nature and had an especially sensitive personality. It was she who, unafraid, saved Odysseus and nursed his wounds when he drifted ashore covered with blood. Nausicaa soothed his spirits by improvising a song for him.

Nausicaa's parents worried that she might fall in love with Odysseus and pressured him to set sail. Nausicaa watched his ship until he was out of sight. According to legend, she never married, but traveled from court to court as the first female ministrel, singing about Odysseus and his adventures on his voyage.

Evsling concludes, "This girl occupied a special place in the weather-beaten heart of the great voyager Odysseus."

Nausicaa reminded me of a Japanese heroin--I think I read about her in The Tales of Past and Present. She was the daughter of an aristrocratic family and was called the "princess that loved insects." She was regarded as an eccentric because even after reaching marriagable age, she still loved to play in the fields and would be enchanted by the transformation of a pupa into a butterfly. Her eybrows were dark and her teeth white--unlike other girls of her era, she did not follow the custom of shaving off eyebrows and blackening her teeth. According to the Tales, she looked very strange!

Today she wouldn't be perceived as an eccentric. Even though she might be considered a little peculiar, she would be able to fit into a society easily, accepted as a nature lover, or just as someone with individualistic interests. In the era of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book(early eleventh century), however, an aristrocrat's daughter who loved insects and would not shave her eyebrows would have been shunned. Even as a child, I couldn't help but worry about the princess's fate.

The princess was not daunted by social restrictions; she ran about as she pleased in the mountains and fields, moved by the plants and trees and the floating clouds...I've always wondered how the princess survived as an adult. Today she would be able to find someone who could understand and love her. What was her fate then, in the Heian period (749-1185), with all its conventions and taboos?

Unfortunately, unlike Nausicaa, the "princess that loved insects" never had an Odysseus wash up on her shores, nor songs to sing, nor foreign lands to wander in, to escape society's restrictions. If she had met a great voyager, however, I'm sure she would have experienced the same illumination from "the man covered with blood."

Unconsciously, Nausicaa and this Japanese princess became one person in my mind.

The people at Animage(a premiere Japanese animation magazine) encouraged me to do comics, so I went ahead and set down my own concept of Nausicaa. Now I am "doomed" and have to learn the hard way again why, a long time ago, I concluded that I have no talent for comics and gave them up (Miyazaki is being overly modest here). Now I just want this girl to attain freedom and happiness.

This article appeared in volume one of the original Japanese version of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.