The Unmade Film That Gave Birth to Nausicaä
An Unmade Film Shaped Hayao Miyazaki
In 1980, a washed-up Hayao Miyazaki proposed adapting Richard Corben's underground comic Rowlf as his second feature. The project collapsed when Corben rejected Miyazaki's radically different sketches, but the reworked princess and darker themes became Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, launching the second act of Miyazaki's career.
The concept of someone struggling to live up to … responsibility had been planted inside my mind for the first time. Before that, all the characters I’d considered were completely free.
- AdmiralAsshat
> He felt kind of washed up. Miyazaki’s debut feature The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had flopped at the box office, and he viewed it as a rehash of his past projects. “I don’t think I added anything new,” he admitted. He saw his creations as stuck.
He's awfully hard on himself. Castle of Cagliostro is, by all accounts, a fantastic movie that rises well above its source material. And it has an immortal legacy as an influence on several major Western animation studios.
- ykl
The way Miyazaki’s changes to and own ideas for Rowlf eventually snowballed into something else entirely, Nausicaä, kind of reminds me of how Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ideas for making a Dune movie eventually took on their own life as The Incal.
Also every time I see Miyazaki concept sketches, I’m blown away by how beautiful his watercolors are.
- harmoni-pet
I love that Miyazaki's real arc didn't start until he was older. Within this arc there are huge jumps in ability. There are two books that are compilations of interviews Miyazaki did in Japan around the times of each movie releasing. A few things stuck out to me:
1. The Japanese entertainment press is/was FAR more sophisticated than anything we have in the states.
2. Miyazaki is all about the details. There is no aspect of his films where there isn't a compelling 'why'.
3. I wish I understood Japanese so that I could experience these films in his own voice.
The books are Turning Point and Starting Point. Honorable mention is Sharing a House with the Never Ending Man, which was written by the only American who worked at Ghibli for a stretch. That one is less about creativity and more about the movie industry/how hard it is to translate Japanese into English