Trivia / Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

• All-Star Cast: In both languages, kind of.
  • The Japanese dub has Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, and Ichirō Nagai in lead roles. This movie was from before Miyazaki's decision to use on-camera Celebrity Voice Actors starting with Princess Mononoke.
  • As the English dub was produced by Disney, this is inevitable. Fortunately, they put together a pretty solid cast for this one – standouts include Patrick Stewart as Yupa, Edward James Olmos as Mito, Uma Thurman as Kushana, Mark Hamill as the Mayor of Pejite, and they even brought in well-known traditional voice actors – Tress MacNeille plays three different women (most notably Obaba), Jim Cummings is one of the old Valley men, Jeff Bennett as Gikkuri, Frank Welker plays Gol, and Emily Bauer voices Lastelle; with Jodi Benson as Lastelle's mother. With narration duties provided by Tony Jay.
• Better Export for You: The Japanese Blu-ray release had heavy amounts of noise reduction and clipping on the Japanese audio track, resulting in Digital Destruction. Most international Blu-ray releases would use this same audio track except for the 2011 US Disney Blu-ray release, which used an unfiltered version of the Japanese audio that has more analogue noise (natural for such a film) but sounds much crisper and natural. Unfortunately, the Disney Blu-ray would soon go out-of-print to be replaced by GKIDS' Blu-ray release, which would use the same filtered audio track from the Japanese release.
• Breakthrough Hit: For Hayao Miyazaki.
• Bury Your Art: The 1985 English dub, Warriors of the Wind, has never been re-released since New World Media's rights to the film expired in 1995. The dub was loathed by director Hayao Miyazaki for its heavy edits, leading Studio Ghibli (formed by Nausicaä alums in the wake of its Japanese success) to institute their famous "no cuts" policy for later English dubs of their works. Fittingly, Disney would put out a more faithful English dub of Nausicaä in 2005.
• Creator Backlash: As per usual, Miyazaki is not proud of a lot of his work on this film/series (he scored the film version 65 out of 100). Much of the commentary accompanying various watercolour posters in the artbook are him saying how drawings "look[ed] wrong" or were too difficult to make or something else. The guy is known to be one of the most relentless self-critics in existence and has a well-deserved reputation for grouchiness, so this is just par for the course. At this point, most fans ignore him when he criticizes himself.
• Creator Killer: An interesting case - while Topcraft would survive another year after the film's release, including co-producing Tatsunoko's Macross: Do You Remember Love? and animating Adventures of the Little Koala, most of the staff that formed the basis of the studio would split off into Ghibli, Studio Gainax, and Pacific Animation Corporation not long after.
• Defictionalization: The Opensky Aircraft Project, a group of amateur aviation enthusiasts in Japan who are attempting to create a working version of the Möwe. Ghibli apparently offered them official endorsement, but they declined because they didn't want Miyazaki and his crew to get in trouble if things went bad and somebody died during testing. As of July 31st 2016, they have flown a successful test flight of it.
• Disowned Adaptation: Hayao Miyazaki was so dissatisfied with Warriors of the Wind that for more than a decade, only a few of his films were dubbed uncut and uncensored. Disney, Miramax's then-parent company, would later become Studio Ghibli's exclusive distributor in 1996, and this was when the films really began to make a mark on North American markets, but even they had to agree to the terms that came as a result of this. Studio Ghibli was so serious about this that one of the producers mailed a katana to Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, along with a note reading "NO CUTS" upon the agreement.
• Doing It for the Art:
  • Hayao Miyazaki only wrote the manga because his higher-ups thought that an animated film was likely to bomb if it wasn't adapted from another work. However, even after Nausicaä finished its theatrical run, Miyazaki continued to write the manga off-and-on for ten more years.
  • In a different interview (seen on Disney's U.S. Bluray), Miyazaki says he created Nausicaä at Toshio Suzuki's request at a time when he wasn't getting work – though almost immediately after, he was hired as animation director for Sherlock Hound – and so he intentionally made a story that could not be easily adapted to animation... and then he was asked to do exactly that.
• Dueling Movies: With David Lynch's Dune (1984). Both are films set in a Desert Punk vision of the distant future, with various giant insects/worms, a blend of medieval and futuristic styles, and a Messianic Archetype protagonist. In fact, Miyazaki himself stated that the original Dune book was an inspiration for the film and manga. Many audiences in Japan have compared the two films as Dune premiered just a few months after Nausicaä. Nausicaä was a massive blockbuster success in Japan. Dune still performed decently and was more beloved by Japanese audiences than most other territories, but even its Japanese success was not enough to save the film from being a Box Office Bomb. Ironically, the American cover art for the Warriors of the Wind version made it look like The Mockbuster to multiple different '70s and '80s blockbusters, among them Dune and Star Wars.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: Some of the roars for the various bug monsters featured throughout the film were recycled from Space Amoeba.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: New World's rights to Nausicaä expired in 1995, so chances are that VHS copies of Warriors of the Wind will be considerably expensive to find. This is also intentional: Miyazaki considered Warriors a Disowned Adaptation of his work.
  • Only the 2011 out-of-print US Disney Blu-ray release has an unfiltered version of the original Japanese audio track in HD, with other Blu-ray releases suffering from varying degrees of Digital Destruction.
  • Every Blu-ray release of the Disney dub has suffered through Digital Destruction, including the US Disney Blu-ray. The best-sounding audio mix for the English dub is only available on the 2005 US Disney DVD, which has been long out-of-print.
• Life Imitates Art: There really are fungi that can neutralize various forms of pollution such as nuclear fallout and plastic waste and scientists have expressed interest in the possibility of breeding and even genetically enhancing them to clean up the environment en masse in a process known as "mycoremediation". Given the growing awareness of how many of these pollutants people's bodies are saturated with, doing so may indeed have health consequences for the people the fungi try to "purify".
  • More darkly, the accelerating destruction of Earth's environment since the end of the Cold War, combined with the surprising recovery of the environment in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, have shown the ethos behind the creation of the God Warriors to be terrifyingly prescient.
• Self-Adaptation: Miyazaki is both the manga's author and the film's director.
• Troubled Production: The movie's making was a dire process. Topcraft was heavily understaffed and was forced to hire extra animators, among them a young Hideaki Anno, who later revealed he had to sleep under his desk in the Topcraft offices because there was neither time nor money for regular lodging.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was going to be produced by Daiei (of Rashomon and Gamera fame) as their first anime film, but Tokuma Shoten (Daiei's then-parent company and the eventual parent company of Studio Ghibli) sent the film to Topcraft instead as they thought Daiei had little experience with making animation.
  • After the movie was released, producer Suzuki and animator Anno proposed Miyazaki a sequel (or a spinoff, according to another version) centered on the Kushana wars, but Miyazaki rejected it, not liking the emphasis on violence. Producers still wanted to do a sequel for many years, so Miyazaki eventually conceded and entrusted the work to Anno in 2011, but the project entered Development Hell and they eventually desisted. Around this time, however, Miyazaki and Anno did a short live action film, Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo, featuring one of the God Warriors (whose animation had been done by Anno himself in Nausicaa).
  • Natalie Portman was considered to voice Nausicaä in Disney's dub before Alison Lohman was cast.
  • During Streamline Pictures' lifetime, they planned on doing an uncut redub of the film long before Disney did so. It couldn't go through due to legal issues with New World Pictures owning the North American distribution rights at the time.
  • Manga Entertainment also planned on rereleasing the film, but legal issues with Disney prevented it from happening. And if Manga were to rerelease the film, they would legally only be able to rerelease the Warriors of the Wind Re-Cut, which they thought would not sell well.

---