We Are All Just Afraid - Lessons from Nausicaa

Sep 11, 2025, 8:13 AM

We Are All Just Afraid - Lessons from Nausicaa

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Everything Nausicaa represents, you can garner from the first 15 minutes of the movie. While everyone else steers clear of the toxic jungle, she thrives in it. Effortlessly, she maneuvers through without a care for the bizarre and monstrous flora and fauna around her.

In fact, she embraces them. She goes as far as to apologize to one for jumping on it, and she exclaims with glee at finding the ome shell. As for me, I jump in terror when I stumble across those little creepy cicada molts.

But fear doesn't ever seem to be a thing for Nausicaa. Upon hearing the commotion caused by a giant angry stampeding bug, she jumps into action. And the way she handles it is how she handles every other interaction in the film—with understanding.

Normally the typical response to a giant raging insect out for blood is to kill it with fire, but Nausicaa approaches it more interestingly. She says, Be a good kid for me. Her first instinct isn't violence, but rather examining Cooley, and coming from a place of goodwill.

When this doesn't work, she doesn't take it as a chance to abandon civility. She recognizes that it won't listen, executes plan B, and charms it back into appeasement. Nausicaa accomplishes this again and again.

When meeting the fox girl Teto, she does so fearlessly. Even when it bites her, she doesn't back down. She understands at a base level that it is just afraid, and doesn't blame it for being so.

Instead, she tries to show that there is in fact, no reason to be. This temperament from Nausicaa is approached with a kind of bewilderment from the other characters. Lord Yupa refers to it as a mysterious power, but I don't think it's mysterious at all.

A central tenet of the movie is that humans often react to the unknown with fear. Instead of trying to empathize with whatever it happens to be, we often try to assert our will upon it, choosing control as opposed to mutual harmony. When the toxic jungle begins to encroach upon society, the Ptolemaicans and Pagites have a simple solution, and it might sound familiar.

Kill it with fire. They place their bets on technology, a weapon of mass destruction that threw back human progress by hundreds of years. Now I know the Giant Warrior is technically organic, but it's treated as a technological invention in the film.

Nausicaa spits in the face of this. Despite being a product of fantasy, Nausicaa acts very much like a scientist. In fact, Miyazaki describes her big revelation as a Copernican turn, referencing the astronomer who pioneered heliocentrism.

Through careful analysis and scientific curiosity, she finds out that the whole reason the jungle is toxic is the Giant Warriors in the first place, and the seven days of fire that they brought about. Instead of taking this adversarial stance that the Others do, she comes at it from a place of love. We shouldn't oppose the toxic jungle.

We shouldn't seek to eradicate the many insects that call it home. We shouldn't be afraid. In the movie, Nausicaa is obviously right, and her acceptance of the Oms and other insects is what leads to stopping the calamity.

The final image is one of hope, with new life sprouting and a face mask that is no longer needed. But does this movie have any actual real-world applicability? Reality is often a harsh mistress, and it can be hard to imagine standing in front of a herd of stampeding...anything, leading to a good outcome. What part of Nausicaa can we actually take beyond the screen and into our lives? Everything.

The answer is everything. At the heart of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is conservation. Nausicaa wants to coexist with the toxic jungle and its denizens, rather than oppose and eradicate it.

She thinks that the world is better with it existing than not, and that nature is a powerful force that shouldn't be trifled with. And she ends up being right, discovering the crucial underlying process that is detoxifying all the trouble of human action. Although the movie was made in 1984, its message is more alive than ever.

We have a number of issues both metaphorically and literally plaguing the world, and there is immense value in revisiting Nausicaa's many now-prophetic lessons. Humans in Nausicaa often place great faith in technology. The Ptolemaicans and Pagites believe that they simply need to revive the giant warrior and they can finally be rid of the toxic jungle.

An article written by Jody Bonici explains how Nausicaa contrasts against this quite well, titled Ethics Animated. Nausicaa's search for knowledge doesn't view knowledge as an object of inquisition. Her aim is to observe nature's workings and not to calculate them.

By gathering the seeds in uncontaminated soil and water, and watching as nature brings forth from, nature itself reveals to her the truth. This is a stark contrast to the inquisition conducted by the Ptolemaicans, who capture and attempt to revive a giant warrior embryo so as to use it as a weapon to burn down the toxic jungle. The serenity and light and earthy tones in the underground lab symbolize the poises of bringing forth into unconcealment, while the dark and gruesome imagery in Officer Kurotawa's lab symbolizes a challenging forth, which sets upon nature and attempts to command it into standing by, to be called upon for further commands.

By leaving nature well enough alone, it rewards her of key and crucial revelations—the unpolluted area and the almost magical power of the Aum. Meanwhile, provoking nature often just leads to a whole lot of whoop-ass. E.O. Wilson echoes this thought in his book Half-Earth, Our Planet's Fight for Life.

In it, he makes the argument that in order to prevent catastrophic results, we need to set aside half of the Earth's surface to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity. Half of the planet might sound extreme, but he argues that we are living in an extreme world already. The bulk of his plan involves maintaining Earth's biosphere, which is the collectivity of all the organisms on the planet at any given moment in time.

It is all the plants, animals, fungi, and microbes alive as you hear these words. While I imagine most people are familiar with the circle of life, I think few really understand how much of a delicate balance everything is in. Wilson covers a few unintuitive examples in his book.

Like did you know that wolves play a role in the promotion of tree growth? The presence of wolves reduces the amount of elk, which in turn causes a larger amount of aspen seedlings to propagate. You can actually manipulate the thickness of aspen grows by changing the number of wolves you introduce, and in turn the amount of soil erosion. In the mangrove forests of India, tigers play the same role, thinning various prey populations, producing a lusher, more biologically diverse fauna and flora.

Just as Nausicaa realized that the toxic jungle shouldn't be carelessly dealt away with, and eventually uncovers its higher purpose of cleaning up the mess humans made, we should also strive to preserve nature as much as possible. Yes, even the creepy crawly things that scare us. Because if we knew how much the world would change without them—seek to attain understanding as Nausicaa does—we may not be scared at all.

Okay, at least maybe a little less. When humans are afraid in Nausicaa, they often turn to technology. Exacerbating that reliance, technology in Nausicaa is shown to be… kinda shoddy? Their planes are literally falling apart at the seams, and at one point in Search for a Weapon, Nausicaa just casually rips the pipe off the wall? Their greatest weapon and the crux of their plan to deal with the Ohm Stampede disintegrates pathetically, barely causing a scratch in their numbers.

But rather than the film denouncing technology completely, it shows many cases in which technology is used beneficially. Nausicaa uses her gun not to shoot carelessly at the Ohm and potentially enrage it further, but uses it to ignite the flares that eventually snap it out of its frenzy. She uses her glider and simple charmer to great effect, and an article, Animated Nature, describes Miyazaki's tendency to "...poignantly juxtapose images of human technology that represent useful inventiveness—quiet windmills, flowing canals—with others that highlight the dangerously driven and wild metastasis of military might." It is not technology itself that leads to bedlam, but misuse of that technology.

Once again, we can still apply that lesson to today. We are in the beginning midst of a pandemic, and while risk to the average person is relatively low, that doesn't stop people from cleaning out supplies in terror. Across the United States, there is a shortage of face masks, but the people using them aren't the ones that need it the most.

Wearing a face mask, according to multiple sources including the CDC, doesn't reduce the risk of you contracting the virus. In fact, it might just lull you into a false sense of security. But it is so primal, so intuitive that a human invention might be able to protect you, that we listen to our inner fears rather than the experts.

A lot of the appeal in Nausicaa to me is the lesson that hate only results in short-term gains, while care and understanding results in the long-term preservation of humanity. Even though it's an older work, made before Studio Ghibli was even a thing, its messages are timeless. We could all benefit from mimicking Nausicaa, who co-exists with nature, knows too much of its strength to try and subjugate it, and loves each thing, be it human or not, as if she were its own mother.

We could use a little more Nausicaa now more than ever. Thanks for watching and be sure to like and subscribe for more content. If you'd like to have some additional reading, I've included all the sources I used in the description below, including some I didn't end up using.

If you want to support me further, you can donate to my Patreon. Thanks to Balan, Gorge Potter, Codgamer632, Teddy Herdsevelt, AnimeBounce, and Yolomore for their support. And of course, if anything I said was wrong, I'm sorry.

I must've stuttered.