Character · Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Nausicaa
A princess with a glider studies the poisonous forest that everyone else wants burned, and the insects notice.
In Otakana the clue reads: Glider-flying princess of a windswept valley
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
- Letters
- 8 · Normal
Nausicaa rules a small farming valley a thousand years after industrial civilisation destroyed itself. The Sea of Corruption has spread across most of the world, its spores fatal to breathe, and the surviving kingdoms treat it as an enemy to be cleared with fire. She goes in wearing a mask and carrying specimen jars, because her working theory is that the forest is doing something and nobody has asked what.
She flies a jet-powered glider called a mehve, one wing and a bar to hang from, and she is very good with it. She is also alarmingly good with the Ohmu, the enormous insects the forest sends when it has been provoked. The film gives her a real temper too, which the merchandise tends to leave out.
Hayao Miyazaki began the manga in Animage in 1982 and directed the 1984 film himself, with Joe Hisaishi scoring it. Its success paid for Studio Ghibli the following year. An early English release recut the film as Warriors of the Wind with roughly twenty minutes removed, which is a large part of why Ghibli stopped permitting edits.
Spelling NAUSICAA
NAUSICAA is eight letters and finishes on two A's, which is the pair people drop. The name comes from the princess in Homer's Odyssey, usually printed with a diaeresis as Nausicaa with two dots, and that mark exists to tell you the final A's are separate sounds. AU at the front, a C rather than an S in the middle, then A and A.