‘This is Not Your World’: Extinction and Utopia in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Hayao Miyazaki’s post-apocalyptic animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind(1984) has long been regarded as a world of ecofiction and its plot read as an eco-fable depicting the emergence of a harmonious balance between humanity and its non-human environment. In contrast to this optimistic reading of the film are the far darker themes of the manga series that Miyazaki worked on in the decade following the film’s release. The Nausicaämanga  (1982-1994) continues the story of the film and expands its themes from a simple environmentalist message into the complex matters of mutation, manipulation, and extinction. This article argues for a reading of the Nausicaämanga as a work of ecological Gothic, that builds its scenes of horror out of the failure of the utopian elements of the  film, systematically undermining the film’s optimistic conclusion  and  developing a far more sombre picture of humanity’s future. This subversion of the film’s message extends to the conceptual basis of the human-nature divide itself, as both the human and natural worlds of the story are shown to be products of interference in the distant past, making humanity inhuman and nature unnatural. But, I argue, it is by way of this negativity that the manga supplants the film’s fable with a properly utopian narrative, which is realised through a Gothic confrontation with the ancient powers that hold Nausicaä’s world in thrall.