The films of Hayao Miyazaki are known for their commentary on environmental issues and for presenting the natural world as a place full of gods and spirits, in which the distinction between the “natural” and the “spiritual” is not easily discerned. This has often led to his films being examined through the lens of animism or Shinto, and there is no doubt that both these currents find significant expression in his work. Yet many of Miyazaki’s movies present a vision readily amenable to a Christian worldview, and Christians can learn much regarding the relationship between humanity and nature, and indeed between humanity and Christ, through an appreciation of his oeuvre. This is especially true of the 1988 release Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
The film takes place in a world in which industrial society has collapsed, leaving behind a waste of ecological devastation and a few scattered civilizational remains. Much of the landscape has been taken over by a “toxic jungle” protected by massive insects. The jungle spreads spores that quickly kill those who inhale them, and, as the opening shots of the film reveal, entire towns are frequently swallowed by this jungle, the townspeople dying and decaying into fungal clouds.
The heroine of the movie is Nausicaä, a young princess from the Valley of the Wind, a small ecological refuge where her relatively unadvanced but peaceful people make their home. An airship crash lands into this valley carrying an ancient weapon uncovered from deep within the earth. This weapon, a giant, semi-organic robot with nuclear-level destructive power, is coveted by the warlike Tolmekians, who want to use it to dominate both the remainder of human civilization and to conquer nature by burning down the toxic jungle to restore the land to human control.
Besides the overt violence and destructive intention of the Tolmekian plans, two revelations further problematize the use of the weapon and the human and ecological disharmony it causes. First, the ecological devastation of the earth that led to the growth of the jungle turns out to have been a war in which humanity nearly destroyed itself through the use of these weaponized robots, bringing about “the Seven Days of Fire.” Second, Nausicaä discovers that the plants of the jungle are not inherently poisonous; rather, they have become toxic as a result of having absorbed the poison (perhaps the radiation) caused by human war, incorporating it into their bodies in a process whereby the land and water is purified.
The ethical implications are clear: The disharmony of war and violence within humanity is a reflection of the disharmony between humanity and nature, and the destruction of both is the inevitable result. Humanity’s hubris in believing itself fundamentally separate from nature, an independent, technologically dominant entity capable of forcing other humans and the natural world into submission, only leads to death and suffering. Prosperity for humanity necessarily involves prosperity for nature, and it is only by working with natural processes, by cultivating those processes for the benefit of all, and not through violent imposition, that flourishing is possible.
This picture is deepened when one considers the Christian themes within the movie and some of their larger implications. Such themes are prevalent in the film in the character of Nausicaä, although I do not think that Miyazaki meant for Nausicaä to be a “Christian film” in any sense. Nevertheless, it is hard for a Christian watching the movie not to recognize Nausicaä as a type of Christ. She descends to the underworld of the toxic jungle to discover its healing potential; she nonviolently confronts the war tearing humanity apart, even appearing in the air with her arms outstretched in the shape of a cross; and she heals the divisions between the human and the natural worlds through an act of self-sacrifice in which she dies and is resurrected, descending upon a field of gold in a Parousia-like moment, fulfilling an ancient prophecy of the reharmonization of humanity and nature.
All this suggests a deeper meaning to the reconciliation of the human and natural worlds. For it is in Christ that the cosmos attains harmony among its members, and so Nausicaä’s typological approximation to Christ is only appropriate. In Christ is revealed the principle, the creative origin of all things, and thus the very foundation of each thing’s being. Because of this common origin, the whole of creation is properly understood as a single organism, a living unity breathing and growing together. One traditional image for this is a circle, in which every point shares a relationship with the center that organizes and harmonizes the multiplicity into an organic unity. The nature of each point is defined in its relationship to this center and by extension its relationship to the other points. Since to exist, all things partake of God, their life is one, what they possess is not their own, and each finds its completion and proper mode of being in union with its origin and, by extension, every other being.
The flip side of this is of course that disharmony with one’s principle, disharmony with God, produces disharmony within creation as a whole, indeed even within the very being that has fallen away from its principle. For to secede from one’s origin is to disrupt both the cosmos and oneself. The reverse is also true: to violate the integrity and structure of creation is also to violate one’s relationship with one’s origin, again losing oneself. Just as the destruction of war and ecological devastation in Nausicaä nearly leads to the extermination of humanity, so too does every act of sin destroy the harmony within the cosmos and the individual, and it is only through a reorientation of the parts to their principle (their common Logos, if you like) that unity can be restored, and it is only in this unity that each part is able to properly be what it is.
It is in his life and resurrection, moreover, that Christ calls all things back to himself. In taking on a life within the cosmos and destroying the powers of sin and death in the resurrection, Christ reorients the cosmos towards its principle, calling it along the upward path out of the destruction of the fall and into the light of God’s intention, into the new creation wherein all things conform to God’s will. It is here that the Christian typology of Nausicaä is most powerful, for in her own death and resurrection, she restores the harmony within the cosmos, recentering humanity and nature alike in a new orientation that allows for genuine unity and flourishing. Her story is thus a direct parallel to the Christian story, a clear revelation of the eschatological promise that lies at the heart of the Christian message. Of course, that message is explicitly eschatological, and it would be a mistake to assume that harmony with the natural world as it currently exists could ever be a full realization of the harmony of the new creation. Creation, too, is fallen after all, and so the best that can be hoped for is a relative peace, a relative flourishing within the constrictions of death and sin that still crack and mar the deepest levels of reality.
Nausicaä is a film remarkably able to point in both of these directions at once. While displaying the eschatological horizon towards which Christians must look, the story is able to offer concrete measures of human failure within the context of the postlapsarian cosmos. The desire to dominate nature and each other, the inability to learn from past mistakes, the attempt to solve ecological crises with shortsighted, violent technological methods—these are grasping at nothingness, the destruction of one’s own inner essence and the violation of the order that seeks manifestation within the world.
To people facing increasing ecological and political crises, the world of Nausicaä seems ever more prescient. How much more so will it appear in the future? We are faced with war, with propositions of solutions characterized by massive technological imposition, and a natural world increasingly poisoned by our technology (and indeed by many of those “solutions”). Nausicaä points in another direction. The film recognizes that nature must be fostered within the limits of what it already is, rather than forced to conform to what it is not. One might say that the vision of Nausicaä is one of permaculture rather than genetic modification, of gardening rather than engineering.
Yet the deeper message is that the cosmos can only be healed by being joined to its true foundation. Indeed, it is only a cosmos at all, a single co-breathing unity, because it shares a principle in the Logos. And it was this Logos who became man and trampled upon the powers of death and sin in order to call all things back to himself, to recreate the world in the image of its foundation. Only in Christ can the total reconciliation of all things occur and God be truly “all in all.” Only then shall harmony be established and the natural and the human worlds be in peace, both within and between each other. All of these messages can be found in Nausicaä to a Christian eye, and they ought to be heeded. Whether humanity shall rise above the chaos of disunity ever present in the cosmos to achieve relative stability in its transcendent source or shall instead sink into a mire of toxic jungles and days of fire remains to be seen. If Nausicaä shows us the future of our own devastation, it also shows us the way to our renewal.