The manga that opened its doors in the Ghibli universe, for the first time in Catalan

Hayao Miyazaki He was captivated by the file dedicated to the Phaeacian princess Nausicaä included in an introduction to Greek mythology. He was so fascinated by her free and courageous spirit that when he finally read theOdyssey He was disappointed to find that Homer's epic poem did not give the character the relief that the future director ofSpirited Away believed he deserved it. Surely, at that time Miyazaki had already begun to fantasize about his version of Nausicaä, materialized when in 1982 the magazine Animage commissioned him to write a manga.

Although Miyazaki's heroine bore the explicit reference in her name, she soon developed a personality of her own and gained the favor of readers. Initially, the author had agreed to write the manga on the condition that it would not be adapted for film, but success forced him to renegotiate this approach, and in 1984 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind It became the source of the first feature film in which Miyazaki worked from his own imagination, and laid the ethical and aesthetic foundations for the founding of Studio Ghibli.

For that reason alone, the manga deserves a prominent place in Hayao Miyazaki's career, but its story doesn't end with the launch of one of the most illustrious filmographies in animated cinema. In fact, when he started working on the adaptation, Miyazaki had only written a few chapters of the comic, which he wouldn't complete until 1994. If we compare the two versions of Nausicaä, we find that the first pages of the manga almost function as a storyboard of the film, but the differences do not take long to appear, until they become two works that are not only autonomous but conceptually divergent: the film closes with the revelation of the messianic character of the title character, while the manga would gradually qualify this idea as the cartoonist and scriptwriter modulated his animistic ideas (and while his vision increasingly).

In perspective, Miyazaki's fidelity to NausicaäThe editors' understanding allowed the author to work intermittently for twelve years on the manga, in parallel with some of his most beloved films, including My Neighbor Totoro. However, the story would likely have remained incomplete if it weren't for the creator's primal fascination with this princess who grieves for a world devastated by pollution and immersed in a war where everyone has their reasons but no one wants to listen to the other. Without the obligation to coordinate with producers, animators and assistants, Miyazaki projected fears and obsessions onto the more than a thousand pages of Nausicaä, which after initial serialization have traditionally been divided into seven volumes (now published in Catalan by Planeta Cómic). A monumental text that possesses the lyrical quality of someone determined to climb a mountain alone and which serves to trace the evolution of the author's strokes, which gradually abandons overly detailed work to gain essentiality and allow air to circulate between the vignettes, with the dynamism of the aeronautical devices he so loves to draw.

The end point of Nausicaä coincided with the start of production of Princess Mononoke, a majestic film that captured the mood of the manga's final stage, as well as some of its rawest images. A spiritual legacy that left unanswered the question of whether we will one day see a complete version of the comic on screen, either with Miyazaki's signature... or that of one of his disciples, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion Hideaki Anno, who has been dreaming for decades of a Princess Nausicaä liberated by her own merits from the Homeric aura.