Tag: fantasy

Queendom of the Seven Lakes, by A B Endacott

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

There is an interesting set-up here: unfortunately, it’s one which truly doesn’t get developed far enough. Elen-Ai is a 21-year-old woman, who has been brought up since birth to be an assassin for hire, part of “The Family.” Her latest commission is a little different: it’s not to kill, but to protect. For she is hired to make sure that Gidyon, the teenage son of Latana, Queen of the Second Country, stays alive. This is a matriarchal society, where power passes down the female side. But Latana has only her son, and is set to upset the traditional apple-cart by proclaiming Gidyon as her heir apparent. This decision will potentially be rejected by some among the seven clans who comprise the queendom, and may make him a target for those who’d rather see him out of the way. Hence, Elen-Ai’s presence, to make sure that doesn’t happen, as he begins a national tour around their estates, seeking support for his position.

I suspect it’s pretty obvious where this will end up going, based on Gidyon’s plan to defuse the clans’ concerns by marrying someone outside of the nobility entirely. I would bet his bride ends up being Elen-Ai, given by the gobbets of unresolved romantic tension which pepper proceedings, together with the wild swings between like and dislike. Given his age though, we’re probably a few volumes away from that. For now, this is more of a travelogue than an action novel. There’s one assassination attempt on Gidyon while they’re on the road, but otherwise, Elen-Ai’s skills are more seen in the stealth department. As well as her abilities with weapons, she can make herself invisible, a useful talent when it comes to obtaining information regarding the conspiracies against Gidyon. However, she’s far from infallible; indeed, her momentary inattention proves to have tragic consequences.

Despite some interesting wrinkles, e.g. the identity of Gidyon’s father is a closely-guarded secret to avoid political repercussions and enforce neutrality, this doesn’t capitalize on the worldview. Indeed, by using a male heir instead, it largely negates much of the role reversal which has gone before. I’m also hard pushed to imagine Latana is the first ever queen who failed to have a daughter. The main issue though, is I really would have liked to know more about Elen-Ai. The very concept of the Family – a tacitly-accepted guild of assassins – merits considerably more exploration. How she reached the point of being commissioned by royalty as a bodyguard, seems considerably more interesting than her traipsing across country as some kind of lethally mobile baby-sitter. This seems like a sad waste of her talents, a bit like reading a Sherlock Holmes book devoted entirely to his post-retirement life as a bee-keeper. While I didn’t feel like I’d wasted the time, there wasn’t enough here to convince me to go further into the series.

Author: A B Endacott
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 6 in the Legends of the Godskissed Continent series.

Satan’s Sword + Elven Blood, by Debra Dunbar

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

The first volume in the Imp series, A Demon Bound, was one of the most entertaining books I’ve read of late. It told the story of Samantha Martin, the human vessel occupied by a demon “who has chosen to spend her life among us mortals, rather than in the underworld… largely because it’s more fun up here.” I was thus stoked to read the next two entries in the series, with Sam’s further adventures. She’d ended the series having been “bound” to an angel, Gregory, and in the subsequent parts, this is now causing issues for both of them. He is getting flak from his colleagues for his association with her, while she is experiencing unfamiliar emotions, such as loyalty and kindness.

It makes sense to cover both of these as one volume, as they combine to represent a significant story arc. The main thread in that is her hell-spawned brother, Dar, has got in the bad graces of upper-tier demon, Haagenti. Unfortunately, that escalates into Haagenti putting out an infernal hit on Sam – as well as those she cares about, in particular her all-too human boyfriend, Wyatt. To deal with that, she ends up taking on a job for an elven lord, locating the offspring of an unfortunate liaison between an elf and a succubus – the latter just happening to be Sam’s foster sister, Leethu.

The main problem, I felt, was Dunbar over-stuffed these books with ideas. If she’d stuck to the basic concept above, and developed it properly, it might have worked a bit better. Instead, there are any number of threads which feel undercooked, to a greater or less degree. For example, the serial killer targetting Sam’s slum tenants, or the teenage boys who managed to summon her, courtesy of a ritual they found on the Internet. The latter feels especially rife with potential, sadly never realized. Or the heavenly bureaucracy in which Sam gets entangled, complete with committee meetings and detailed reports. I’d rather have heard more about these fascinating and amusing ideas, than the detailed discussion concerning the breeding habits of elves we get.

Fortunately, the heroine remains as wonderfully twisted a character as ever. Though I must confess, the angel influence is a little worrying, given what made Sam so deliciously bad was her complete lack of scruples. For when you are all but immortal, you can afford to push other entity’s buttons – such as when she manages to goad another angel into an all-out brawl during one of those committee meetings. There may have been a stale Danish pastry involved. If this sardonic edge becomes dulled due to the angelic influence, it would be a real shame, since it’s one of the main things which makes Sam stand out in the field of literary action-heroines. We’ll see what happens as we go forward in the series.

Author: Debra Dunbar
Publisher: Volumes 1-3 are available as an omnibus from Anessa Books, available through Amazon, as an e-book
Books 1-3 of 10 in the Imp series.

Ghost Squad

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★★★½
“The real female Ghostbusters…”

I’ll confess, the headline above is a bit click-baity. This is perhaps closer to a female version of The Frighteners, the early Peter Jackson film in which Michael J. Fox could see dead people, and had to learn to work with them. The conduit in this case is Rika (Yanagi), a young woman who has been able to see ghosts since a young age. But an encounter with a trio of ghosts, all murder victims who are seeking revenge on their killers, opens a whole new realm. For, it turns out, whenever Rika is in a life-threatening situation, the spirits can take physical form. They can also draw energy from her, which can be used to create weapons, which range from the merely strange (the “meat hammer”) to the bat-shit insane. None more so there, than that of Akari (Mikado). She has a tendency to go into puppy mode when stressed, which involves her becoming… a bit licky. So inevitably her weapon transforms Akari’s hand into Grudge Dog, capable of ripping the face off her opponent.

For I didn’t yet mention, the director is also responsible for some of the finest examples in Japanese splatter, perhaps peaking with The Machine Girl (which may well have informed one of the weapons here, as shown in the trailer). But also including a hand in Mutant Girl Squad and Robogeisha. This is relatively restrained, though the key-word there is “relatively.” There’s certainly the same degree of lunatic inventiveness at work, although the arterial spurting is considerably lower pressure than you’d expect: the comparison above to early Peter Jackson is entirely deliberate.  For the most part it’s goofily endearing rather than outrageously offensive, and quite well thought out. Even if Rika is more a pipeline for vengeance, she tries to act as the group’s moral compass, for example refusing to let the ghosts take vengeance on the daughter of one culprit.

There are still a few scenes which seem a bit sleazy. Not least, that the energy transfer mentioned above is lip-to-lip. Basically, it’s a shallow excuse for some lesbo makeout sessions, which feels at odds with an approach which sometimes seems closer to Disney than extreme gore. And there’s some dancing in underwear which made me feel mildly uncomfortable; it seemed gratuitous, even by Iguchi’s standads. I was also surprised by the way the vengeance largely ended up compacted into a single battle; if this had been paced throughout the film (like Kill Bill), it might have been more effective and enjoyable. However, I still watched the vast bulk of this with a grin on my face, and laughed out loud more than once. It perhaps helped that, going in, I didn’t know who the director was; indeed, the poster above was about all I had to go on. My expectations were closer to a light comedy with action elements, and the imagination here definitely came as a pleasant surprise.

Dir: Noboru Iguchi
Star: Anna Yanagi, Sumire Ueno, Minori Mikado, Yuni Hong

Giantess Attack!

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★★★
“Large and in charge.”

Diedre (Tacosa) and Frida (Riley) are the fractious stars of low-rent superhero show, Battle Babe and Combat Queen. When the series is canceled, they go on a bit of a binge, ended only by the appearance of two tiny aliens from Metaluna (Nguyen), who give the pair of very drunk Earth women devices that will turn them into Team Giantess Attack. These are intended to be used to rid the planet of evil. Needless to say, things don’t quite work out that way. The military, under Gen. Smedley Pittsburgh (Rowen), want to get their hands on this alien technology. But D+F won’t give it up and, instead, use it to go on the rampage and take revenge on those who previously wronged them.

When a film goes out of its way to be deliberately crap, this largely makes it flame-proof, since a legitimate defense against any highlighting of its shortcomings becomes. “Well, it’s supposed to be bad.” There’s no doubt this is a parody of.. well, everything from Japanese sentai shows through B movies such as Attack of the 50-Ft Woman and on to TV series like The Bionic Man. As such, there are chunks which work remarkably well: Nguyen’s dual performance as both Metalunans (a name itself taken from This Island Earth) is delightful, especially if you’re familiar with the Mothra movies which inspired the twins. It just needed a little song-and-dance number to make it perfect.

However, there’s a weird inconsistency of tone, and as the above should suggest, a lot of potential left on the table. At times it seems almost like this is aimed at kids, Then you get a lengthy sequence about Team Giantess Attack sticking the General into various orifices, which seems to have strayed in from some creepy fetish movie (I’m not Googling it, but… Rule 34). There’s also a funny spoof commercial for cereal… and just the one. That they failed to go full Amazon Women on the Moon there, peppering the film with fake adverts, trailers, etc. seems like a lost opportunity. The whole thing runs only 61 minutes, so it’s hardly as if they were strapped for time. And there’s still padding: we’re 22 minutes in before the Metalunans show up.

Yet all told, it remains a good-humoured and generally entertaining piece of work. The effects are all over the place, throwing stock footage, model work and green screens together in a thoroughly low-budget mess – which is, of course, the point, just as much as the women’s clothes conveniently expanding to keep them covered. If you don’t smile at the thought of two bikini-clad behemoths wrecking Hollywood landmarks like the Capitol Records building, then it’s probably safe to say this isn’t the movie for you. However, I have seen more than my fair share of the content which this is lampooning. So I must admit, I probably have more anticipation than I expected, for the impending sequel, Giantess Attack vs Mecha-Fembot, whose trailer is below.

Dir: Jeff Leroy
Star: Tasha Tacosa, Rachel Riley, Jed Rowen, Christine Nguyen

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

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★★★
“An industrial sized box of eye-candy.”

Dear god, the scenery in this is almost unutterably lovely to look at. It’s the kind of film which left me wishing I’d seen it at the cinema, even if I fear my head would have exploded at the beauty of it all. Right from the opening sequence, featuring an insane swooping shot which seems to last forever, it is just gorgeous. The final battle is so lush, a war occurring in a castle the approximate size of Bavaria, against a back-drop of exploding red-clouds made from fae genocide dust, it should be bottled and sold in the skin-care aisle.

The other big positive comes from leading ladies Jolie and Pfeiffer. As we mentioned in our original review, Angelina was born to play Maleficent, and that hasn’t changed. Here, Michelle gives her an excellent foil to go up against. I couldn’t help feeling Pfeiffer’s performance was influenced by Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons – a film in which she also appeared, apparently taking notes. Their scenes opposite each other, such as the Most Uncomfortable Dinner Party Ever, are a delight to watch.

The problem? Uh, basically everything else, beginning with Fanning and Dickinson as the world’s blandest couple, who manage to suck the life from every scene they inhabit. The former is Aurora, now monarch of the magical kingdom, the Moors. She falls for Prince Philip (Dickinson), heir to the throne of Ulstead, and everyone is delighted that their impending marriage will seal peace forever between the two realms. Everyone bar Philip’s mom, Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer), who has other plans. Basically, starting a war and blaming it on Maleficent, whose PR person must have been asleep since the first film, since Mal is now back to being generally despised. Ingrith then intends to use the fae genocide dust mentioned above to emerge victorious, allowing her to sweep in and annex the Moors.

Meanwhile in a sub-plot which is both superfluous and ham-handed, Maleficent is reconnecting with the family she never knew she had. Their leader is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a fine actor. However, remember what I said about Jolie being born for the role? Ejiofor isn’t, and looks more embarrassed than anything else, to be stomping around in those oversized horns. It’s all filled with Obvious Commentary on bigotry, diversity, racism and so forth. Poor Maleficent is largely relegated to a supporting role in her own franchise, before returning to hurl green lightning at the end, and engage in some behaviour which can only be described as Christ-like. Have you a moment to talk about your lord and saviour, Angelina Jolie?

You can’t argue the $185 million budget was ill-spent though. Rønning was previously co-director on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the [pauses to check notes] fifth installment in that franchise, and clearly knows his way around a nine-figure price-tag. It’s not enough to match its predecessor: more the kind of film I’ll dip into if I see it on cable, rather than rush to embrace on Blu-Ray.

Dir: Joachim Rønning
Star: Angelina Jolie, Michelle Pfeiffer. Elle Fanning, Harris Dickinson

M in the Demon Realm, Vol. 1-2, by Mark William Hammond

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

I feel a little uncertain about reviewing this, since it’s basically two-thirds of a single novel. Or maybe two connected novellas. Oddly, the three entries get longer as they go, starting at 110 pages, increasing to 160 for the second and finishing off at around 210. I’ve been waiting for the third and final part to show up on special offer for a while, but it hasn’t happened. The first two parts were somewhat intriguing, just not enough to convince me to pay full price. So I finally decided to publish and be damned. Wait and see its cost drop the week after this goes live…

Anyway, the heroine here is Emma Ricci, who begins the first book, M in the Demon Realm, as a fashion student in New York. However, she has a heritage and legacy to live up to, one of which she is only dimly aware, through recurrent disturbing dreams. It comes into sharp focus after demonic warriors attack her and her boyfriend, killing him; only her latent skills allow her to survive. No-one believes her account, except for a small group of Chinese guardians led by Li Bai. Emma – or M as she becomes – learns she is the descendant of a Chinese warrior bloodline. She is now the only thing standing between someone trying to open a portal that will unleash literal hell on earth, which is why she was targetted.

Fortunately, her allies can train her, in particular, to use a ribbon sword which is “liberated” from a local museum. That, and some unexpected assistance from a giant canine, allow M to face the threat and recover the (slightly Lament Configuration-like) artifact used to open the gate. In volume two, M in the Empire of the Dead, she returns it to the Tibetan monastery where it is kept, only for the relic rapidly to be liberated by the bone demon. Baigujing. The action shifts  to Paris and its labyrinthine catacombs, where Baigujing begin preparations for its use. This time, M is going to need to fight her battles, not just on Earth, but in hell itself.

It’s decent enough, from what I can tell: I’ll presume the obviously dangling loose end about M being a twin is going to form a key element of the third volume. The basic premise is probably over-familiar: something something Buffy. However, the Asian influence is nicely done, and while Vol 1 + 2 have similar stories, the different locations provide variety. The depiction of hell is also well-drawn, feeling like a written version of Hieronymus Bosch. My main issue is the characters, which feel under-written. M, in particular, doesn’t seem to be given much depth. What is she thinking? How does she feel about her transition from student and part-time waitress to saviour of the planet? I’d be hard pushed to tell you, to this point. That, and slightly repetitive action scenes, explains which I’m waiting for a discount on part three.

Author: Mark William Hammond
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-2 of 3 in the M in the Demon Realm series.

Immortal Fist: The Legend of Wing Chun

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★★
“So, is there, like, an anime convention in town or something?”

The above quote does suggest that the makers here appreciate how ridiculous the entire thing is. And that self-awareness may be the main thing which saves this from being largely cringeworthy. Just because you can make a fantasy kung-fu film with no budget, and largely filmed in a Californian park, doesn’t mean you should make a fantasy kung-fu film, etc. etc. Kaya (Caminiti) is your normal high-school girl. Except for being adopted, parents unknown. And the recurring dreams about martial arts battles. And the four mystical guardians who follow her around. And, it turns out, that she’s the great-granddaughter of the original Wing Chun (Bennett), and her last surviving descendant. Evil forces are intent on ending the bloodline; the guardians try to stop them, while attempting to convince Kaya to… er, get her arm cut off so she can claim her mystical birth-right and resulting mad skillz.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the notion we live in some kind of Matrix-styled VR multiverse. But there are just too many mis-steps – and ones which would have been easily avoidable, and are unrelated to the lack of resources. For instance, why the guardians take the form of young, thoroughly non-Asian Americans, could have been explained away with a quick line or two about adopting the best shape to blend in to modern society. Nope. There are way too many loose ends that go nowhere as well, such as Kaya’s school pals. This is all the more irritating, because the film ends with absolutely nothing of significance having been resolved: it’s an attempt at delivering a cliffhanger, which is staggeringly unsatisfying.  I hate that nonsense when books pull it, and it’s no better here. Especially as this runs only 73 minutes, even including all those superfluous loose ends. Tighten it up, and give us a proper, complete story. If we want a sequel, we’ll let you know: don’t tell us.

However, I actually quite liked the performances here: Caminiti is a winning heroine, with a dry reaction to the increasingly bizarre situation in which she finds herself. The guardians, led by Tai Fong (director Beyer), have an amusing mix of personalities, but it’s Bennett as Wing Chun who manages to steal the film, despite only having a few scenes – she’s taking proceedings far more seriously than they probably deserve, and elevates the whole thing as a result. Technically, it’s not bad, with some interesting use of filters and colour in the “other” realm. In the end, this is not much more than a glorified fan film, with aspirations clearly well in excess of its ability to deliver. As an apparent first feature, there’s something to build on, yet I suspect it might have been better released as a web series. This could have helped address some of the more obvious flaws, and perhaps found the cult following to which it seems to aspire.

Dir: Lon Beyer
Star: Silvana Caminiti, Lon Beyer, Josh Fesler, Elle Bennett

Fear University 1-3

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I was initially a bit concerned this was going to be a slightly-more horror oriented version of Harry Potter, based largely off the title. I needn’t have been worried. For at least the first two books, this is quite startlingly dark and on the razor’s edge. As for the third… well, we’ll get to it. The setting here is a world where Filipino shapeshifters called aswangs, which feed on the fear of their victims, are migrating across from their home country and through Alaska. Lined up to stop them, by any means necessary, are hunters; it’s a harsh and often brief occupation. To replace those lost in battle, the titular establishment exists on Kodiak Island, to train hunters – mostly members of families who have been in the bloody business for generations.

Into this comes Ollie Andrews, a waitress who kills an aswang, and is recruited (well, abducted is probably closer) into Fear University. Her survival is largely down to an unusual illness/talent: her inability to feel pain. No pain = no fear, and so nothing an aswang can use against her. However, this ability has caused her issues in the past – not least,  her abduction by a father/son pair of psychopaths. Though Ollie escaped, killing the father in the process, she has been pursued by the survivor, Max. This has forced Ollie to change her identity and keep on the move to avoid him tracking her down. FU [I’m not sure if the author chose the name for that acronym!] might offer her somewhere to belong, replacing the family she never had.

Keyword: might. For she has to overcome the prejudices of the other students, due to Ollie not being from one of those historic families. And that’s just the start, as she begins to discover the university’s quest to win the war under its head, Dean Bogrov and his shady scientific experiments. It also turns out there is a third group, operating between the aswangs and the humans, and Ollie’s past comes back into play; she was an orphan who never knew her father, and whose mother abandoned her in a closet. That’s an awful lot to unpack, and for the first two books, Collett does an admirable job. It’s a gritty approach, with Ollie a severely-damaged heroine, who has enough issues for an entire conference.

Those opening two books keep the story going forward. In the first volume, Fear University, she learns to tap into the power her talent gives her; builds a relationship with the similarly-broken young hunter Luke, who is her mentor; discovers aswang saliva can make her feel pain; finds out who her father was; and has to go through a life-or-death test involving both her, and her best friend at FU, Sunny. The second, Killing Season, is a rather drastic change in approach, with Ollie, Luke and others sent north to Barrow for the winter break, when the aswang are most active.  That was the location used for vampire action film 30 Days of Night, and serves the same kind of purpose here. However, it’s almost as much a whodunnit, with the large house which is the hunters’ base apparently home to a killer. Not helping matters: Max shows up in town.

Then there’s the third… I should probably have detected the change in approach, based entirely on the title: Monster Mine. For sadly, the series loses its edge entirely. Rather than turning into Harry Potter, it instead becomes something which combines the whiny angst of the Twilight series, with the Daddy issues from Star Wars. That’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and by the end, this was a chore to slog through. To the point, indeed, that the free novella included in this omnibus edition, was left entirely unread. Collett does, at least, tie things up reasonably well, giving the reader some closure. It’s a pity that the groundwork laid for a memorable anti-heroine over the first two volumes, evaporates so drastically in the third.

Author: Meg Collett
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 5 in the Fear University series.

Rattlesnake

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★★★
“A tale without enough to rattle you”

This occupies a rather odd middle-ground between a meditation on what it means to take a life, and a violent thriller. I’m not sure it manages to pull either off entirely successfully, yet some striking imagery helped sustain our interest. Katrina (Ejogo) is driving from Phoenix to Oklahoma City, with her young daughter, Clara (Pratt), to start a new life: it’s hinted that there may be an abusive partner in the rear-view mirror. The route takes her across the Texas Panhandle, and in an effort to avoid a traffic jam, she hits the back roads. This turns out to be mistake, as she first gets a flat, then Clara is bitten by a rattlesnake.

Fortunately, there’s a trailer nearby, where Katrina is able to get help; by the time mother and daughter reach the nearby hospital in Tulia, there’s no indication of any snakebite. But a stranger turns up in their room, demanding payment for the emergency assistance, and not the kind covered by their health insurance: a “soul for a soul”. If Katrina doesn’t kill someone by sundown, Clara’s life will be forfeit. After the validity of the threat is confirmed, Katrina seeks a victim, and seems to find one in another abusive man, Billy (Rossi), whom she encounters in a local bar, taking out his anger on his wife, Abbie (Greenwell). But even when her own daughter’s life is at risk, can Katrina find it in herself to go against all her morality, and take another person’s life?

It does pose an interesting question: how far would a mother (or anyone, I guess) be prepared to go in defense of their child? As we learn, Katrina is prepared to sacrifice whatever might be necessary, but it’s a bit of a process to get there. For example, she spends rather too much time hanging around the hospital, hoping for a chance to smother an already-dying patient, conveniently nearby. And Billy is similarly convenient, a character so unpleasant, the resulting moral dilemma becomes massively diluted. It would have made for greater drama if there hadn’t been an easy candidate, and Katrina was forced to choose between her child and someone decent.

Hilditch has a good eye, however, and there are some striking scenes where the heroine experiences visions, reminding her of her task, and that time is running out. A priest spontaneously combusts; a little kid engages in equally self-destructive acts. These help create an unsettling atmosphere, which keep the film’s head above water, when the plot struggles to do so. Ejogo is also decent in the central role, making it relatively easy to put yourself in her shoes. But I’d have like to have seen more of the background filled in here. Katrina does some light Googling, which suggests she is far from the first person to have found themselves in debt. Yet this angle is severely under-explored, and the net result is something which almost feels more like a series pilot.

Dir: Zak Hilditch
Star: Carmen Ejogo, Theo Rossi, Emma Greenwell, Apollonia Pratt

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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★★★★½
“The wind rises.”

After the enormous critical, if not commercial, success of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki was commissioned to create a manga series for Animage magazine, with a potential film adaptation attached. Publication began in early 1982, but it would take a dozen years, albeit of intermittent publication, before that story was complete. When the series’s popularity among Animage readers was established, work began on the film adaptation, covering the early portion of the manga. Since this was before Miyazaki’s own Studio Ghibli was founded, an external company, Topcraft, were commissioned to create the animation. The budget was only $1 million, with a mere nine-month production schedule leading up to its release in March 1984.

It takes place on a post-apocalyptic world, a thousand years after the near-mythical “Seven Days of Fire”, pushed humanity to the edge of extinction. Since then, nature has taken over much of the planet, covering it in an expanding toxic jungle where the very air is poisonous in a few minutes. It is populated by equally lethal creatures, at the top being the “ohmu”, gigantic insectoids capable of destroying anything in its path. The human race is reduced to clinging on to the fringes, such as the small kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, in which a never-ending breeze keeps the toxins at bay. There, the king’s daughter, Nausicaä (Shimamoto), is one of the few brave enough to enter and explore the jungle, and has developed a mutually respectful relationship with its strange inhabitants.

The balance is destroyed when a plane from the kingdom of Tolmekia crashes. In its cargo is an enormous “God Warrior” – one of those which carried out the Seven Days of Fire – recently dug out from where it had been buried. Tolmekia and their rivals, Pejite, are wrestling for control of the warrior and the power it wields, and the crash drags the Valley of the Wind into their conflict. In particular, Princess Kushana of Tolmekia (Sakakibara) intends to use the warrior to destroy the jungle and restore mankind’s dominion over the planet. Nausicaä is ferociously opposed to this scheme, especially after discovering that the jungle is actually purifying the atmosphere and soil, absorbing the toxins from the apocalypse. She’ll do anything to stop Kushana, including being willing to sacrifice her own life if necessary.

There’s a lot going on here, as you can see. It’s somewhat understandable why, when initially shown in the West (one of the first examples of anime to receive a theatrical release), 22 minutes was cut out, in order to market it as a children’s film, retitled Warriors of the Wind. The problem is, like almost all of the director’s work, it is not a children’s film. This is not a uncommon mistake – presumably based on them having a child as the central characters, and because they’re animated, which still largely equates to Disney in many people’s minds. But they’re more about that age capturing an innocent and idealistic mentality. This is undeniably mature and thoughtful cinema. In just his second feature, and first original film, Nausicaä establishes several themes which would run through almost all of Miyazaki’s future work, in varying degrees: the joy of flight, concern for the environment, and a strong female presence.

Miyazaki’s father ran an airplane parts company in World War II, and even his film company, Studio Ghibli, was named after an Italian plane. Almost every one of his movies includes a flying sequence, and Nausicaä certainly has plenty of them, whether its the heroine skimming across the desert on her one-person glider, or gigantic warships looming, threateningly, in the sky. Despite the imperfect animation, a result of the limited resources, the sense of wonder and awe is undeniable. If you don’t want to take to the skies after seeing these scenes, you might want to check for a pulse. Similarly, there’s no denying Miyazaki is firmly on the side of nature, with his heroine believing all life to be sacred, and humanity deserving no special place above any other species. If mankind can’t live in harmony with the world, the movie suggests, it’s mankind which needs to change. Bending nature to our will is always going to backfire.

But it’s with the depiction of womankind that the film truly succeeds. In Nausicaä and Kushana, you have two fully-formed characters that are not just among the best in animated film, they could stand beside the protagonist and antagonist of most live-action movies. The latter, in particular, demonstrates Miyazaki’s skill at depicting those who would be flat-out villains in less nuanced films, instead being given motivation and depth. While you may not agree with Kushana resurrecting the God Warrior, you can understand what she is trying to accomplish. Her actions stem from a genuine belief that what she is doing is best for the future of mankind. She just has a military-industrial approach to that, in sharp contrast to the one emphasizing ecological science and harmony, preferred by Nausicaä. Interesting to note that, in the 2005 Disney English-language dub, Kushana was voiced by Uma Thurman.

The story here builds to a stellar climax, in which a massive herd of ohmu are lured into a stampede towards the valley, while simultaneously the God Warrior is unleashed by Kushana, to horrific effect. [The animation for the latter was done by a young Hideki Anno, who’d go on to become a master of the genre himself, best known for Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a 2006 Japanese poll, Evangelion was the only anime ranked ahead of Nausicaä as an all-time favourite] Our heroine puts herself in harm’s way in an effort to stop the carnage, and… Well, I won’t spoil it in detail; Miyazaki manages to pull off an ending which could easily have come off as contrived or ridiculous, and is instead emotionally satisfying. With even the Tolmekians forces humbled by nature, as environmental messages delivered by teenagers go, it’s certainly a great deal more effective than an angry Scandinavian shrieking “HOW DARE YOU!” at the audience.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star (voice): Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, Yoshiko Sakakibara