Sure, a hunter kills Bambi's mom, and The Last Unicorn involves animals being hunted to near extinction, but Nausicaä never sugarcoats humanity's role in causing the end of the environmental world.Įveryone in this world knows and recognizes that their dire situation is a direct result of the actions of humans from eons past. Miyazaki is playing with environmental themes we have seen in animation before, just on an unmatched scale. There's a reason Nausicaä's logo sequence includes a seal of approval from the World Wildlife Fund. Though their actions are despicable, you can't help but feel some kind of sympathy for their desire to prevent the toxins of the forest from overrunning the world. In the case of Nausicaä, the antagonists are two human kingdoms just trying to find a way to bring back the old world, even if they never knew it.

Greedy humans ruining the environment for the sake of industrial progress are the villains in films like Princess Mononoke, and Takahata's Pom Poko. His characters are often forced to accept and adapt to change, rather than fight it or try to reverse it. This theme is present in most Ghibli films, as Miyazaki's fierce and unapologetic sense of environmentalism often leaks into his film. Rather than look for a way to stop the forest from invading the human cities, our hero knows that the creatures of the forests are to be respected, and the new flora to be understood in order for humanity to coexist with it. We follow Nausicaä, the princess of one of the only three remaining human civilizations, which have devolved into warring feudal states at once at war with each other and also with the ever-growing forest at their border. The forest is also home to giant mutant insects as big as ships.

In its wake, an ever-growing forest of toxic plants and fungi formed and began to expand, killing anyone who enters within minutes unless they wear protective face masks. A thousand years ago, the earth was poisoned after a conflict known as 'Seven Days of Fire' destroyed all human civilization.

New scifi human apocalypse