In many ways, Miyazaki's single greatest work has not been an anime, but the thousand-page graphic novel, or manga, Nausicaä; (available in English from Viz Comics) that he labored to complete between 1982 and 1994. Set a millennium after a biowarfare holocaust has destroyed our civilization, Nausicaä; is the story of the eponymous princess who seeks to somehow reconcile the last remnants of a still-warring humanity with the monstrous new biological order overcoming the Earth. Although this movie adaptation represents only an early draft of the story-one Miyazaki would change considerably in the manga-it was and remains a stirring, sweeping epic of war and adventure, and one of the best science-fiction films to have been made anywhere in the world during the 1980s.-Carl Horn