Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Hayao Miyazaki might consider his single greatest work to be not one of his films, but rather the thousand-page manga epic Nausicaä that he labored to complete between 1982 and 1994. In Nausicaä, genetically engineered weapons have burned civilization to the ground, leaving behind the seeds of a new global ecology that has made humans aliens on their own planet. A thousand years after the holocaust, Nausicaä’s eponymous princess—a girl both soldier and scientist—seeks to reconcile the last remnants of her still–warring species with the monstrous biological order overtaking earth. Although this movie adaptation represents an early draft of the story—one Miyazaki would change considerably as the manga evolved—it was and remains a stirring, sweeping epic of war and adventure, and one of the best science fiction films made anywhere during the 1980s.