of the Valley of the Wind
Hayao Miyazaki, producer of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind named his character after a Phaeacian princess in The Odyssey, who saved Odysseus when he drifted ashore covered with blood and then nursed his wounds. Nausicaa soothed his spirit by improvising a song for him."
The story is set thousands of years in the future after a war and the ensuing ecological holocaust has destroyed most of the Earth and wiped out almost all of humanity. The destruction occured during the now-legendary Seven Days of Fire when genetically designed monsters called God Warriors destroyed the world in a horrific war. Thousands of years later there are only small kingdoms and fiefdoms that remain along the edge of the Sea of Corruption, a vast forest of fungus and plants that give off poisonous gases and cover most of the Earth. The people of these kingdoms must fight a continual battle to keep the fungi from contaminating their meager farmlands. Most of the knowledge of earlier technology has been long lost. There are still some technological items such as airplanes and airships and tanks, but they are kludged together from ancient pieces of other machines dug up from the ruins of ancient cities.
Nausicaa is the princess of the kingdom of the Valley of Wind, a coastal kingdom where the continual winds from the sea provide power (via windmills) and keep the fungi spores from the Sea of Corruption at bay. Nausicaa is an expert pilot who flies about on her jet-powered glider (called a mehve which means "seagull"). She explores the forests (wearing a gas mask) studying the plants and giant insects that live there. When treaty obligations force the Kingdom into joining a larger war, Nausicaa is forced to become a warrior woman and lead her Valley's troops into a pointless battle. Torn between following her duty as her people's leader and her obsession to prevent the war from spilling into her Valley, she stumbles onto the true secret of the ecology of the poisonous forests and the insects.
