“The Great Masterpiece”: Rated 4.2 out of 5 Will Nausicaa get a sequel 40 years later?

In theaters on November 1, director Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron was a success in France with 1.5 million admissions. Internationally, the Japanese maestro’s animated film has grossed more than $116 million.

After this triumph, Miyazaki is not going to stop there, still in good shape at the age of 82. The one who announced his retirement too soon has already returned to work, says Studio Ghibli vice president Junichi Nishioka.

“Some say this may be his last film, but Miyazaki doesn’t see it that way. He’s currently working on ideas for a new film. He comes to his office every day to do that. He won’t announce his retirement this time. He’s going on. Work as usual.”Nishioka said at the Toronto festival last September.

What if the Japanese director’s crazy project was a sequel to his 1984 masterpiece Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind? Indeed, in the documentary 2399 Days with Hayao Miyazaki, which airs on Japan’s NHK channel, the filmmaker dropped a hint that might indicate this.

At the end of the theme dedicated to her, we see that the artist paints Nausicaa and her faithful companion Teto, a kind of mix between a cat, a fox and a squirrel. He accompanies these pictures with a sentence that has caught the attention of fans: “Returning to this world is painful.”

Can we conclude from this that Miyazaki is not diving into Nausicaa again for pleasure, but for work?

Indeed, the world of Nausicaa, based on the manga created by Miyazaki himself, still contains a lot of history. In the 1984 film, the director filmed only a part of it.

It is also possible that the Japanese maestro is preparing a sequel for us in the form of a manga version, and not a feature film. So far, no information has been released about Miyazaki’s new project. You will have to be patient to find out.

As a reminder, Nausicaä transports us to an Earth ravaged by human madness during the “Seven Days of Fire”. A few people managed to survive in a valley sheltered from the wind. However, the people of this agriculture are threatened by the toxic forest that continues to grow, a forest where only giant and mutated insects survive.

These few survivors one day saw their beloved king killed and their princess Nausicaa captured. However, the latter, sensitive to nature and ecosystem, is the only one that can interact with mutants.