Yeah, I've had the big bad burly edition on my want list for a few years now. However, I finally sprung for half of Toynbee so it'll have to wait.

Spirited Away is a lovely film, but it's very Western. Miyazake made it a good decade into his arrangement with Disney and after the clusterfuck that was the Mononoke dub. This is the work of a guy who was already an acknowledged master, who had most any resource he needed, and who was playing on a world stage.

Nausicaa, on the other hand, is alien. It was Miyazake's first broad, bold "I'ma make me a movie" tale. Nausicaa was rejected as a movie, done as a manga, then retooled as a movie - it's doubly refined. It was done cheap and it was done fast and it makes no attempt to embrace the thinking of Americans raised on Speed Racer. Nausicaa is Miyazaki's Snow White - it's the "gimme one shot" reach for the sky of the undisputed master of anime.

Much like Watchmen utterly annihilates your expectations of graphic novels, Nausicaa grabs you by the lapels and shakes all the Sailor Moon and Pokemon the fuck and gone out of your head. The first time I saw it was '94, an anime club fan sub. No official English edition had been done and even that horrible, weird recut was hard to come by. Anime for me was, at the time, Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival, and occasional weird shit on Liquid Television. We'd trekked down to Santa Fe to see a midnight showing of Urutsukidoji (the film that convinced me once and for all that the Japanese really are different in some not-so-flattering ways) but passed up the chance to do the same thing with Totoro. So when I saw Nausicaa I suddenly got it. I suddenly understood why people bothered with Anime. It made sense. It was an art form that allowed you to do things you can't do otherwise.

Spirited Away is nice, but what it says is "Miyazaki can out-Disney Disney."