In honor of Hayao Miyazaki's 70th birthday, I tracked down this excellent and highly detailed discussion on Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, the iconic graphic novel that I consider his crowning masterpiece. These lectures by Japanese anime scholar Kentaro Takekuma were translated into English by author Kumi Kaoru (who himself wrote a book about Miyazaki), and then published online at Datacomp.
This is a brilliant and highly intelligent analysis on the structure of the Nausicaa manga, and how Miyazaki struggled to bring his filmmaking expertise to comics, resulting in an epic that is very different from typical manga. Compositions, panel arrangements, and editing are all used to create a cinematic experience, and Takekuma goes into depth to explain how it all works. Fans of Scott McCloud will appreciate his descriptions of comics panel editing.
The translations of Takekuma-san's lectures are available here: part one -- part two.
3 comments:
Hey Daniel I really appreciate the (again) freuqent posts, I look forward to each of them and enjoy reading your insights very much. Please keep up the good work!
I agree with Joel. Great work!!!
Hi, I'm the person who translated Part 2 of the essay/lecture, and I just want to clarify a couple of things.
First, the original lecture was by Kumi Kaoru and it was translated into English by both me and welcome datacomp blogger kransom. Takekuma didn't really have anything to do with this, though kransom has translated things by Takekuma in the past.
Thanks for understanding, and thanks for the link back.
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