Eco-Tainment #1: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

This is a new series I'm going to be doing here on Environmental Esotericism, called Eco-Tainment. Basically, it's about different ways that the environmental movement and environmentalism has been portrayed in popular culture, and how these portrayals can help or hurt actual environmental efforts. Our first inductee will be Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki's excellent film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. First released in Japan in 1984 (and given a half-hearted, badly edited US release under the title Warriors of the Wind, before being picked up for distribution by Miramax), the film tells the story of a girl named Nausicaa, who must stop her village from using an ancient weapon--the "God Warrior"--to destroy the Toxic Jungle that surrounds them.
Nausicaa covers a number of bases that other environmental works rarely do. For starters, it focuses on insects and other invertebrates, creatures usually glossed over by popular entertainment. In fact, Nausicaa's mystical connection to the giant Ohmu--arthropods that resemble house-sized pillbugs--is one of the driving forces of the movie. The Toxic Jungle, meanwhile, is at first presented as a generic "polluted wasteland," but we later find out that it is in fact the opposite, that it is actually clearing pollutants out of the soil and water and making them safe for humans.
Even though Nausicaa does not take place on the Earth as we know it-- real-life animals aside from humans are absent, with the place of horses, for instance, being taken by large ostrich-like birds-- it is very clearly meant to serve as a parable for what may happen if we destroy our natural environment without taking heed of the consequences. When the inhabitants of Tolmekia, a neighboring kingdom to Nausicaa's, try to destroy the Toxic Jungle, they incite the wrath of the Ohmu and soon find themselves at the mercy of the creatures.
  Nausicaa is much more subtle about its message in these ways than many other environmental works, as we will see in later Eco-Tainment entries.

 A Japanese poster for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The creature behind Nausicaa is an Ohmu, a fictional species of giant arthropod.