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'Hayao Miyazaki might consider his single greatest work to be not one of his films, but rather the thousand-page manga epic Nausicaä that he laboured to complete between 1982 and 1994. In Nausicaä, genetically engineered weapons have burned civilization to the ground, leaving behind the seeds of a new global ecology that has made humans aliens on their own planet. A thousand years after the holocaust, Nausicaä's eponymous princess – a girl both soldier and scientist – seeks to reconcile the last remnants of her still – warring species with the monstrous biological order overtaking earth. Although this movie adaptation represents an early draft of the story – one Miyazaki would change considerably as the manga evolved – it was and remains a stirring, sweeping epic of war and adventure, and one of the best science-fiction films made anywhere during the 1980s.' Pacific Film Archive