Legendary ’80s Movie Might Be Getting a Sequel, 40 Years Later

Legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki made a massive comeback this month with his new movie The Boy and the Heron, but his next project may be even more exciting to long-time fans. Studio Ghibli has confirmed that Miyazaki is already working on another project, and there are hints that it may be a belated sequel to his 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Some of those hints come from Miyazaki himself.

The rumor that a Nausicaä sequel was in the works has been circulating online for months according to a report by World of Reel, and there’s no clear sign where it started. It may well have been speculation or wishful thinking among fans, but now Miyazaki and Ghibli have added a lot of fuel to the fire. The studio released a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Boy and the Heron called 2399 Days with Hayao Miyazaki, which mentions Miyazaki’s work on another movie. In the final scene, the legendary director is drawing his character Nausicaä and her pet, Teto.

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“It’s painful to return to this world,” Miyazaki said while working on the drawing. The phrase “returning to this world” could easily imply that Miyazaki is working on more than one stand-alone drawing. On the other hand, a thoughtful artist like Miyazaki could just get that deeply into the right headspace for each drawing. It’s also possible that Miyazaki was working on a new Nausicaä manga rather than a movie, but the conspicuous drawing certainly got fans excited.

Some commenters have gone so far as to speculate that this scene and the drawing were an intentional hint that a Nausicaä sequel is coming. On the other hand, Miyazaki is infamously secretive about his work, and it’s not clear how he or the studio would benefit from dropping clues so early.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is one of the darker movies in Miyazaki’s filmography. It is set in a futuristic version of Earth about 1,000 years after a nuclear apocalypse, with some human settlements finally regaining a foothold – including the kingdom of the Valley of the Wind. It centers around Princess Nausicaä, a teenage girl who tries to protect the newly-mutated ecosystem around her from the rising threat of humanity.

Nausicaä was not released in the U.S. when it first came out but an English dubbed version finally came out in 2005. Since then, Miyazaki’s work has become extremely popular in the English-speaking world – especially when the movies were packaged together as a collection on HBO Max. This year, The Boy and the Heron was released in theaters in the U.S. only a few months after it premiered in Japan.

The Boy and the Heron is still showing in some theaters in the U.S. You can stream Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind now on Max in English or in the original Japanese with English subtitles. There’s no telling when Miyazaki’s next movie might be finished.