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thank you and thankyou Takekuma Kentaro!

However, I think this also reflects a shift in the manga’s narrative. Mr Kentar says, ‘(Nausicaa) is a human drama that aims to depict the relations between its various characters.’ But in the manga’s early sections, the human drama is only one element. The manga is also very much about the relation between humans and their fantastical world, interspersed with epic, ‘cast of thousands’ spectacle (a flotilla of planes coming under attack, far more spectacular than the equivalent scene in the film version; a humungous land-battle that’s depicted over 40 pages.)

Moreover, for the first two-thirds of the manga, even the main characters are essentially _reacting_ to circumstance (both the human war and the changes in the ecosystem). It’s only in the last section that the characters fully assert themselves as individuals (e.g. Nausicaa contending with being seen as a messiah.)

In short, I wonder if the shift in visual style reflects the fact that in the early section, Miyazaki was more (or equally) interested in his world than in his characters, but shifted the weight toward the protagonists in Nausicaa’s final chapters.