The Movies: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Porco Rosso (1992) Though he is best known for massively original works such as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, the Japanese Walt Disney has adapted at least half of his works from existing sources - two of which are comic books. Renowned for his obsessive, immaculate attention to detail, and the fact that he draws hundreds of thousands of frames of each of his pictures personally by hand, Miyazaki is arguably the perfect person to adapt an established comic book into an animated feature film. You really couldn't find a trustworthier guy. Miyazaki's first feature film with Studio Ghibli (a studio that would become and remains synonymous with his name all these years later), then, was the beautiful and haunting Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which tells the story of a young girl's fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, and was based on... well, Miyazaki's own manga of the same name. Almost ten years later, he adapted another one of his comic books, Hiktei Jidai, into the wonderful, soaring, World War I movie, Porco Rosso. So when in doubt, adapt your own work, apparently.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
