It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to regard Hayao Miyazaki as one of—if not the single most acclaimed animated film directors of all time. As the director of eleven different animated features (and in the height of production on his final project, How Do You Live?), Miyazaki’s particular blend of technical precision and imaginative world building has cemented the auteur as one of the most creative visionaries in the history of anime.
While his animated films have entertained audiences across the world for decades, Miyazaki is less known outside of Japan for his also significant contributions to manga. Now, one of Miyazaki’s often-overlooked graphic novels, Shuna’s Journey, is set to receive its first official English localization in early November of this year.
First released in Japan in 1983, Shuna’s Journey will feel stylistically and thematically similar to many of Miyazaki’s most famous animated features. Released after his debut feature film The Castle of Cagliostro and shortly before Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind for Topcraft (the Japanese anime studio that would later branch out to become Studio Ghibli). Because a manga is a much more manageable, small-scale endeavor than an entire animated film, the medium served as a perfect canvas for the young creator to experiment on some themes and artistic choices that would immortalize his reputation in future films.
The work utilizes a full watercolor illustration style, going against the grain of common black-and-white manga of the day and reflecting the painterly aesthetic that Miyazaki, Topcraft and Ghibli would soon become famous for.
Shuna’s Journey is a fantasy story in which Shuna, a young prince, must leave his remote village to help his people survive a famine. Becoming fascinated when a strange visitor provides him the clues to a mysterious new grain, Shuna’s epic travels westward untangle in an epic journey that spans everywhere from helping a young slave girl liberate herself, witnessing the miracles of the natural world, and arriving in the mythical land that may hold the answer to his people’s famine.
Miyazaki’s influences for Shuna’s Journey range from a Tibetan folktale to the adventure manga he read as a child in 1950s Japan. The story’s themes of distant lands, fantastical adventures, and a headstrong noble protagonist are also resonant with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
The one-volume graphic novel was never properly translated into English, and for years it remained a lesser-known yet highly-inspired piece of Miyazaki’s creative oeuvre. After its criminally-long relegation to compressed scans and auto-translations from curious fans, a definitive English-language edition of the work is now available.
Published by First Second Books and translated by anime historian Alex Dudok de Witt, the new edition aims to ground the story within the context of Miyazaki’s wider creative development. With this new edition releasing sooner rather than later, fans are finally able to take a look at a pivotal creative work from anime’s most storied visionary.
More information and pre-orders on the new edition of Shuna’s Journey can be found online at Macmillan, parent company of First Second Books.
