Shuna’s Journey: 40 years later, this work by Miyazaki is finally released in France

Between Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, this flamboyant concentrate of Miyazakian imagination is finally translated.

Games of mirrors, corridors of time: today the hero of Boy and the heron (which is currently a hit in theaters) explores a parallel world where he meets figures from his past, and 40 years ago was released in Japan Shuna’s Journey. Somewhere the comic strip and the storyboard, the bookHayao Miyazaki finally arrives in French from Sarbacane editions. Shuna, the prince of a small isolated village, ventures into the outside world to find the seeds of a cereal that may save his people from famine. “These events could have happened a long time ago. Or were they going to happen in the distant future? No one really knows anymore.”

What we know is that the story is inspired by a Tibetan tale, as Miyazaki explains in a note dating from the Japanese publication of the work (May 1983), which he wanted to adapt into Animation Film. The film was not made “in the current climate of Japan”, he writes. The afterword, signed by journalist Alex Dudok de Wit, will teach you everything there is to know about the making of the Shuna’s Journeyinitiated after The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), in parallel with the manga (and therefore the film) Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Before the founding of Ghibli, then.

The Boy and the Heron: Miyazaki’s Winning Return (review)

Between the wild post-apo (we fight with guns in the ruins of a wild Central Asia) and the radical eco-mysticism, no doubt: we are completely, totally in Miyazaki. Shuya’s Journey is a true concentrate of his imagination from the 70s and 80s, as flamboyant as it is stimulating. If ever The Boy and the Heron seemed to you to be the work of an old curmudgeon, know that Shuya’s Journey even manages to speak of the artist as an old man: the heroine Théa, taken in by an old lady “cantankerous but not bad”, reassures herself by telling herself that she “knew well that unhappy old people were often grumpy”. Miyazaki has been an unhappy old person for perhaps forty years.

Shuna’s JourneyHayao Miyazaki, translated by Léopold Dahan, Editions Sarbacane, 25 euros