Il viaggio di Shuna

Hayao Miyazaki is an absolute master in creating wonderful worlds and making his imagination live forever. Everything he has done, every piece of art is part of a bigger universe, whose themes and productive stories turn the director, writer and artist into one of the most beautiful minds of the entire human history. Obviously we don't have only Miyazaki's movies as material, but his entire graphic novel production gives us a glimpse of his incredible talent. Shuna's Journey is not an exception, appearing as the saddest and deepest narrative you can find among Miyazaki's productions.
The plot, written and crafted for the first time in 1982/1983, is centered around Shuna, the young Prince of a poor village who starts a long exploration of nearby lands in order to find the golden seeds, useful to produce a great amount of food. He will discover desert cities with human hunters, inside the arid remnants of past wars. He will be immersed inside the fabulous god lands, until the love for a forgotten lady saves him from a primitive fate. In fact the entire meaning behind Shuna's Journey is the humility we need in the common existence, where robbery turns us into beasts or irrational creatures and war shows the worst of humanity. A mix of common themes of the author while, at the same time, we find the first experiments for a strong changement of his characters, both temperamentally and aesthetically, inside a setting which would inspire Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke. What highlights this moral fight between the hero in search for the survivallence of his people and the mad men ready to sell their similars is the style of the Master. Miyazaki chose a watercolor painting so that all the locations and imaginific creatures stand out, with an elegant artistic feature granted by the great work of Bao Publishing, at least in the Italian version. In the end we live another adventure you can find inside the “Ghibliverse”, a sadder one with a visceral link between characters and their transformations, offering the classical atmosphere of these japanese tales, which will be part of ourselves forever.

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐