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Information

• Member: Jerrit Tenurb
• Studio: Ramen Noodle Productions
• Title: For She Is The Kwisatz Haderach!
• Premiered: 2005-07-24
• Categories:
  • Comedy
  • Parody
  • Fun
  • Serious
  • Trailer
• Song:
  • Dune Trailer
• Anime:
  • Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
• Participation:
  • Nekocon AMV Contest, Nekocon AMV Contest (2005-11-04)
• Comments: As the son of a big Dune fan, Dune has always had a certain degree of significance to me. My father even gave me my middle name, Duncan, in honor of his favorite character in Dune, Duncan Idaho. I was introduced to the movie when I was pretty young. Though I didn't understand it at first, I loved it. Any trip to the dentist would come with me and my brother randomly quoting, "Remember the tooth! When the Baron comes close, remember the tooth!" When I think of Sting, I don't think of his music at all... the first image that comes to mind for me is snarling Fayd, screaming out to the royal court, "I will kill him!"
  
  Nausicaa, on the other hand, was a fairly recent interest. I became curious about it when I found out that it was the first movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki. (This is technically not true. The first movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki was The Castle of Cagliostro. Nausicaa came after Cagliostro.) At the time, it had not been released in the U.S., and I didn't have much money to buy import DVDs. So, I looked into the manga and put them on hold at the library. It took a while for them to come in, but when they did I read through them hungrily.
  
  What struck me most about Nausicaa were the geopolitical themes. The main theme is, of course, about the environment, but one cannot ignore the goings-on between the Pejites and Torumekians. More and more I began to notice little connections and parallels between Miyazaki's Nausicaa and Franki Herbert's Dune. Once I started seeing the similarities, I couldn't unsee them. It was everywhere- to the point where the plot similarities were almost as glaring as those between Kimba and the Lion King. To illustrate, I will list:
  
  -Both Nausicaa and Dune take place in the distant future, long after an apocaplyptic event sparked by mankind's meddling with advanced technology. In Nausicaa the apocalypse was The Seven Days of Fire, caused by the God Warriors. In Dune the apocalypse was the War of the Machines, caused by computers.
  -Both stories take place in worlds that are inhospitable for humans; the deserts of Arakkis, and the Toxic Jungles.
  -In both stories, resources that are usually taken for granted are limited and very important (clean air/water), and people wear special devices for the purpose of conserving these resources (air mask/stillsuit).
  -Both worlds are populated by huge, insect-like creatures (Spice worms in Dune, Ohmu in Nausicaa) with a special and unique bond to the inhospitable environments. While they seem dangerous and malevolent to humans, these creatures are both essential due to the nature of their bond with the environment (The spice worms create the spice, the Ohmu defend the jungle and allow for the purification of the Earth's poisons).
  -Both stories are messianic tales with a main character who comes to be known as a savior (Nausicaa and Paul) largely due to his or her special connection to the aforemention creatures (Paul can command the spice worms, Nausicaa can pacify the Ohmu).
  -Both of the main characters are heirs to some position of royalty (Paul's father is a duke, Nausicaa's is a king), and both of their fathers are killed by an outside faction.
  -Both stories feature a dangerous rivalry between two main factions, one of which is "good", the other "evil" (the Harkonnen and Atriedes in Dune, the Torumekians and Pejites in Nausicaa).
  -Both stories have a faction of priests with some telepathic powers (the Bene Gesserit in Dune, the Dorok priesthood in Nausicaa), and each of these groups believes in the coming of a messiah (the Kwisatz Haderach, the Blue Clad One). Also, both of these groups fear this coming messiah.
  -In both stories, one factions tries to defeat the other by siccing the creatures of their environment on their enemies. In Nausicaa, the Pejites guide an Ohmu stampede into the Valley of the Wind to defeat the Torumekians, and in Dune the Fremen lead a spice worm stampede into the cities to defeat the Harkonnen.
  -Both stories have a group of mysterious people who are said to live in the very midst of the inhospitable parts of their world, where it is actually safe, and coexist with it in order to survive. In Nausicaa these people are the Forest People, who live deep in the Toxic Jungle where the land is pure. In Dune the Fremen live far from the cities, in the middle of the desert, where they survive on the plentiful stores of water they keep.
  -Both stories have a group that secretly uses genetic engineering for twisted purposes. In Nausicaa, they are the Dorok scientists, who amnufacture a new kind of spore that acts like the Toxic Jungle... but is more deadly. In Dune, these are the equally evil Bene Tleilaxu, who grow clones in vats and produce their own super-assassins to sell to the highest bidder.
  -Both stories feature an aging master-at-arms with renowned skill in swordsmanship (Gurney Halleck in Dune, Lord Yupa in Nausicaa). What's more... both of these characters, in the David Lynch version of Dune and the Disney dub of Nausicaa... are played by the SAME ACTOR. Patrick Stewart played Gurney Halleck in Dune, he does the voice of Lord Yupa in Nausicaa.
  -Nausicaa was released in 1984, in Japan... the EXACT SAME YEAR that the Dune movie was released.
  
  Go on. Tell me it was all a coincidence.
  
  After the movie came out and I watched it, I found out on the Internet that I was not the only person to make this conenction. Indeed, many people had written articles on the same subject. I set the thought aside for then, since it didn't really matter- what could I do with the connection, really?
  
  Later, after I had begun making AMVs, I was working on a sound-clip video. I wanted to set the Monty Python quote about the "violence inherent in the system" to Nausicaa, since it was the only anime I had with peasants. So I popped in my Nausicaa DVD and began watching it, scanning for any clips I could use. Immediately all the thoughts about Dune came back. I started to wonder if I could get an AMV out of it... maybe I could set some quotes from Dune to Nausicaa clips? It wasn't a bad idea, but it felt more like the same boring stuff I'd been doing. So, I thought, what if I could take something longer... like the trailer for the Dune movie?
  
  It would be much more difficult than anything I'd done before, but the idea sucked me in. I quickly found and downloaded the Dune trailer, and extracted the audio from it. The sound quality was pretty bad, since it was taken from an old movie trailer... I did my best to fix it up in Audacity, but it still doesn't sound great. Hopefully, there's a better version of the audio somewhere. If so, I'll find it and remaster the video. Everything went pretty smoothly with the video, though my dependence on WMM2 drove me crazy. Everything... except...
  
  I bit off more than I could chew. My idea was that I could use this project to learn how to do image editing. Specifically, I wanted to take the characters who were supposed to be Fremen and color their eyes blue. Now, I didn't have any kind of special program to do that, but I'd used Photoshop before. So I downloaded Gimp and began doing it. It was incredibly time-consuming, but it worked. The only problem? The video quality of the "fremenized" clips looked awful. It sapped out my energy doing it, and the product looked just plain bad... it clashed with the rest of the video. After careful consideration, I removed the fremenized sections and replaced them with normal footage. It looked much, much better. I still want to do this video with blue eyes, and some day, when I have the programs to do it right, I will do so. When I release a remaster, that will be one of my first things to change.
  
  This was my "big project". I'm very, very proud of it. Some parts of it may look out of place... this video can be fully appreciated only if you have seen the original Dune trailer. This AMV is my tribute both to Hayao Miyazaki and Frank Herbert.