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The Hayao Miyazaki anime we never got – New art book reveals Ghibli legend’s unrealized concepts

Casey Baseel Jun 28, 2025
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Latest volume in Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series traces the pre-history of Nausicaa, with over 50 never-before-seen Hayao Miyazaki illustrations.

In 2024, Japanese publisher Iwamani Shoten began releasing its Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series line. Each volume is filled with amazing artwork drawn by the legendary anime director, and with the fourth book in the series just about to go sale, the cover has been revealed.

There’s no mistaking Miyazaki’s artistic style, with soft, almost abstract linework nonetheless being used to convey a wealth of small details, and coloring that’s expressive and eye-catching without any garishly harsh contrasts. But while most anime enthusiasts can recognize the aesthetics, even the biggest Studio Ghibli fans are probably scratching their heads trying to figure out who the character on the book’s cover is.

Her outfit sort of looks like something Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’s heroine would wear. That’s just it, though: it looks like something she would wear, but nowhere in her film does Nausicaa wear this costume. That’s not quite Princess Mononoke’s San, either, plus that movie had wolves, not a dog like the one in the illustration above.

The new book, titled Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series-Nausicaa Prehistory, is a collection of nearly 200 pieces of Miyazaki-drawn artwork, including 58 that have never been shown before, which the famed artist drew before Nausicaa went into production or Studio Ghibli was formed.

Miyazaki may have become the most lauded and respected figure in the history of Japanese animation, but that success didn’t come overnight, nor did every idea he had materialize in completed anime form. In fact, even after the extremely positive response to Miyazaki’s first effort as a theatrical feature director, Castle of Cagliostro, won him praise in 1979, it wouldn’t be until 1984 that he directed his second anime movie, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Miyazaki wasn’t just twiddling his thumbs for those five years, however. While working on a variety of anime TV series and teaching animation techniques at anime studio Telecom Animation Films, Miyazaki continued to draw characters and develop concept art on his own, something he’d been doing since even before his work on Cagliostro. Eventually, it was his story and art concepts for Nausicaa that convinced anime magazine Animage to run it as a serialized manga, with parent company Tokuma Shoten eventually bankrolling its theatrical anime adaptation and Miyazaki using its success a springboard to co-founding Studio Ghibli.

Iwanami Shoten describes the book as “tracing the 10 years leading to the birth” of Nausicaa, and it includes, among other things, Miyazaki’s drawings for his imagined adaptation of American comic artist Richard Corben’s Rowlf, which unfortunately never made it past the early rights-negotiation stages. In that sense, looking through the pages of Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series-Nausicaa Prehistory will be a little bittersweet, as in some ways it’s a brief glimpse at the Miyazaki anime that could have been, but with an artist of his caliber, even a glimpse is something for fans to be happy about. And who knows? Since Miyazaki hasn’t said he’s officially retired, maybe some of the concepts in the book will end up making their way to the movie screen after all.

The 192-page Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series-Nausicaa Prehistory goes on sale July 8, priced at 6,000 yen (US$41), and can be ordered through Amazon Japan here.

Source, images: PR Times
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