When I was a prodigiously unpopular seven-year-old in Hong Kong, my favourite game to play alone was based on an animated film I'd seen on Chinese television, where the princess of a futuristic tribe saves humanity while accompanied by a cute squirrel. Every day, after school, my parents' bedroom would be transformed into a post-apocalyptic barren Earth, a mess of pillows and sheets draped over lamps, and I would patrol it with a plastic cup taped to my face as a gas mask.

That Christmas, I asked Santa for a real gas mask, and won myself a long, serious conversation with my parents. I explained to them that I was trying to be a princess called Nausicaä, who I related to because she was a tomboy, a friend of animals, and the saviour of humanity. I think they were relieved that they weren't raising a young second world war aficionado, though they never did buy me that gas mask, or the small pet that I felt I also needed to authenticate my game.

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Some years later I rediscovered the film, and found out that it wasn't Chinese at all. It was a Hayao Miyazaki film, called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and that it preceded the founding of Studio Ghibli. I guess it had been dubbed for Chinese television, because the version I have come to know since was dubbed in English, and featured the voices of Alison Lohman and Uma Thurman.

When I watch Nausicaä now, I am just as impressed with the gentle heroine of the title, who teaches her people to love nature and not fight against it. A clue as to why I was playing on my own for most of my childhood can be found in the fact that Nausicaä, who I so identified with, is discovered at the end of the story to be the next messiah.

Now I'm an adult non-megalomaniac, I still look up to Nausicaä for weird reasons. I'd like to say it's mainly her humility and strength, but I can't help but linger on those little touches that make her such a lovable dork. Such as her amateur interest in science, or the fact that, when she encounters her one potential love interest, Asbel, in a glowing subterranean biodome, which – newsflash – is incredibly romantic, she friend-zones him immediately by talking about her insect collection. She is the Liz Lemon of futuristic princesses.

With her rapport with plants and her homemade arboretum, Nausicaä is the cartoon princess for anyone who likes nature. If Nausicaä lived in the modern age, you can bet she'd spend most of her year chained to a tree, and the rest of it yelling slogans outside Tesco Metro. If Nausicaä was in FernGully, it would have been titled FernGully: Endgame.

(Review by film critic Michael Mirasol) Reading on mobile? Click to view

Though Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released in 1982, it goes without saying that its message is relevant now, probably more so, as the world we live in starts to resemble the conditions of its predicted eco-apocalypse. Maybe if we all aspired to be a more like Nausicaä, the world would be a cleaner, better place, where humans and huge insects co-exist in peace. Ah.

Maybe we'd also be less patriarchal, because Nausicaä seems to live in a quietly feminist society, where she and her enemy are both women, and the leaders of their people, without question or the making of a point. Miyazaki has always had a talent for creating powerful, independent female heroes, and I sometimes wonder if it is a coincidence that after Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released, Disney began a new, tougher era for its princesses, beginning with Ariel in 1989 and continuing to this day with princesses like Brave's Merida, who fights against a forced marriage, and the Princesses and the Frog's Tiana, who makes a choice that I can't tell you because … spoilers.

Miyazaki recently made what he said would be his final film, after a long run of creating timeless, magical characters who are strong in spirit and at one with the forces of life. Nausicaä remains one of his most indelible creations, a blueprint for the animated heroines that followed, from Disney to his own Princess Mononoke, and for me. Two decades after I first stalked my imagined toxic jungle, I still like plants, I still harbour a secret dream of owning a squirrel, and about 50% of me is still holding out to be the female tree-Jesus, destined to be resurrected on the back of a giant beetle. I'm glad I chose Nausicaä when I was a child. I will be forcing her on my children, and my children's children, until the world does actually end.

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