Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind belongs in the same canon of films as Lawrence of Arabia or The Leopard: epic and sweeping, but never losing sight of their characters or their true conceits. With a movie this ambitious, especially an animated movie, it’s easy to get lost in the scenery. It says something that Nausicaa has characters that upstage most of the action, and a story that lingers long after the images fade.

Tatsuya Nakadai has one of the blankest, most impassive faces possible for an actor, and Sword of Doom is a showcase for him projecting the most chilling emptiness possible with that face. Most people confuse acting with emoting: they think of Jack Nicholson or Dennis Hopper throwing an on-screen tantrum. Then they see the films of Robert Bresson or Jean-Pierre Melville, or many of the newer Japanese directors (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kore’eda), and see acting that has been dialed so far down that, paradoxically, nothing but pure emotion remains.

For the most part, Nakadai’s face is passive, his eyes large and unresponsive, showing all of the emotion of a mirror. Then, even more chillingly, he smiles. The smile is worse, because it is the rictus of an animal of prey. This is appropriate for a movie that is about a man who would at first glance appear to be nothing but a moral void. Then we look closer.