Not a visual reference per se, but Miyazaki was moved to write Nausicaa by the plight of Minamata, the Kyushu factory town whose coastal waters were poisoned with mercury during the 50s and 60s, making many of its residents seriously ill. In the film, a young princess must negotiate the toxic wastes created by an apocalyptic war some thousand years ago to seek a rapprochement between humankind and the ohm, a mutant breed of giant insects also presumably bred by the environmental cataclysm.