Film Review: Hayao Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises"

 

Review of Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises”

Note: This is a slightly edited version of an assignment I wrote for a college argumentative writing class. 

Hayao Miyazaki has always had a fascination with planes. They are a common icon throughout his filmography, and he even named his own Studio Ghibli after the Arabic name for the “Mediterranean Wind,” which also serves as an homage to the Italian war plane Caproni Ca.309, nicknamed Ghibli. It’s fitting then, that The Wind Rises, initially said to be Miyazaki’s final film before retirement (though he has since come back to work on another film), focuses entirely on planes and stars a main character who dreams of Giovanni Caproni himself. The Wind Rises is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a real life plane designer known for designing the infamous Mitsubishi A6M Zero, also known as the “Zero” fighter plane, known for its use in devastating Kamikaze attacks towards the end of World War II, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Though some details were taken from Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain” and Tatsuo Hori’s “The Wind Has Risen,” such as Jiro having a younger sister. The film catalogs his life starting from childhood and up through ten years of his career, through the end of World War II. Upon it’s release, The Wind Rises was met with controversy in Japan and abroad due to the sympathetic view with which it paints Horikoshi, but nonetheless managed to be the highest grossing Japanese film of 2013 and was met with critical and commercial acclaim, including an Oscar nomination for “Best Animated Feature” in the 86^th Academy Awards. Hayao Miyazaki had previously won the Oscar for Spirited Away in the 75^th awards, and Studio Ghibli has had numerous other films with Oscar nominations and various other awards, both from Miyazaki and other directors at the studio.

The film starts with Jiro as a young boy, an ambitious dreamer with aspirations of designing beautiful flying machines despite his nearsightedness. Opening with a stunning and wordless dream sequence of a young Jiro flying a fascinating contraption through town, we get a first-person view of the way Jiro pictures planes, as captivating and complex machines which can present a wholly new and beautiful way to see the world. It’s stunningly detailed painterly backgrounds and fluid animation and camerawork capture the whimsical, dreamlike feeling of Jiro’s fantasy, until his contraption is shot down by ominous, grotesque alien-like bombs from a massive ship; a hint of what Jiro’s life would have in store for him if he chases this dream. It’s telling that despite the fact that this sequence lacks any dialogue at all, I found myself as captivated as Jiro was. So engrossing was this sequence that I hadn’t even realized there was no dialogue until the film's first words were spoken a little over 5 minutes in.

Returning to the real world, of course with the same locations Jiro flew through in his dream which he now walks through in mundane fashion, we get a sense of Jiro’s personality through seeing his walk to and from school, and how he behaves at home. He’s kind, polite, a bit neuro-atypical, and has a strong sense of justice. He doesn’t hesitate to help a young boy who gets harassed by some bullies, beating them in a fight despite his unassuming figure. His mind is always filled with thoughts of planes and flight, it’s such a single-minded, focused devotion that he happily reads an entire book about an Italian designer in English despite not knowing the language at all (he says he’ll use a dictionary to help). He dreams of flight most nights, and meets Caproni himself in his dream worlds. “Airplanes are not tools for war. Airplanes are beautiful dreams” he hears his idol tell him in his fantasy world. Caproni is seen sending off his planes to war a bit before this point, but it’s only mentioned casually, cast aside for the majesty of the flying contraptions with which Jiro is obsessed. Its here where he decides to truly commit to his passion.

From here, the film covers Jiro’s adult life. He gets on a train to go to a school for aspiring plane designers, where he helps a girl and her family through the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. He slowly improves at designing, gets hired by Mitsubishi, does research in Germany where he witnesses first hand the start of what would eventually become the Nazi rise to power, eventually reunites with Naoko (the girl he helped earlier), and creates the infamous planes we know now before leaving his career in a blaze of regret and glory. Japan’s engineering is shown as behind the times, still utilizing wood over metal and being one of few countries to still use oxen to bring planes to the runway (leading him to the aforementioned research trip); we witness Jiro’s life through all of this, and see the way he helps Japan’s aeronautical industry to grow, pushing through his doubts about the use of his work and time lost with his lover for the sake of pursuing his “beautiful dream.”

It is through this journey that The Wind Rises tells an emotionally wrought tale of obsession and regret. As Jiro progresses his career, it becomes more and more obvious that the necessity of planes at the time isn’t for the joy of allowing people to travel, but for the horrors of war. Nonetheless, Jiro chooses to push on with his dream, for he just wants to make planes more than anything else. Beyond simply war, Jiro ignores his other love for the sake of his dream, admitting at one point that he’d fallen in love with Naoko when he met her for the first time all those years ago, but still kept chasing his dream in spite of the likelihood of never seeing her again. Of course, he does eventually reunite with her, but things further complicate after he commits himself to her, as she’s suffering of tuberculosis and lives a frail life in a sanatorium. As his work becomes more involved and time consuming, and the patient Naoko simply watches him work while admiring his passion, Jiro’s doubt continues to manifest, but nonetheless, he chases his dream with the same single-minded devotion he had as a child.

The film ends on a bittersweet, somewhat tragic note after ten years of his career. His two loves, his planes and his wife, and the results of it all: did he do the right thing? Jiro reached his dream, but in a sort of twisted way, distorted from the dreams of his childhood. Maybe he could have spent more time with Naoko, maybe that would have created less tragedy, and that's not to mention his sorrowful feelings at seeing destruction of his own creations. While Jiro’s obsession may have led to a bittersweet end to his career, and I won’t spoil how his love life turns out, he must live with the results of his choices. “The wind is rising. We must try to live” is a quote from a poem by Paul Valéry which the film mentions often, and it’s extremely relevant to its final message. Jiro didn’t always make the right choices. In prioritizing his dream over everything else, he sacrificed so much for so many. His life is filled with both love and tragedy, triumph and regret. Passion is a wonderful thing which can lead to progress and satisfaction, but single-minded obsession can be dangerous. Jiro was aware of his surroundings and the coming war, it appearing as early as the first dream sequence I mentioned at the beginning of this review, serving as an ominous sign of what would come later; But he prioritized his dream anyway, and in the end, he must live with his choices, relishing in the beauty of the memories of his most cherished moments and learning from his mistakes and regret to live out the rest of his life.

In covering so many years worth of time, the film incorporates time skips which are not always presented flawlessly. At times, I found it difficult to tell when the film jumped forward in time, as it doesn’t utilize any visual or audio cues to make it apparent and forces me to readjust on the spot once the context allows me to determine that we’ve skipped forward in time. It’s a relatively small flaw, but nonetheless one that negatively impacted my enjoyment of the film, and is worth mentioning here.

It has been said that the film doesn’t take a strong enough stance against Jiro and against war. The real-life Jiro Horikoshi is responsible for a horrifying killing machine, who’s crimes include the attack on Pearl Harbor. It can be and has been argued that the film glorifies Jiro’s life, and only mildly criticizes his role in World War II. The film ends not with a blunt message with which to beat us over the head with, but a moment of quiet hope, allowing the viewer to reflect on the events of Jiro’s life and come to their own conclusions (itself one of the great things about this film in my opinion). Miyazaki has been known to have complicated feelings towards his country, and he is a staunch pacifist, even having refused to come to America to receive his 2002 Academy Award in order to protest America’s involvement in war overseas. He’s spoken out about his distaste for war and his hope for Japan to not be involved in war, likely spurned by his childhood living through World War II. He said in an interview that one of his first memories is the terrifying experience of an Allied bombing raid when he was four-and-a-half years old, and waking in the night to see Utsunomiya in flames. His father even owned a factory which built parts for Mitsubishi’s planes, including Jiro’s A6M Zero.

Moreover, Miyazaki’s life as an artist and animator has numerous parallels to that of Jiro’s as a plane designer. Miyazaki didn’t fall in love with animation until he saw The Tale of the White Serpent at age 17, which is the major notable difference from Jiro’s childhood obsession with planes. Miyazaki fell in love with the film and went on to become an accomplished animator and director. He slowly became disillusioned with the Japanese animation (anime) industry and the progression of otaku (a word that generally refers to someone deeply passionate about a certain topic, such as trains, but in this context refers specifically to devoted fans of certain types of anime, manga, visual novels, and related media) culture. Nonetheless he continued to chase his passion for animation for decades, and has said he would retire after the release of a film but found himself unable to do so on multiple occasions, including after the release of The Wind Rises. Miyazaki is 79 years old now, but is currently working on “How Do You Live?” expected to be released in 2020 or 2021. Knowing this, I think it’s no wonder that Miyazaki was sympathetic toward Jiro, another man who pushed on through his career out of pure, dangerous obsession despite his doubts.

My personal opinion on this matter is that the film does not take Jiro’s atrocities too lightly. As sympathetic as the film may be towards him, the horrific use of his work is arguably his biggest regret and a central reason for the film's dramatic and thematic conflict. The film shows Jiro as a person who wanted to make planes, which ended up being used for tragedy not by him, but by people in power, a reality I don’t find hard to believe matches our own. He didn’t desire to create machines for war, but being a plane designer during war time meant that fighter jets were in high demand. I can imagine that if Jiro were born in another time, he would be making the planes that happened to be in demand then as well. As such, while I agree that the film perhaps idealizes his creations to some degree (though it is from Jiro’s perspective, a person who adores planes from a mechanical point of view), it does not sugarcoat his atrocities, rather mixing the triumphant and tragic elements of his life and allowing viewers to make what they will of his work and choices as presented in the film, ultimately forming something more thought-provoking than simply telling us that his work is wholeheartedly horrible or admirable.

Jiro is brought to life in all stages of his life through detailed animation and body language, as well as a lovely grounded vocal performance from Hideaki Anno (perhaps best known as the director of the seminal anime classic Neon Genesis Evangelion, here he voiced Jiro for his good friend Miyazaki). His odd and endearing personality, imaginative fantasies, and unique ticks are made to feel lifelike through the loving, painstaking detail with which they are drawn and animated. For that matter, this incredible attention to detail permeates throughout the film and applies to all of its characters. Be it major recurring side characters like Naoko and Jiro’s younger sister Kayo, or even the most minor of background bodies, the film animates characters, planes, and worlds with nuance and purpose. Shots of crowds are never still, every background character has a life and personality of their own that you can get a glimpse of through how they move. The Great Kanto Earthquake is presented as if the ground literally vibrates out of the earth, as if it were a sheet of paper blowing in harsh wind, effortlessly capturing the immense power and destruction of this natural disaster. The flight of planes is fanciful and beautiful while maintaining their detailed designs and metallic sheen, and the horrors of war and conflict are presented with a rawness that makes them harrowing to watch and think about. Every facial expression, bodily tick, rustling leaf, and rattling piece of metal carries so much weight thanks to the meticulous detail with which it is presented. This is further backed by thoughtful camera placement and framing, appropriately capturing the mood of a scene or the inner feelings of a character solely through how we are made to view them through the lens of animations metaphorical camera. If the purpose of animation is to capture the essence of reality, as opposed to reality itself, then The Wind Rises succeeds masterfully on this front.

This extraordinary quality and attention to detail extends to the film’s audio as well. Sound effects often sound like they’ve come from the human mouth rather than extensive foley work. The hums of propellers and rumblings of engines sound like men rumbling their lips into a microphone, which creates an almost nostalgic, childlike quality to how machinery sounds, perfectly fitting the nature of Jiro’s idealistic obsession. That’s not to say that it has no traditional foley, I particularly loved the sound of quiet footsteps in Jiro’s house as a child, but compared to the unique approach it takes towards mechanical objects, it doesn’t stand out quite as much. I suppose that may be a point in its favor, as the sound design is unobtrusive and fits each location well enough as to not feel out of place. Joe Hisaishi’s orchestral score is wonderful, stylistically matching the historical setting, while using sound to convey the majesty of flight, intimacy of love, solitude of doubt, and horrors of war just as effectively as the film conveys them visually. While I watched the film using the Japanese voice track with English subtitles, it does have an English dub courtesy of Disney. While I have only seen clips of the English audio track, it has generally been well received, and my personal thoughts on what I’ve heard of it is that it’s perfectly good and a fine way to experience the film if you’d prefer to watch it in English. That the audio is probably the aspect of this film I’m the least enamored with is a testament to just how excellent The Wind Rises is as a whole.

The Wind Rises may be Hayao Miyazaki’s most personal film. A notable departure from the more magical, child friendly fare that his studio is (perhaps somewhat unfairly) known for, The Wind Rises is a realistic historical drama aimed squarely at an adult audience. Miyazaki has said he was afraid to make this film, that Ghibli was “digging their own grave” by making a mature drama focused on planes, but producer Toshio Suzuki convinced him to go through with it anyway, and we received a truly stellar film for it. Though Miyazaki rejects the idea that it’s a thinly-veiled self-portrait - “I think that both Jiro and Tatsuo Hori are greater men than I, so I can’t put myself beside them,” he says - the parallels are clear, and his passion for not only this film, but the art of plane design and the life of Jiro Horikoshi shines through. While the film may be a bit of a departure from Miyazaki’s usual genre choice, it still feels like it belongs on Ghibli’s catalog. It maintains the astounding visuals, moving score, and sense of magical whimsy that the studio’s work is known for, but applies it to a tragic tale about a man’s journey to chase his dream at all costs. It’s a stunningly realized, cinematically excellent, emotionally resonant work which I’d recommend to anyone who may appreciate a great historical drama, directed by perhaps one of the greatest ever. We are truly lucky that Hayao Miyazaki too, continues to chase his dream at any cost.




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