The Wind Rises

                              
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Year: 2013
Rating: 8.0
This was to be Hayao Miyazaki's final film as he had announced his retirement but it seems that he is working on another and I have no doubt Studio Ghibli fans are thrilled. This is a marvelous film and the animation literally soars at times with its stunning landscapes and period detail. There were moments of pure astonishment on my part simply gazing at the passing scenery. Miyazaki keeps coming back to movement in this film - primarily in a number of train journeys but also from above in stunningly imagined air planes. By doing so it allows him to paint Japan in the early part of the 20th century. As trains roll on they pass villages, cities and farms teeming with life and people and with great detail we are able to visit the past. The animation just knocked me out. But I expect people are used to that from his films - he isn't a legend for nothing.




What is really surprising is the story itself; a combination of fact and fiction interwoven to address Japanese history in these years as well as to offset it with a romantic tragic tale. There isn't really a speck of cuteness or fantasy in this film - no talking animals, no children magically exploring the world - it is a serious illumination of a man's life and how he becomes caught up in a war machine without really understanding it or morally contemplating it. He just wanted to build the best air planes that he could. But they were to be used for total destruction. How much guilt should you carry. How responsible are you for how your inventions are used. It is a conundrum that all science has had to deal with. The subject of the film was a real person - an airplane designer named Jiro Horikoshi - who was to build the Prototype 12 aka Model 00 - best known as the famous Zero jet fighter.




But the film begins long before that occurs - Jiro as a youth literally dreams of flying and meeting an Italian air plane designer Caproni - a real person - who in the dream tells him that planes should not be used for war. These are stunning animation sequences as Jiro first sees the planes flying high above and as they come closer he sees that they are loaded with bombs and machine guns.  He is near-sighted and so knows that he can't fly and so decides to become an aeronautical engineer. In one spectacular set piece he is on his way to study in Tokyo when the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 strikes and much of Tokyo is consumed in fire. He helps a young girl named Nahoko and her maid to escape. After graduating he is employed by Mitsubishi to engineer planes. On a holiday many years later he again meets a now adult Nahoko and they fall in love. She has TB. He builds the Zero. War comes. Japan is destroyed.




The section about Jiro and his pursuing his dream to build planes is basically factual - his tragic romance with Nahoko is totally fictionalized. The real Jiro had five children with his wife. In his diary the real Jiro condemned the war as insanity but he built one of the greatest fighter jets ever. As he mournfully says in the film, they all left and none of them came back. He just wanted to build beautiful graceful planes - but he built death. Much of this is left to us to figure out and think about. At one point his friend Kiro (a real person) says he is building a bomber that can fly 3,000 miles loaded with bombs. Jiro asks why. Kiro doesn't know. Well, we know. Pearl Harbor. The war itself is skipped over - just the rubble that remained is shown in a final dream sequence when Caproni reappears. Miyazaki's father interestingly supplied parts to Mitsubishi and to the war effort. How much you might wonder did this play in his wanting to make this film. He is a well-known pacifist but he never condemns Jiro - just the war. But it will be the animation that sticks with you - in particular in the first half of the film before it settles into his true love, Nahoko. It is glorious.