The Wind Rises

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast (voice): Joseph Gordon – Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski
Length: 126 min
Country: Japan

All Jirô Horikoshi (voiced in the Disney dub by Joseph-Gordon Levitt) wants to do is design beautiful planes. By the end of the film he has succeeded, but at a terrible cost: his designs are corrupted by their conversion into killing machines. In dreams he meets his inspiration Giovanna Caproni, who asks him, “Do you prefer a world with pyramids, or with no pyramids?” Horikoshi chooses pyramids, unaware of the chaos about to descend upon the world.

In his last film before retirement, Hayao Miyazaki presents a gentle portrait of the engineer as he grows up and finds love between the wars. He is a likeable, soft-spoken young man whose love of designing planes is infectious and much of the story is taken up by the intricacies of plane design. This is by far Miyazaki’s most autobiographical film as his father worked in the aviation industry; moreover, he experienced bombings as a child. This is an unusual departure for the director, and bar an extraordinary early earthquake scene, and the dream sequences with Caproni, this could easily have been made in live-action.

What I love about Japanese storytelling is the methodical pace with which the narrative takes place. In classic films like Tokyo Story or Ikiru, the slow method of storytelling increases the emotional impact. The true Western equivalent would be Lost in Translation, which, fittingly enough, takes place in Tokyo. Miyazaki brought this level of introspection and detail to animation, interpolating the fantastical with the contemplative. You’d never see anyone taking the time to smoke a cigarette or make some tea in a Disney film.

What I love about Japanese storytelling is the methodical pace with which the narrative takes place. Miyazaki brought this level of introspection and detail to animation, interpolating the fantastical with the contemplative. You’d never see anyone taking the time to smoke a cigarette or make some tea in a Disney film.

Usually Miyazaki finds the suitable narrative style to match the plot, whether it’s the wonderful adventure pastiche of Castle in The Sky or the dreamlike pacing of Spirited Away. Sadly, the narrative construction in The Wind Rises is a failure, as he tries to combine a weepy melodramatic romance with a biopic like The Aviator. For a director known for his awesome female characters, the love interest Naoko (Emily Blunt) is boring and passive with little personality of her own. The central question is never answered, and the moral message is muddled. Was the beauty of these planes really worth their creation? One only has to think of Pearl Harbor to answer that question – and considering his two finest films My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service take place in alternate worlds where World War Two never happened, he’s already sort of answered that question himself. By the end I was in a state of puzzlement, and despite feeling glimmers of emotion during certain sequences, it never came together as a whole.

I am being overly harsh of Miyazaki. It comes from expecting him to repeat or top his past successes, which may be an unfair standard of judgment as his best films rank among the most joyous films ever made. For any other director this would be a small triumph, and is worth seeing for the animated scenes alone, which are at their usual masterful standard. The little details are the best; the way the wind moves, the light filtering through the trees (summed up by one Japanese word: komorebi), the swirls made in a cup of coffee. Watching scenes unfold is like watching a series of beautiful watercolors blended seamlessly together, and there’s no cinematic experience quite like it. Miyazaki is still a master of atmospheric, nuanced animation. I only wish he’d picked a better story.

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