Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 3/52 | Anime
The wind rises, we must try to live. — Paul Valéry
Japan, 1918
Jiro Horikoshi lay sleeping. In his dreams, he climbs to the rooftop, where a bird-like plane waits. He primes the engine and cuts it on. The plane lifts vertically—the clouds part. The aircraft, with wings like a bird, flies over the landscape. As he ascends, he sees enemy airships. He puts on his goggles to commence engagement, but his eyes spread apart from each other, doubling his vision. Sputtering out of control, he tries to remove the goggles. An enemy shot collides with his, sending him careening to the ground.
He awakes, his nearsighted vision blurred until he puts on his glasses. A teacher gives him a magazine that discusses Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni and his Caproni Ca.60. Outside, he stops some boys from bullying a small child. Bruised and beaten, he returns home, where his mother reminds him that fighting is never the answer.
He lies on the roof at night, hoping staring at the stars will fix his eyes. That night, he dreams of Ca.60s bombing a city and going down in a fire. He also dreams of Caproni, who claims they are sharing a dream. Caproni tells Jiro that building planes is better than flying them.
Years pass, and Jiro attends Tokyo Imperial University as an aeronautical engineering student. The film follows Jiro’s life designing airplanes, falling in love, and the World Wars in which his planes fly.
The film fictionalizes the real-life aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi and combines aspects of the Japanese novel The Wind Has Risen. Like Miyazaki’s other final film, The Boy and the Heron, the resulting movie is a mishmash. The story is more coherent, but Jiro is an avatar of a character—a hero who never falters from his ideals.
Though structured as a biopic, the film is not interested in Jiro Horikoshi’s life as much as it focuses on Miyazaki’s love of airplanes and disdain for how the military uses them in war. The film follows a similar mentality as Oppenheimer, where it does everything possible to make the designer of the war machine innocent and barely touches on the tangible impact of his aircraft.
To clarify, Jiro Horikoshi designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Japan’s most-produced combat aircraft in WWII. Towards the war’s end, the Japanese used them for kamikaze operations. However, for Miyazaki, these details are inconsequential.
The film becomes more interesting when it leans on The Wind Has Risen. Those moments are more literary, symbolic, and heartfelt. While the filmmakers weave it through, it takes about half the movie before it kicks into gear.
Of course, the animation is beautiful, and the filmmakers render the aircraft with meticulous detail.
Why did they get Hideaki Anno to voice the lead? His voice is so affectless.
The use of voice effects for the sound effects is a fascinating choice.
It deeply saddens me that Miyazaki made this instead of his planned sequel to Ponyo. I would have preferred it to this or The Boy and the Heron any day.