Runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Quick Impressions:
We’re back from seeing The Wind Rises, and my five-year-old is busily making paper airplanes and wondering if they’ll fly as far as the ones in the movie if she remembers a trick my dad taught her and uses just the right paperclip.
Halfway through the film, my daughter leaned over and whispered to me, “Wait a minute. Is this really in Japanese? Are we supposed to assume that German man is talking in Japanese to him when he’s talking in English instead of German?”
“Yes,” I whispered back.
“So is the movie really in Japanese, and they just put in the English voices for us, but usually it’s Japanese with words?”
“Yes,” I whispered back, explaining, “but I thought it would be hard for you to keep up with reading the movie, so I picked this screening because it’s in English.”
With a sigh, she said, “I’ll bet it’s better in Japanese with words.”
Maybe so, but she has a habit of reading the “words” out loud (the only way she can read), and I’m pretty sure the rest of the audience would not appreciate that.
My husband is still in India (and just finished celebrating the extremely colorful festival of Holi), so The Wind Rises seemed like the ideal, child-friendly choice for a new(ish) movie to review this week. My parents came along, too.
Going in, I knew that The Wind Rises, which is supposed to be Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, tells the true story of a pioneer of Japanese aviation during World War II, and I knew, too, that it’s not technically a children’s movie. But my five-year-old didn’t know that, and she liked it just fine. My parents liked it, too.
The Good:
The Wind Rises may be a true story, but it definitely feels like a Miyazaki movie. As always, nature seems wild and organic and welcoming and peaceful and humanizing. Meanwhile, the industrial world is a bit off-putting in its cold, geometric invasiveness.
Although this isn’t a fantasy (like almost all of Miyazaki’s most widely known films), the protagonist has such a rich interior life that The Wind Rises still offers audiences a charmingly whimsical take on reality.
Here in the United States, we don’t get too many movies about the development of Japanese fighter planes and bombers in World War II told from the point of view of a sympathetic aviation engineer who draws inspiration from the designs of German and Italian warplanes. I wonder why!
Can you imagine American audiences rushing to take their children to a live action movie about a really nice guy who worked for the Axis powers making planes to bomb the United States and other Allied Nations? Had anyone but Miyazaki made this movie, nobody over here would even have heard of it, let alone had the opportunity to see it in theaters. The film won a slew of awards and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Can you imagine a non-animated Japanese film on this topic being so warmly embraced by the Academy? I certainly can’t.
I’ve read that Miyazaki’s father ran a factory that assembled the aircraft that Jiro Horikoshi designed, so the story is probably deeply personal to him. As a novelist, I can see why Jiro’s story would appeal to an artist like Miyazaki. Apparently, he was inspired by something Horikoshi once said, “All I wanted was to make something beautiful.”
Artists, writers, scientists—dreamers always need financial backing. And people with money and power always screw everything up and destroy the world and desecrate our dreams. Ask anybody without money. We’ll all tell you that. Really, it’s self-evident. I feel terribly sorry, actually, for all the artists and innovators working for the Third Reich who discovered far too late what they had actually gotten themselves into.
I like the line about the pyramids that Caproni says to Jiro in his final dream of the film. Sometimes I think there are two fundamental ways life can go wrong. 1) You don’t do anything (so you waste your potential, squander the gift of your life) 2) You do something (so your actions probably indirectly kill millions of people or destroy the moral fabric of the universe.) (Seriously, real life sometimes dishes up such awful alternatives, it makes the whole Scylla vs. Charybdis thing look win/win by comparison.)
The recurring dream sequences with Caproni were my favorite thing about the movie. They were so winningly whimsical, and yet they presented a kind of uncluttered view of Jiro’s soul and his passions and priorities. In some ways, the sequences were more like hyper-reality than fantasy. What really mattered to Jiro always appeared in that beautiful dreamscape with Caproni. That was his reality. The exterior world was just clutter and complication, accidental things outside of Jiro’s control.
The other thing I really liked about The Wind Rises was how poignantly and effectively it presented the idea of the transience of beauty. What is really beautiful and special is more beautiful and special because it is fleeting and cannot be held. The entire doomed romance with Nahoko served as a perfect thematic parallel to Jiro’s professional life. My daughter didn’t realize how things would end up for Jiro, but every adult in the audience should realize that things aren’t going to end well for a Japanese boy in 1918 who dreams of designing planes and then grows up to design bombers and fighter planes for the military. If you have a basic grasp of arithmetic, and you know how World War II ended, you’re pretty sure that our sweet young protagonist is in for some pretty serious disappointment.
Like all of Miyazaki’s movies, this one is really beautiful, and it’s particularly moving. I cried through the last fifteen minutes at least. My daughter was also quite troubled when she found out what TB means. (Other aspects of the movie confused her more. At one point, I whispered, “Well, you’ve heard of Hitler,” and she answered earnestly, “No.” Continuing the whispered conversation in a meaningful way got very tricky at that point. We did have at least a little success much later on when she revealed that yes, she was aware of the existence of Hawaii.)
The movie really isn’t for children, but my daughter (not even knowing who Hitler is, apparently, and having no significant knowledge of World War II) watched the movie very attentively and seemed to enjoy it. The thing is, Miyazaki’s movie is more personal than it is political. Jiro is a sympathetic and captivating character, and the film’s main themes are pretty universal. You don’t have to know any context at all to find the characters relatable and the story engrossing. And as always, the hand-drawn animation is so serenely beautiful.
I haven’t heard the original Japanese voice cast, but I liked the English dub quite a bit. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, particularly, is perfect as Hiro. I spent most of the movie trying to place his voice, but I could never quite manage it. (It was driving me crazy. I was like, “I hear this voice all the time!” At one point, I actually thought, “Is it Ben Affleck? No! He’s too young to be Ben Affleck, but it’s definitely not Christian Bale. He sounds so much like somebody who ought to be Batman, but he’s too young!” Thanks for the help, brain! How could I never get from that to Joseph Gordon-Levitt? I think in riddles, apparently!)
Emily Blunt is good as Nahoko, too. For some reason, I went in knowing that Emily Blunt was in the English language cast. (I don’t understand why I only knew about her and none of the others.) Anyway, by process of elimination, I immediately figured out that she was the adult Nahoko, even though it only sometimes sounded like her.
Mae Whitman is very recognizable as Jiro’s sister, a character I wish we’d seen a bit more of. Jon Krasinski does a great job voicing Honjo, a character who provides some very interesting political commentary and complements the idealistic, aviation-obsessed Jiro perfectly. I didn’t recognize Stanley Tucci as Caproni or Martin Short as Kurokawa, but I should have recognized Short, and I really loved both of their characters and performances.
Best Scene:
Jiro’s courtship of Nahoko was by far my daughter’s favorite part of the movie. All this doesn’t happen until pretty late in the film, of course. But once Nahoko reenters the story, both the film and Jiro’s life become much more focused and fast-paced.
My five-year-old seemed to love the balcony scene with the paper airplanes.
On video chat with her father, she declared that her favorite scene was, “that wonderful wedding with the beautiful flowers and the red dress.” She elaborates now, “It was very good, you know, and I like Japanese love stories the best because they’re so lovely. I like Japanese and I like love stories, so if you mix them together, they’re perfect.”
Funniest Scene:
I absolutely love the look and animation of the character of Jiro’s boss Kurokawa, (hilariously voiced in English by Martin Short). What’s best is that although the character seems almost cartoonish, this somehow never detracts from the serious tone of the film. It just always seems perfect for the character. Kurokawa provides some comic relief simply because of his antic prickliness, but he never becomes ridiculous or unrealistic. (It’s pretty clear that the character affects a gruff exterior, but takes his work very seriously and cares deeply for those in his charge.)
Best Action Sequence:
Most of the action in the film involves test flights (or imagined flights) of various planes, but I personally preferred the dream sequences with Caproni. There was a beautiful elegance to everything that happened in Jiro’s dreams.
Another scene that really caught my eye was the pursuit on the streets of Germany that Jiro and Honjo casually witness. I love the use of the shadows on the distant wall.
Best Scene Visually:
I absolutely love the depiction of the earthquake that derails the train. My daughter found this quite captivating, too. In fact, for a second, she was scared. The earthquake seems so evil. It also seems to foreshadow an ominous ending to the dreams of young men like Jiro eager to work in Japanese aviation.
Fairly late in the film, there’s a scene featuring Jiro walking ahead of his plane (being pushed by humans) that’s framed very nicely. The framing in the film is very captivating. We see scenes from some highly unusual and very arresting angles (but there’s nothing so unusual that it’s jarring).
The Negatives:
I’m not sure how true this movie is. The love story with Nahoko seems to complement the aviation plot so perfectly that I often found myself wondering how many liberties Miyazaki had taken with the historical facts. Then again, perhaps the film’s central thematic concerns fit the plot elements so well because of the way the story is framed. Obviously, all narrative is constructed, so I don’t know how much it matters if the events of Jiro’s personal life actually happened as they do here or affected his interior life in the way depicted.
I honestly think the film raises some very interesting (and fairly sophisticated) questions about whether the historical facts even matter in the face of an individual’s self-concept and intentions. I truly love the way that Jiro’s interior life is by far the most compelling, realistic, and meaningful part of his story until the adult Nahoko enters his world. And even then, she’s incorporated into his interior life eventually. We get this really strange moral. Does it matter (to you) if something you created is used for evil if you created it to be good and beautiful? Isn’t everything created capable of being used for evil? Should we create nothing? How responsible are we for the ultimate fate of the ideas we let out of our heads into the greater world and other people’s hands? The dream Caproni seems to suggest that living in a world with pyramids is worth it, but this whole interpretation is complicated by the fact that Jiro has allowed this discussion into his interior world in the first place. Clearly he does not completely believe that he is innocent of the destruction his creations helped to cause simply because his ideas and motives were pure. If he did believe in his own innocence with conviction, then he would not be having these discussions with himself in his own dream world, the safest and most real place he knows.
The Wind Rises is long and unusual, and it’s full of controversial ideas. Just making a film featuring a sympathetic Japanese war plane designer in World War II is a pretty risky and unusual choice. But ultimately, I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with Miyazaki’s swan song. Some people won’t like the movie, but I’m sure he doesn’t care.
Overall:
The Wind Rises is a beautiful and moving film that tells a story we almost never hear. You don’t have to be interested in World War II, aviation, or even Japanese history to find this film compelling and fascinating. It’s a long movie with a somewhat meandering story, but ultimately it’s so gorgeously drawn and creatively presented that surely everyone who sees it will get something positive out of the experience. My daughter, my parents, and I all enjoyed the movie, and afterwards, my mother remarked wisely, “Well, my brother always said that when it came to the aerodynamics of the designs, the Japanese had the best planes in World War II.” So there you go.