To complete our look back at Miyazaki, here’s what was—for a time—supposed to be his last work. After several others, including Princess Mononoke, were meant to be. And though he’s coming back out of retirement for at least one more time, let’s take a look at where we left him, with The Wind Rises.
Unlike his more famous works, this one eschews a fantasy setting—it’s based on a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, an aircraft designer known for creating the Zero fighter of WW2. Here, it’s used to explore some themes that were obviously heavy on Miyazaki’s mind while making this—that of the cost of pursuing dreams, and trying to balance those with the reality ahead. Jiro is obsessed with creating a revolutionary flying machine, while at the same time, trying to get with a sweetheart from his youth—and both journeys, it seems, are bound to end bittersweetly.
Despite the more grounded setting this time, there’s no shortage of Ghibli’s signature effort on display. There’s a very memorable and spectacular sequence set during an earthquake, where the land rolls and undulates, where buildings shake themselves apart—and combined with Jiro’s personal struggle between it all, it definitely makes for one of the more memorable moments here. Interspersed throughout are also dream sequences where Jiro meets with personal hero, real-life Italian airplane engineer Caproni.
If you know anything about Miyazaki, you’ll know of his love of classic planes—and in these dreams, we see all manner of demented (and mostly real) early 20th-century hulls on display. The interwar period was one of eager but naive technological innovation, as any sort of plan was experimented on, with the hope that nobody could be possibly insane enough to repeat the horrors of the last conflict—and it’s evidently that fervent spirit that appeals to the director, one well conveyed in those moments.
All this being said, the writing is perhaps not the strongest we’ve seen from him—there’s definitely evocative theme at hand here, there’s some nice moments, but it doesn’t gel as well as some of his greats. And then there’s the elephant in the room—the fact that ultimately it’s about creating a tool used by a not exactly pleasant regime. Japan’s history with confronting the Second World War and the part it played in it is…complicated, and you can argue this one doesn’t go far enough in acknowledging some things. The part the Zero played, the destruction Jiro’s dream partook in, is sort of wedged in at the end, and though there’s other instances like a very unflattering portrayal of the Imperial military, there is definitely a sense of dissonance that’s inescapable. I guess for some, it would be how many Europeans might react to a similar film about the designer of the Tiger tank.
You’ll have to be the judge of how much of a dealbreaker that may be. I certainly don’t think there was any malice involved or anything here—Miyazaki’s work has certainly spelt out that he’s no supporter of militarism, and I do get that there’s an effort to separate what to many may just be a classic aircraft design--to him at least--from those that used it. There’s also the framing of the underpinning ideas of trying to achieve a vision no matter what, or even what the consequences may be. That, itself, is something you can definitely see across his output as a whole, and I suppose ones that certainly fit what was to be a swansong.
And that bittersweet mood the film leaves off on is apt, I guess. Ghibli is not quite what it used to be—still around, but in a rather stripped down state following Miyazaki’s retirement. Modern trends inevitably caught up, and it too hopped on the CG 3D animated bandwagon just like everyone else. Whether the fantasy epics of old like Nausicaa, Mononoke, or Spirited Away could be done again in modern commercial environments, at least the way they were, is…a matter of debate. But then again, with how timeless they are, they don’t really need to be. Most of them are as great now as they were back then, and that itself is what puts Ghibli so close to the hearts of many. And if we don’t see their like again? That’ll make them only the more special.
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