The Wind Rises **** (2013 dir Hayao Miyazaki) – Movie Review

Japan’s greatest animation director Hayao Miyazaki, the 2003 Oscar winner for Spirited Away, combines his own entertaining plot and screenplay, compelling characters and quite stunningly breath-taking animation for his fictionalised and fanciful biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the wiz who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War Two. Unable to fulfil his dream of flying and become a pilot, the near-sighted Jiro instead joins a major Japanese engineering company in 1927 and becomes one of the world’s most innovative and accomplished plane designers.

All this remarkable film’s fantasy elements are quite beautiful, beguiling and even entrancing. It’s easy to get spirited away by this extraordinary animation. But the only problems the film has are when it connects with the harsh facts of reality. These are the planes that attacked the Americans, presumably the very ones that assaulted Pearl Harbor. Don’t mention the war, Hayao Miyazaki! This plotline is brave of you but you’d have been much better keeping to a totally fictional character of a civil aviation designer.

You are lulled into thinking what you are watching is a biopic of biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, but, instead, the main character in the film Jiro is not actually Jirô Horikoshi, the designer of the Zero fighter aircraft, but a fictional character made from a mix of the actual lives of Jirô Horikoshi and Tatsuo Hori, the author of the short story The Wind Rises. The title comes from Hori’s translation of a quote from Paul Valéry’s poem Le cimetière marin, which starts the film.

The film’s one other problem is the totally sugary and saccharine nature of the hero’s central romance with Nahoko, a girl who is suffering from tuberculosis. This is handled as seriously as an opera plot, La Boheme or La Traviata for example, making it a Disney version of a life of suffering and death. No wonder Miyazaki is nicknamed ‘the Japanese Walt Disney’. And, as the film chronicles some key events during the designer’s life, like the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Great Depression, the tuberculosis epidemic and Japan’s plunge into war, the spirit of Disney hovers over the film again and again.

Then again, with world events intruding on the narrative, the Italian character of the famous aeronautical designer Caproni who inspires the young Jiro and the weird German character Castorp seem worrying, simplistic stereotypes, seemingly representing Miyazaki’s views on their nations or national characters. Luckily, no Americans or British appear.

There’s a choice of subtitled or American dubbed versions, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt voicing Hiro and Emily Blunt as Nahoko in that version.

But there we are, dazzling, provocative and intelligent animation for grown-ups, treading the minefield of Earthquake, Depression, tuberculosis, war and death. It’s quite a ride.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/