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| Picture c/o StudioCanal |
“The
Wind is rising. You must try to live!”
It is easy to underestimate the intense
passion that is generated by the surreal fantasy films that have emerged from
Japan’s Studio Ghibli over the past
two decades. For young children and
ageing hipsters alike, films such as My
Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away and (personal favourite) Ponyo have provided a beautiful
counterpoint to the saccharine and patriarchal Disney canon and allowed an insight
into Japanese mythology. The man who has
garnered the most dedicated following within the company has easily been Hayao Miyazaki who has just released
his swansong with The Wind Rises.
Breaking away from his usual narratives
of magical sprites and fantasy worlds, Miyazaki’s final film is far more
grounded in a sober reality with the action taking place in between the
catastrophic Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and Japan entering World War II. The protagonist is Jiro Horikoshi, a boy
whose dreams of being a pilot are thwarted due to his poor eyesight, and so
instead grows up to become a passionate aeronautical engineer. Along the way he has intense dreams where he
meets Giovanni Battista Caproni, an Italian aeroplane designer who tells
encourages him to design planes for the joy of creating something beautiful and
not to succumb to the temptation of creating war machines.
Jiro eventually gets a job working at an
aircraft manufacturer that primarily make planes from wood. Here he is assigned the task of travelling to
Germany in order to research their superior metal designs. He then returns to Japan to work on a number
of different planes with increasing weapons capability.
Alongside all of this there is a central
love story featuring Jiro and a woman named Naoko, whom he met after a train
derailment during the Earthquake. She
has developed Tuberculosis and is bedridden but lovingly lies at his side as he
develops his engineering designs.
As a final film, it is striking how dark
the subject matter is. Jiro has to
compromise in order to achieve his dream and work for military contractors and
naval clients, forced to design flushed rivets and other features in order to
accommodate the machine guns. There is
also a impending doom that arises in any film set in the late 1930s – a
character at one point refers to the earthquake stating “I didn’t think Tokyo
would recover so quickly”, an obviously ironic observation when contrasted by
what is about to happen to Japanese cities in years to come. There is also a casual reference to Pearl
Harbour where an engineer asks Jiro casually “who are they bombing with this
one?... America Probably”
Needless to say to fans of Miyazaki’s
earlier work, the art direction and animation are stunning. The long shots of fields and skies that are
home to prototype planes being tested are painted as if 18th century
watercolours. There are also beautiful
sequences in rainstorms that Miyazaki has used to striking effect in a lot of
his films. The plane designs are
increasingly ludicrous and expansive but look spectacular as they sail through
painted clouds. Even the depictions of
plane wreckages look strangely beautiful in a kind of fin-de-siècle
Futurist way.
The sound design is also gorgeously
constructed. The soundtrack features
sparse piano, strings and guitar with such a light touch that barely two notes
ever play at the same time. Yet the most
amusing sound effect is the choice to make all of the planes voiced by
humans. Propellers and engines splutter
in to life with rasping sounds that feels so playfully Japanese – a humorous
move that American animators with their lofty sincerity would never agree to.
Miyazaki films have a slow pace and are
about unusual subject natters, but the characters in his story are so
compelling and optimistic and the strangers around them are so kind that they
hard to dislike. The Wind Rises is a love letter to maths and design with an
aeronautical engineer as the hero armed with blueprints and slide-rules. It is unlikely that a more beautiful cartoon
will emerge this year.
[unashamed
uses of word ‘beautiful’ in this review: 5]
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