The Wind Rises
I initially felt like I should watch it again before I did opinions Unfortunately, it did not invite to instant re-watch, like some Ghibli films have. It's got a lot in common with Only Yesterday, in that aspect: For being one of the most profound films I have ever seen, it was storywise uneventful.
Here's Jiro Horikoshi, a boy who dreams of flight. Unfortunately, our boy's dependent on glasses, so piloting is right out. Second best option, then: make the goddamn planes.
So Jiro becomes an aircraft engineer in a Japan that is struggling to catch up with the industrialised powers of the West, and that is pretty much it. Because we know where this story ends; we don't need to be told where the tale of Japan in the early twentieth century is over. The film doesn't go there, either: it is over before the war even starts. There's a thoroughly fictional love story going on, there's a sister who never existed in reality - it's all for the sake of paralells and contrasts, because the purpose of this film is to be neither biography nor a history class. It is a story about creation, destruction, and healing.
"The opposite of war isn't peace; it's creation!" So goes the refrain, but let's never forget how much innovation owes its existence to military budgets. And here is the film's great worry: our hard-working, dream-riddled, aeroplane-obsessed hero owes his job to military commissions. He gets to build planes, he gets to travel abroad to look at how things happen in the west, but it's ultimately on the military's bill, the implicit understanding being that his planes might be used in warfare. And here is the part where the film might or might not commit to a fatal escape manouvre: it never passes moral judgment on this fact.
The thing is that I'm not so certain that it should. This isn't a film about the war, and to what length its avoidance of the topic qualifies as apologia, it is only by the same measures that Hetalia is to be categorised as such. Both refrain from touching onto the festering cesspit that is the atrocities commited by Imperial Japan, but in both instances, that cesspit is an inescapable background noise that is mostly irrelevant to what the story is trying to do. Hetalia is a sitcom on national stereotypes and historical fail that unwisely started with jokes about the Axis Powers; The Wind Rises is a story about dreams, and the disappointments and the consequences of following them to their end. Miyazaki's pacifism has never been a secret, and Wikipedia suggests that Horikoshi was more pronounced anti-war IRL than his animated counterpart ever verbalises. He isn't making weapons, it is made almost redundantly clear that he's interested in making things fly, not bombing the Americans. The film largely portrays him as merely one engineer among many; if Jiro didn't draw the fighter planes, someone else would.
For the record: I think it's really, really, really important for people to know about the past and present sins commited by their countries and what these sins have meant for the victims of their aggression. I think it's appaling that a country as well-off as Japan to this day will not educate its citizens about the things their grandparents were a part of. I think it is chilling that a company such as Studio Ghibli might run into serious problems were they to make a film about WWII in East Asia. I absolutely think that the country of Japan needs to tell itself that story, but I don't feel that we should fault this film in particularly for not telling it. If this had been a German film about a German engineer, the debate about its silence would never have happened. Modern Germany practices an almost absurd amount of self-flaggelation for her grandmothers sins, and a German film set in the thirties with the war as the unspoken conclusion would get away with not commenting further on the ultimate consequences. Thanks to Japan's embarassing silence, Miyazaki is not allowed the same luxury - even though the war has minimally to do with the story he's trying to tell.
Unfortunately, I think it'd be a lot more coherent if it did. Here's the thing: this is a good film. For more than two hours playtime, I was never bored watching it. It never failed to keep my interest; and true to Studio Ghibli fare, it is beautiful in all possible ways. But for all that the story keeps my interest, it also fails to truly engage me. Blame it on Hollywood raising me into expecting a certain storytelling pattern, or whatever. Fact is, I was also waiting for something to happen, for something to matter, but nothing really does. There's no true conflict in this film, barring Jiro's continued struggle in making a great plane, but there's not really anything bad going to happen if Jiro doesn't suceed in making it. Everything in this film is about the philosophy and its themes and the inescapable shadow of the future, but I think the film could have made me a lot more invested in it if it had used Jiro's frankly not too interesting personal struggle as a springboard to comment on the bigger issues surrounding the period.
But that aside, this film is a beautiful... I dunno if I can call it a tribute to Horikoshi, what with how the biographical freedoms taken make it obvious that he's mostly just the spokesperson for the film's great message. But the film is beautiful, and the story it tells is beautiful, too. And just for the fact that it clearly shows that it has intelligent thought going on underneath the beautiful images, it is instantly twice as good as Frozen so again: WTF Academy awards, stop being dumb.
I. Globalisation
This film is full of foreigners, surprisingly so for Ghibli fare. Jiro big hero is the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who appears in several dream sequences. Another key character is Castorp, a character from The Magic Mountain (hugeass classic of antebellum Germany). The title and regularly repeated key phrase is from a French poem. Almost curiously for Japan, only English is not represented except for the acknowledgment that the big rivals are the US.
Even more curiously: the foreign characters are allowed to speak their own languages. Caproni is introduced by starting a conversation with Jiro entirely in Italian; Castorp delivers several lines in German, and then there's this:
(and as an aside: can't speak for Caproni, but the minor German characters speak German lines as spoken by native German speakers. Castorp, however, has a distinctively English-background accent, and his Japanese VA has a distinctively English-looking name. And then the English version went and cast Werner Herzog for the part, who replaces the unfitting accent with his peerless inability to carry a tune)
I don't know if Miyazaki wanted to make some kind of comment on the value of cultural exchange or whatnot, but I like to imagine that he did. National chauvinism is a disgusting thing, and this film actively engages in the positive relationships between Japan and other countries. (even though those other countries are, um.)
2. Railways
Someone on the internet once informed someone else that the reason the Leijiverse is about trains in space is because of Leiji's childhood post-WWII, when he saw the trains come in, and bringing people and goods for re-building the country with them. There is something similar going on in this film: because for all that Jiro is all planes planes planes, there are a lot of railways going on here, and I refuse to believe that they just showed up in that dream with no purpose. And where the planes ominously all crash or fall to pieces or just refuse to take off, the trains are reliable, safe, and they bring people together.
Here's Jiro Horikoshi, a boy who dreams of flight. Unfortunately, our boy's dependent on glasses, so piloting is right out. Second best option, then: make the goddamn planes.
So Jiro becomes an aircraft engineer in a Japan that is struggling to catch up with the industrialised powers of the West, and that is pretty much it. Because we know where this story ends; we don't need to be told where the tale of Japan in the early twentieth century is over. The film doesn't go there, either: it is over before the war even starts. There's a thoroughly fictional love story going on, there's a sister who never existed in reality - it's all for the sake of paralells and contrasts, because the purpose of this film is to be neither biography nor a history class. It is a story about creation, destruction, and healing.
"The opposite of war isn't peace; it's creation!" So goes the refrain, but let's never forget how much innovation owes its existence to military budgets. And here is the film's great worry: our hard-working, dream-riddled, aeroplane-obsessed hero owes his job to military commissions. He gets to build planes, he gets to travel abroad to look at how things happen in the west, but it's ultimately on the military's bill, the implicit understanding being that his planes might be used in warfare. And here is the part where the film might or might not commit to a fatal escape manouvre: it never passes moral judgment on this fact.
The thing is that I'm not so certain that it should. This isn't a film about the war, and to what length its avoidance of the topic qualifies as apologia, it is only by the same measures that Hetalia is to be categorised as such. Both refrain from touching onto the festering cesspit that is the atrocities commited by Imperial Japan, but in both instances, that cesspit is an inescapable background noise that is mostly irrelevant to what the story is trying to do. Hetalia is a sitcom on national stereotypes and historical fail that unwisely started with jokes about the Axis Powers; The Wind Rises is a story about dreams, and the disappointments and the consequences of following them to their end. Miyazaki's pacifism has never been a secret, and Wikipedia suggests that Horikoshi was more pronounced anti-war IRL than his animated counterpart ever verbalises. He isn't making weapons, it is made almost redundantly clear that he's interested in making things fly, not bombing the Americans. The film largely portrays him as merely one engineer among many; if Jiro didn't draw the fighter planes, someone else would.
For the record: I think it's really, really, really important for people to know about the past and present sins commited by their countries and what these sins have meant for the victims of their aggression. I think it's appaling that a country as well-off as Japan to this day will not educate its citizens about the things their grandparents were a part of. I think it is chilling that a company such as Studio Ghibli might run into serious problems were they to make a film about WWII in East Asia. I absolutely think that the country of Japan needs to tell itself that story, but I don't feel that we should fault this film in particularly for not telling it. If this had been a German film about a German engineer, the debate about its silence would never have happened. Modern Germany practices an almost absurd amount of self-flaggelation for her grandmothers sins, and a German film set in the thirties with the war as the unspoken conclusion would get away with not commenting further on the ultimate consequences. Thanks to Japan's embarassing silence, Miyazaki is not allowed the same luxury - even though the war has minimally to do with the story he's trying to tell.
Unfortunately, I think it'd be a lot more coherent if it did. Here's the thing: this is a good film. For more than two hours playtime, I was never bored watching it. It never failed to keep my interest; and true to Studio Ghibli fare, it is beautiful in all possible ways. But for all that the story keeps my interest, it also fails to truly engage me. Blame it on Hollywood raising me into expecting a certain storytelling pattern, or whatever. Fact is, I was also waiting for something to happen, for something to matter, but nothing really does. There's no true conflict in this film, barring Jiro's continued struggle in making a great plane, but there's not really anything bad going to happen if Jiro doesn't suceed in making it. Everything in this film is about the philosophy and its themes and the inescapable shadow of the future, but I think the film could have made me a lot more invested in it if it had used Jiro's frankly not too interesting personal struggle as a springboard to comment on the bigger issues surrounding the period.
But that aside, this film is a beautiful... I dunno if I can call it a tribute to Horikoshi, what with how the biographical freedoms taken make it obvious that he's mostly just the spokesperson for the film's great message. But the film is beautiful, and the story it tells is beautiful, too. And just for the fact that it clearly shows that it has intelligent thought going on underneath the beautiful images, it is instantly twice as good as Frozen so again: WTF Academy awards, stop being dumb.
I. Globalisation
This film is full of foreigners, surprisingly so for Ghibli fare. Jiro big hero is the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who appears in several dream sequences. Another key character is Castorp, a character from The Magic Mountain (hugeass classic of antebellum Germany). The title and regularly repeated key phrase is from a French poem. Almost curiously for Japan, only English is not represented except for the acknowledgment that the big rivals are the US.
Even more curiously: the foreign characters are allowed to speak their own languages. Caproni is introduced by starting a conversation with Jiro entirely in Italian; Castorp delivers several lines in German, and then there's this:
Click to view(and as an aside: can't speak for Caproni, but the minor German characters speak German lines as spoken by native German speakers. Castorp, however, has a distinctively English-background accent, and his Japanese VA has a distinctively English-looking name. And then the English version went and cast Werner Herzog for the part, who replaces the unfitting accent with his peerless inability to carry a tune)
I don't know if Miyazaki wanted to make some kind of comment on the value of cultural exchange or whatnot, but I like to imagine that he did. National chauvinism is a disgusting thing, and this film actively engages in the positive relationships between Japan and other countries. (even though those other countries are, um.)
2. Railways
Someone on the internet once informed someone else that the reason the Leijiverse is about trains in space is because of Leiji's childhood post-WWII, when he saw the trains come in, and bringing people and goods for re-building the country with them. There is something similar going on in this film: because for all that Jiro is all planes planes planes, there are a lot of railways going on here, and I refuse to believe that they just showed up in that dream with no purpose. And where the planes ominously all crash or fall to pieces or just refuse to take off, the trains are reliable, safe, and they bring people together.