Kaze Tachinu!
We went for a bit of pasta before stepping into the cinema. I had some pesto penne and Dad ordered a large bowl of marina spaghetti. We both had some garlic bread, too. I drank some 1up, but couldn't finish it for the life of me.
The session room seemed about four times smaller than commercial/mainstream ones, but it was nice and cosy. No wonder the tickets for the nightly session were sold out on the day!
Most of the moviegoers seemed to be university students in their early to late twenties. At seventeen I was either the youngest or one of the close-to-youngest attendees; there were no teenagers or little ones. At fourty-five my dad was one of the older audience members; there didn't seem to be anyone above the age of fifty-five. The demographics were quite surprising! Though I guess tech-savvy uni students are probably most likely to watch foreign movies on release at indie cinemas?
Then we sat down and waited for that eponymous wind to blow us awaaaaay...
Kaze Tachinu is perhaps the best and only film Hayao Miyazaki directed with an audience of one in mind. A lesser director would only be responsible for fiascos. But Miyazaki is not mortal; his self-indulgence heartens our delight. However, KT's greatest misstep is crossing of the personal life of historical figure, Jirou Hirokoshi, with an entirely unrelated fictional novel, Kaze Tachinu by Tatsuo Hori. At times the film borders on thinly veiled autobiography. The result is Miyazaki’s most jarring chimera yet. But it is not a creature without its beauties.
Visually, Kaze Tachinu is Fucking Gorgeous! ™ That’s no real surprise; the most dazzling moments in the film have all been captured in trailers. Heavens, Miyazaki breathes the anima into animation! And many of his staples are here. Planes, one of Miyazaki’s oldest loves, are depicted as creatures sometimes menacing, oftentimes beautiful, always alive; their sinews and bones of metal share a shape with those of the fish and birds from which they draw their inspiration. Skies shift into many colours: periwinkle, peach-pink, blood-red, yolk-yellow, shimmering gold, and sometimes all these segueing into one another. These images of prewar Tokyo are hand-drawn and sometimes infused with the aesthetic of traditional Japanese scroll paintings. The motions and mannerisms of background characters are as important to the film’s integrity as the ones made by the leads. The kind of nuanced, subtle, and generous filmmaking we love Studio Ghibli for is still very much intact.
Conversely, Kaze Tachinu is not taut nor well-paced in comparison to other, more freeform Ghibli productions. The melodrama is split awkwardly into three transitory acts: Jiro’s youth; his rise to prominence as an engineer and courtship of the lovely but listless Nahoko; and his marriage to her against the backdrop of the throes of war. The strongest act is overwhelmingly the first one. It is quieter, purer, and more intensely lyrical than the others. The young Jirou climbs to his rooftop and stargazes with his sister, Kayo. She points out all the meteors he cannot see due to his myopia. He later soars into dreams of flight in which he meets his hero, an Italian aeronautical engineer, Caproni, who serves as a metaphysical mentor and harbinger from this point on. The dialogue is cute as can be. “I think you are in my dream,” Jirou says plainly to Caproni. Then he elaborates: because his vision is so poor, he cannot be a pilot, and decides with the support of Caproni to become an aeuronautical engineer instead. We know Jirou’s shortsightedness to be not only a physical manifestation, but a mental one, too. But for now he is a small dewey-eyed boy facing all the wonder possible in the vastness of a welcoming world. Miyazaki shines brightest when he paints pictures of childhood and fantasy just like this one. The scene is beautiful and intimate and familiar in Miyazaki’s way. We connect with little Jirou because all of us once dreamed freely in waking with our eyes fixed to the sky.
This sort of cinematic poetry continues up until the depiction of The Great Kanto earthquake. I believe it to be one of the greatest moments in animation. The earth whispers in cracked hexes and ripples through the city, toppling homes and infrastructure like a great unseen dragon burrowing through the ground. The disaster spreads palpable fire and gloom but also rouses camaraderie in survivors; it is here that Jirou meets his future love interest, who is the catalyst for the most unconvincing arc of the film.
Now, the relationships in Miyazaki’s films are usually exquisite and real. My loved ones know I’ve been wailing about Ashitaka and San, cooing over Sheeta and Pazu, weeping for Chihiro and Haku, etc & et al, for years. I was moved to tears by the sisterhood of Mei and Satsuki, the father-daughter moments between Kiki and her dad, Nausicaa’s love for her people, etc & et al. First, I’ll give credit where credit is due: the romance is above all gorgeously and tactilely animated. All the kissing and embracing and handholding between Nahoko and Jirou physically warmed me. But what reason was there for the two to be in love? We know close to nothing about Nahoko. She paints (though we never do get to see the finished picture) and is wealthy and beautiful and dying. That’s all we get. She is a far cough from the well-written heroines I come to Ghibli films for. I kept wondering why Miyazaki felt it necessary to insert Tatsuo Hori’s fictional romance Kaze Tachinu into the telling of the real life of Jirou Horikoshi. None but the director can honestly make sense of this.
The subplot might be excused if Jirou’s characterisation were stronger, and we don’t really know much about him, either. He claims he ‘only wants to make something beautiful’. He is exasperatingly singleminded in pursuit of his craft. His lack of convincingness is certainly a fault of Hideaki Anno’s god-awful voice acting in the midst of a much more experienced cast. I haven’t watched the English dub, but don’t count on it to be an improvement. My favourite character is easily Kayo, an assertive and ambitious young girl who keeps her big brother in check and goes on to become a doctor. Others are introduced and dismissed without so much a wave of the hand. You often end up wondering which character went where. Whatever did happen to that lovely German man? Who is Honjo’s wife? Did Kinu ever end up fixing that umbrella? What did Kayo do with her life as a doctor? How come the film ended on such an abrupt and mawkish note? There’s something uncomfortably and inappropriately inconclusive about the whole thing that clashes with the neatness of many of the earlier films from the studio.
Additionally, music is imperative to the success of a Ghibli film. The brilliant Joe Hisaishi, whom I also adore, is also surprisingly low-key here. His usual melodicism isn’t very present. The tracks consist of a charming, recurring Mediterranean theme ‘Journey’, the pretty but brief piece ‘Excitement’, Germanic marches, a clip of Shubert’s Winterreise, as well as a few nondescript background pieces that are mainly there to heighten melodrama. Contrarily, the film’s beautiful and affecting ending song, Hikoukigumo, translated as ‘Airplane Cloud’ or ‘Vapour Trail’, explains why I was grasping at tears during the trailers and not so much the film. It’s a tribute by longtime Japanese singer-songwriter, Yuming, to a young friend in the wake of her passing. I was surprised to learn she wrote such a song at only sixteen and recorded it at nineteen; today she is sixty. The diegetic sounds, especially of the aforementioned earthquake, are also very well done.
My greatest disappointment is that Kaze Tachinu did not move me in any special way. I expected to cry as I often did during countless moments of beauty, transcendence, humanity, and universality in Miyazaki’s other films: Laputa’s genesis, Totoro’s dance, Haku’s flight, Shishigami’s fall, Porco’s farewells, Nausicaa’s triumph, and so on. During the latter half of Kaze Tachinu I was indifferent when the film asked for my sadness.
Furthermore, the manner in which the repercussions of Jiro’s craft are discussed is ambivalent and not always responsible. Yes, the film is pacifistic overall. There are some foreboding scenes depicted that imply all the insidiousness dealt in the then-nascent battle. Visions of ruined planes are ubiquitous. The vices of Nazi Germany are mostly expressed symbolically through grim mise-en-scene. On a midnight stroll through winter streets Jirou witnesses a man scurry into the night, and we are left to wonder whether he is a thief, a progressive, or Jewish. The unnamed anti-war German is disapproving of Japan’s warmongering and speaks prophetically of its destruction. However, Japan’s rampant militarism and subsequent subjugation of the entire Asian continent goes otherwise unmentioned. The issue of the many Chinese and Korean slaves who laboured in the production of Jirou’s planes is not touched upon at all. Pursue one’s dreams no matter the price? Try to live while winds stir? By all means and absolutely! But if one is acutely aware of the destruction their creations are capable of, they are no longer the innocuous children of dreams. Miyazaki’s hero-worship goes too far in assuming Jirou was oblivious, or worse, that he simply prioritised art over human life. These are not the only issues the film itself bypasses, although Miyazaki has published an essay calling out all of Japan’s war crimes. Watch Hotaru no Haka if what you seek is an anti-war film. Porco Rosso is as charming a picture about aviation and peace. Mononoke Hime too is a realistic and unflinching depiction of the consequences of war that manages also to deliver the same will-to-live message quite nicely.
However, despite all the criticism levelled at the film, it is still worth seeing and suppoting. The film is a spectacle of sight and sound; a kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young man in which the master and subject are rendered parallel; and a fascinating clockwork that reveals much of Miyazaki’s psyche and id. This film is metaphorically autobiographical. I don’t doubt that Jirou is at least partly an authorial stand-in for Miyazaki. They are two dreamers lost in the clouds, far too absorbed in their work to pay much attention to life at home. Like the director himself, everyone smokes too much. Place more of Miyazaki’s heroes, such as Saint Antoine Exupery, with Caproni, and the dream at the very start of the film would be Miyazaki’s; in these dreams Jiro Horiboshi is referred to as ‘Japanese Boy’, and so acts as a representative of all the dreamers of a nation.
For each time Kaze Tachinu falters it offers a genuine chuckle and charm. For example, I loved watching Jirou’s squat superior stomp around as his hair flopped about like a bird. Jirou’s courtship of Nahoko with the paper plane was a tender and amusing moment very few filmmakers can make so heartrendering. I’ve constantly been comparing Miyazaki’s newer work to his older ones throughout the review, which is perhaps unfair because he has set such a high standard for himself. Kaze Tachinu deserves to be loved for its earnestness and forgiven for falling short of cohesion and ubiquity. If anything, the ineffable magic touch of the god of animation is still lush and everliving. Miyazaki’s films are gifts and I’m glad I watched Kaze Tachinu. It was an enriching and personal experience I am so, so thankful for.
I conclude this review with a great deal of contextual and personal sadness. Judging by Miyazaki’s recent interviews and essays, he’s become weary and lax when it comes to filmmaking, and is no longer the hotblooded, perfectionistic young man he used to be. He can’t make dynamite like Mononoke Hime anymore. He hasn’t the strength to direct epics like Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Castle in the Sky, and Nausicaa. As a longtime votary of his, I keep wishing in my selfishness that he’ll direct another quiet film like Tonari no Totoro before someday he too takes to the sky. I am unsure whether or not Kaze Tachinu will be Miya-san’s final picture. I can only hope his future endeavours, on the screen or no, display again the ripening of his art that his long and illustrious years have gifted him with.
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari is a folktale I've been familiar with since I was little thanks to Chinese picture books. Takahata's could be the better film. It seems to have received unanimous praise, with Takahata himself stating that it is perhaps his best work. I really can't wait to see it this November! I'm sure it'll be screened at Dendy, too.
The session room seemed about four times smaller than commercial/mainstream ones, but it was nice and cosy. No wonder the tickets for the nightly session were sold out on the day!
Most of the moviegoers seemed to be university students in their early to late twenties. At seventeen I was either the youngest or one of the close-to-youngest attendees; there were no teenagers or little ones. At fourty-five my dad was one of the older audience members; there didn't seem to be anyone above the age of fifty-five. The demographics were quite surprising! Though I guess tech-savvy uni students are probably most likely to watch foreign movies on release at indie cinemas?
Then we sat down and waited for that eponymous wind to blow us awaaaaay...
Kaze Tachinu is perhaps the best and only film Hayao Miyazaki directed with an audience of one in mind. A lesser director would only be responsible for fiascos. But Miyazaki is not mortal; his self-indulgence heartens our delight. However, KT's greatest misstep is crossing of the personal life of historical figure, Jirou Hirokoshi, with an entirely unrelated fictional novel, Kaze Tachinu by Tatsuo Hori. At times the film borders on thinly veiled autobiography. The result is Miyazaki’s most jarring chimera yet. But it is not a creature without its beauties.
Visually, Kaze Tachinu is Fucking Gorgeous! ™ That’s no real surprise; the most dazzling moments in the film have all been captured in trailers. Heavens, Miyazaki breathes the anima into animation! And many of his staples are here. Planes, one of Miyazaki’s oldest loves, are depicted as creatures sometimes menacing, oftentimes beautiful, always alive; their sinews and bones of metal share a shape with those of the fish and birds from which they draw their inspiration. Skies shift into many colours: periwinkle, peach-pink, blood-red, yolk-yellow, shimmering gold, and sometimes all these segueing into one another. These images of prewar Tokyo are hand-drawn and sometimes infused with the aesthetic of traditional Japanese scroll paintings. The motions and mannerisms of background characters are as important to the film’s integrity as the ones made by the leads. The kind of nuanced, subtle, and generous filmmaking we love Studio Ghibli for is still very much intact.
Conversely, Kaze Tachinu is not taut nor well-paced in comparison to other, more freeform Ghibli productions. The melodrama is split awkwardly into three transitory acts: Jiro’s youth; his rise to prominence as an engineer and courtship of the lovely but listless Nahoko; and his marriage to her against the backdrop of the throes of war. The strongest act is overwhelmingly the first one. It is quieter, purer, and more intensely lyrical than the others. The young Jirou climbs to his rooftop and stargazes with his sister, Kayo. She points out all the meteors he cannot see due to his myopia. He later soars into dreams of flight in which he meets his hero, an Italian aeronautical engineer, Caproni, who serves as a metaphysical mentor and harbinger from this point on. The dialogue is cute as can be. “I think you are in my dream,” Jirou says plainly to Caproni. Then he elaborates: because his vision is so poor, he cannot be a pilot, and decides with the support of Caproni to become an aeuronautical engineer instead. We know Jirou’s shortsightedness to be not only a physical manifestation, but a mental one, too. But for now he is a small dewey-eyed boy facing all the wonder possible in the vastness of a welcoming world. Miyazaki shines brightest when he paints pictures of childhood and fantasy just like this one. The scene is beautiful and intimate and familiar in Miyazaki’s way. We connect with little Jirou because all of us once dreamed freely in waking with our eyes fixed to the sky.
This sort of cinematic poetry continues up until the depiction of The Great Kanto earthquake. I believe it to be one of the greatest moments in animation. The earth whispers in cracked hexes and ripples through the city, toppling homes and infrastructure like a great unseen dragon burrowing through the ground. The disaster spreads palpable fire and gloom but also rouses camaraderie in survivors; it is here that Jirou meets his future love interest, who is the catalyst for the most unconvincing arc of the film.
Now, the relationships in Miyazaki’s films are usually exquisite and real. My loved ones know I’ve been wailing about Ashitaka and San, cooing over Sheeta and Pazu, weeping for Chihiro and Haku, etc & et al, for years. I was moved to tears by the sisterhood of Mei and Satsuki, the father-daughter moments between Kiki and her dad, Nausicaa’s love for her people, etc & et al. First, I’ll give credit where credit is due: the romance is above all gorgeously and tactilely animated. All the kissing and embracing and handholding between Nahoko and Jirou physically warmed me. But what reason was there for the two to be in love? We know close to nothing about Nahoko. She paints (though we never do get to see the finished picture) and is wealthy and beautiful and dying. That’s all we get. She is a far cough from the well-written heroines I come to Ghibli films for. I kept wondering why Miyazaki felt it necessary to insert Tatsuo Hori’s fictional romance Kaze Tachinu into the telling of the real life of Jirou Horikoshi. None but the director can honestly make sense of this.
The subplot might be excused if Jirou’s characterisation were stronger, and we don’t really know much about him, either. He claims he ‘only wants to make something beautiful’. He is exasperatingly singleminded in pursuit of his craft. His lack of convincingness is certainly a fault of Hideaki Anno’s god-awful voice acting in the midst of a much more experienced cast. I haven’t watched the English dub, but don’t count on it to be an improvement. My favourite character is easily Kayo, an assertive and ambitious young girl who keeps her big brother in check and goes on to become a doctor. Others are introduced and dismissed without so much a wave of the hand. You often end up wondering which character went where. Whatever did happen to that lovely German man? Who is Honjo’s wife? Did Kinu ever end up fixing that umbrella? What did Kayo do with her life as a doctor? How come the film ended on such an abrupt and mawkish note? There’s something uncomfortably and inappropriately inconclusive about the whole thing that clashes with the neatness of many of the earlier films from the studio.
Additionally, music is imperative to the success of a Ghibli film. The brilliant Joe Hisaishi, whom I also adore, is also surprisingly low-key here. His usual melodicism isn’t very present. The tracks consist of a charming, recurring Mediterranean theme ‘Journey’, the pretty but brief piece ‘Excitement’, Germanic marches, a clip of Shubert’s Winterreise, as well as a few nondescript background pieces that are mainly there to heighten melodrama. Contrarily, the film’s beautiful and affecting ending song, Hikoukigumo, translated as ‘Airplane Cloud’ or ‘Vapour Trail’, explains why I was grasping at tears during the trailers and not so much the film. It’s a tribute by longtime Japanese singer-songwriter, Yuming, to a young friend in the wake of her passing. I was surprised to learn she wrote such a song at only sixteen and recorded it at nineteen; today she is sixty. The diegetic sounds, especially of the aforementioned earthquake, are also very well done.
My greatest disappointment is that Kaze Tachinu did not move me in any special way. I expected to cry as I often did during countless moments of beauty, transcendence, humanity, and universality in Miyazaki’s other films: Laputa’s genesis, Totoro’s dance, Haku’s flight, Shishigami’s fall, Porco’s farewells, Nausicaa’s triumph, and so on. During the latter half of Kaze Tachinu I was indifferent when the film asked for my sadness.
Furthermore, the manner in which the repercussions of Jiro’s craft are discussed is ambivalent and not always responsible. Yes, the film is pacifistic overall. There are some foreboding scenes depicted that imply all the insidiousness dealt in the then-nascent battle. Visions of ruined planes are ubiquitous. The vices of Nazi Germany are mostly expressed symbolically through grim mise-en-scene. On a midnight stroll through winter streets Jirou witnesses a man scurry into the night, and we are left to wonder whether he is a thief, a progressive, or Jewish. The unnamed anti-war German is disapproving of Japan’s warmongering and speaks prophetically of its destruction. However, Japan’s rampant militarism and subsequent subjugation of the entire Asian continent goes otherwise unmentioned. The issue of the many Chinese and Korean slaves who laboured in the production of Jirou’s planes is not touched upon at all. Pursue one’s dreams no matter the price? Try to live while winds stir? By all means and absolutely! But if one is acutely aware of the destruction their creations are capable of, they are no longer the innocuous children of dreams. Miyazaki’s hero-worship goes too far in assuming Jirou was oblivious, or worse, that he simply prioritised art over human life. These are not the only issues the film itself bypasses, although Miyazaki has published an essay calling out all of Japan’s war crimes. Watch Hotaru no Haka if what you seek is an anti-war film. Porco Rosso is as charming a picture about aviation and peace. Mononoke Hime too is a realistic and unflinching depiction of the consequences of war that manages also to deliver the same will-to-live message quite nicely.
However, despite all the criticism levelled at the film, it is still worth seeing and suppoting. The film is a spectacle of sight and sound; a kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young man in which the master and subject are rendered parallel; and a fascinating clockwork that reveals much of Miyazaki’s psyche and id. This film is metaphorically autobiographical. I don’t doubt that Jirou is at least partly an authorial stand-in for Miyazaki. They are two dreamers lost in the clouds, far too absorbed in their work to pay much attention to life at home. Like the director himself, everyone smokes too much. Place more of Miyazaki’s heroes, such as Saint Antoine Exupery, with Caproni, and the dream at the very start of the film would be Miyazaki’s; in these dreams Jiro Horiboshi is referred to as ‘Japanese Boy’, and so acts as a representative of all the dreamers of a nation.
For each time Kaze Tachinu falters it offers a genuine chuckle and charm. For example, I loved watching Jirou’s squat superior stomp around as his hair flopped about like a bird. Jirou’s courtship of Nahoko with the paper plane was a tender and amusing moment very few filmmakers can make so heartrendering. I’ve constantly been comparing Miyazaki’s newer work to his older ones throughout the review, which is perhaps unfair because he has set such a high standard for himself. Kaze Tachinu deserves to be loved for its earnestness and forgiven for falling short of cohesion and ubiquity. If anything, the ineffable magic touch of the god of animation is still lush and everliving. Miyazaki’s films are gifts and I’m glad I watched Kaze Tachinu. It was an enriching and personal experience I am so, so thankful for.
I conclude this review with a great deal of contextual and personal sadness. Judging by Miyazaki’s recent interviews and essays, he’s become weary and lax when it comes to filmmaking, and is no longer the hotblooded, perfectionistic young man he used to be. He can’t make dynamite like Mononoke Hime anymore. He hasn’t the strength to direct epics like Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Castle in the Sky, and Nausicaa. As a longtime votary of his, I keep wishing in my selfishness that he’ll direct another quiet film like Tonari no Totoro before someday he too takes to the sky. I am unsure whether or not Kaze Tachinu will be Miya-san’s final picture. I can only hope his future endeavours, on the screen or no, display again the ripening of his art that his long and illustrious years have gifted him with.
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari is a folktale I've been familiar with since I was little thanks to Chinese picture books. Takahata's could be the better film. It seems to have received unanimous praise, with Takahata himself stating that it is perhaps his best work. I really can't wait to see it this November! I'm sure it'll be screened at Dendy, too.