Studio Ghibli/Walt Disney Pictures
A bubble that will not last: Hayao Miyazaki’s new film, “The Wind Rises,” is about a young warplane designer.
The Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has long had an aerial fixation, setting one movie after another in the realms of fanciful flight, from “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” to “Kiki’s Delivery Service” to the underrated “Porco Rosso” (about a World War I flying ace who turns into a pig man). Mr. Miyazaki remains enchanted with the idea of being airborne, which animation freely lends itself to, having sent little girls, castles and even swine into flight. “ The Wind Rises ,” his newest film, tells the fictionalized story of Jiro Horikoshi, a gifted aeronautic engineer who is historically notable — or infamous — for designing deadly warplanes used by Japan in World War II. Mr. Miyazaki’s lyrical chronicle of the inventor’s creative process and his poignant romance reminds us that staying aloft is a fraught endeavor. Yet even in this film about an absorbed artist of the floating world, premonitions of the calamitous events to come cannot be entirely absent.
Jiro is a natural and unpretentious solver of engineering challenges of all kinds. He notices the promising possibilities that a fish bone suggests for an airplane wing, and with his trusty slide rule, he makes a splint for a fellow train passenger, a girl named Nahoko, who is injured in Japan’s devastating 1923 earthquake. The depiction of the disaster is typical of Miyazaki’s virtuosic technique: the earth erupts with rippling, ramshackle motion, rising up and snapping like a rug as the artfully organic sound design summons groans and burps.
The plot of “The Wind Rises” is episodic, following Jiro from one project to another, portraying the creative process through sudden sequences suggesting his dream life. Though his days might be spent at a drafting table overseen by a benevolent troll of a boss, his inspirations come in lucid visions and plays of form. The air pioneer Gianni Caproni, his mustachioed mentor, supplies a spirited, wise perspective during Jiro’s stops and starts on his projects.
The film’s heart lies in Jiro’s innovative career and in his touching bond with Nahoko. They cross paths again at a mountain resort that she visits as a tuberculosis sufferer in the company of her father (who, in an offhand detail, seems to share Jiro’s loping gait). Mindful of her illness, Jiro and Nahoko marry quickly, and their relationship is shaped by their dwindling time together. After a coughing fit, hers is basically the only blood we see, perhaps notable in a movie about warplanes.
Between the earthquake and Jiro’s sometimes apocalyptic dreams, the film’s fanciful sequences seem to tap into Japan’s troubled unconscious, as if anticipating the cataclysms to come. That history has brought criticism in Japan, where some have cast the film as antipatriotic, and has led to a certain caution in its United States marketing because of how sympathetically it treats the creator of a machine used in the attack on Pearl Harbor and in kamikaze missions.
Yet just as with Isao Takahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies,” about two children surviving amid the terrors of World War II, it would be hard to argue that the subject of Mr. Miyazaki’s film was cavalierly seized upon. It is a considered choice, as Mr. Miyazaki is mindful that the inventor’s process is not necessarily focused on moral implications.
Mr. Miyazaki, 72, has stated with more finality than in past declarations that “The Wind Rises” is his last film. And like Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” it feels partly like a concluding reflection on creation and destruction. Its sonic quietude and mostly subdued palette, unusual for a striking colorist like Mr. Miyazaki, are almost unnerving. But Jiro’s world is not immune to upheaval, and Mr. Miyazaki does interrupt this idyllic view with the inflamed red of a fire at a university and of Nahoko’s blood.
Yet Jiro’s head is ultimately in his work and the preciously cocooned love of his wife, not the world at large. And just as we know that Jiro and Nahoko’s bliss has an end, so too are we aware that the bubble in which he toils will not last forever. But Mr. Miyazaki renders Jiro’s life and dreams with lyrical elegance and aching poignancy. At one point, Caproni advises Jiro that artists have 10 years of peak creativity. Yet “The Wind Rises,” with its complex diminuendo, underlines Mr. Miyazaki’s much longer, richly creative odyssey.
The Wind Rises
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based on an original graphic novel published in Monthly Model Graphix; supervising animator, Kitaro Kosaka; edited by Takeshi Seyama; music by Joe Hisaishi, with the theme song “Hikoki Gumo,” music and lyrics by Yumi Arai, performed by Ms. Arai; art direction by Yoji Takeshige; produced by Toshio Suzuki; released by Studio Ghibli and Touchstone Pictures. In Manhattan at the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH THE VOICES OF: Hideaki Anno, Miori Takimoto, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masahiko Nishimura, Stephen Alpert, Morio Kazama, Keiko Takeshita, Mirai Shida, Jun Kunimura, Shinobu Otake and Mansai Nomura.
NYT > Arts
Movie Review: ‘The Wind Rises,’ Miyazaki’s Film About a Warplane Creator
