The Wind Rises Review

When some filmmakers discuss retirement, you remain uncertain as to what they mean. You parse their final films, hoping for a sense of why, as an artist, they chose to stop expressing themselves in this way. Often, you come up empty-handed: usually this is because many filmmakers, like Robert Altman, spend their dying days calling shots behind the camera. Those that attempt to escape the profession on two feet often seem poker-faced in doing so. You’d be hard-pressed to find a personal shade of who Steven Soderbergh is during any of his chameleonic films, and those who viewed Side Effects and Behind The Candelabra through that prism ultimately came away with little insight as to why a great artist would, in their prime, get up and walk away.

Hayao Miyazaki is a different breed. One of animation’s most beloved figures, he’s made his final statement as a director with The Wind Rises, an elegiac, deceptively simple story about a good man who did terrible things. Even the title, always a major part of Miyazaki’s other films, is at once graceful and furious. At first glance The Wind Rises appears innocuous, but once you penetrate the potential meanings of the phrase, it makes sense. Like the film’s political stance, everything you need to know about the picture lies within the title. And as the movie plays, you realize that title means both everything and nothing all at once: it’s Miyazaki’s way of placing the kernel of an idea inside you, and forcing you to make it grow. This has both thematic and spiritual rewards: yes, Miyazaki makes animated films, but maybe leave the kids at home for this one. Really, leave anyone at home who doesn’t grasp the macro story that Miyazaki tells on a micro level.

The film follows Jiro Horikoshi, who begins the film as a young with an obsession: an all-encompassing interest in aviation. Early on, Miyazaki correctly illustrates the malleable psyche of the young, under-developed mind. Jiro takes to the skies in a dream, but as his plane begins to crumble and dissolve, he begins an inevitable plummet. Here, Miyazaki notes the fragile extremes of a child’s mind; a broad pleasure also, inevitably, tickles the subconscious, leading to our worst fears. We love our toys so much, but the thought of them being destroyed and broken is a very vivid possibility. We’re not prepared for it, but without firsthand knowledge, we blindly fear it. Aviation, with its inherent dangers, only heightens this dichotomy.

It’s also in the subconscious mind where Jiro abandons his dreaming and sets out to actually build planes for a living. To him, the idea of these winged beasts taking flight is the ultimate glory. A later, intense scene has Jiro venture out on a limb to rescue his drifting hat, risking his own safety for a chance not just to rescue his wardrobe, but to reach out and be a part of the flight patterns. With a little ingenuity and a lot of imagination, anything can fly, and therefore be beautiful, Jiro reasons.

The upsetting element to all this is that Jiro lives in the 1930s, and the planes he creates end up participating in war combat, resulting in the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands. He is, by very nature, a war criminal. Good or bad, this is a black and white distinction that ultimately simplifies Miyazaki’s depiction and argument. Jiro slaves for days designing aircrafts meant to deliver death onto others. His indifference to this is uncommented upon, for the most part. He is the Creator: to blame him for what the planes do greatly simplifies war, a level playing field where one man opts to destroy another. Miyazaki’s somewhat-controversial argument is that Jiro (a composite of several WWII architects) was a part of the war to try and find something else. He sought a measure of grace.

Jiro ultimately treats the sky as his canvas, and while he’s not naïve to what’s happening during the war, he still dedicates himself towards building the perfect model, restarting and redefining his models. The perfectionism on display is not unlike Miyazaki, the prolific filmmaker responsible for some of the all-time greatest animated works. It’s unclear if this is his sharpest film, but it’s his most detailed. Without the usual animals, ghosts, goblins, spirits, and fairies boosting his narrative, he creates flesh-and-blood humans, each with their own expectation-busting flaws and strengths. Jiro’s relationship with his airfield boss is testy and seems potentially adversarial. When both men eventually see eye-to-eye, an unlikely friendship develops.

These relationships aren’t beside the point, Miyazaki argues. They are the point. Perhaps it’s fatalistic that Miyazaki feels humans destroying other humans is inevitable. Making the decision to do better, and to establish bonds from within seems to be the mission statement. Miyazaki emphasizes this point by shying away from combat footage, but depicting the horrific events of a massive earthquake that hit decades ago. The violence is intense and grisly, and coming from the idea that you’d have to associate that sort of carnage as man-made. But it’s important that Jiro, who survives and attempts to protect those around him, acts selflessly, eventually meeting his future wife in the rubble. Even in times of great disaster, we try to do our best, and Miyazaki’s final film finds the grace we can each maintain. To focus on what is severed would continue the cycle of pain. Instead, Miyazaki offers us the chance at peace. It’s not how a Miyazaki protagonist is knocked down, but how they triumphantly stand.