As Miyazaki’s choice for his last film, it’s hard not to wonder what statement he’s trying to make; The Wind Rises is not a whimsical fairytale but a tale of artistic obsession, and the subject, Jiro Horikoshi, is the designer of planes used by Imperial Japan during the second world war. What Miyazaki presents is such a forgivingly-neutral portrayal that, with knowledge of events of that time, I found it a little hard to stomach.
As expected from a Miyazaki/Ghibli film, The Wind Rises looks and sounds stunning. In contrast to the stuffy banality of Jiro’s actual work, scenes of which often drag the film down into rote mundanity, the flight sequences are these beautifully realised, tranquil moments in which he works out engineering problems alongside encouraging visions of Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni. Back on the ground, a depiction of the 1923 Kanto earthquake is breathtaking, with human voices used for sound effects. The subsequent devastation, silent but for the chattering sound of settling pebbles and an occasional low, demonic groan from the depths of the earth, is unnerving.
Where I had a harder time was in how vacant Jiro as a character is. He’s calmly and quietly obsessed with his work but not in a stereotypical Hollywood way, all newspaper clippings and stubble; he’s professional, a dutiful husband who tries to feed hungry street urchins. Miyazaki bends over backwards to show him in a positive light, making him not so much politically naive but politically unaware, and the result is a dorky blankness.
Jiro wonders occasionally who Japan is planning on fighting with these things, but doesn’t really care as long as he gets to build his perfect planes. He’s instrumental in getting access to Nazi aviation technology which he does not out of patriotism but out of a hunger for knowledge. While in Germany he witnesses a night raid by the German secret police but he remains unshaken, observing but never really processing anything outside his work. When he himself is targeted, he’s oblivious to what this means, is just happy to be protected by his employers even when he’s told that they’ll only do so while he continues to be useful to them. The only time he shows an interest in anything outside of his work is during his courtship of his eventual wife Nahoko, but it’s unclear why; she’s an underwritten character with little agency of her own, a disappointment for a Ghibli film when the studio has a history of convincing female characters.
In the end, I was left caring as much about Jiro as Jiro did about anything beyond his work. His relationship with Nahoko is sentimentally portrayed and his situational awareness is absent to the point of implausibility. The message of the film, that artistic obsession should be pursued no matter the cost, is a dubious one. So, while The Wind Rises is as perfectly realised as any of Miyazaki’s previous works, it left me feeling just a little bummed out.
Second viewing
Watching The Wind Rises a second time, knowing that I’d find the story problematic and the characters shallow, I was at least better able to appreciate the film’s production values. The film is staggeringly beautiful and intricately designed, worth watching not just for this but also the incredible sound design, with the human-sourced sound effects on the planes and natural events giving them animal-like personalities, the planes growling and screaming as they fly. The 1923 earthquake and the firestorm that razes Tokyo afterwards is a stunning moment of animation and sound.
Given that the film is so wonderfully crafted and the period of history so volatile, it’s even more frustrating on a repeat viewing that Jiro is the one to carry us through it. Oblivious to so many possible stories around him — post quake violence, Japan’s poverty, the rise of German Nazism and Japanese Statism, the spy Hans Castorp — there’s a sense that Jiro has been purposefully written as a political rube just so the audience can’t accuse him of knowingly designing weapons of war. “We’re not arms merchants,” a friend of Jiro’s states midway through the film, “We just want to design good airplanes”. But, they’re not designing generic planes that could be used to kill, they’re specifically designing combat planes: the better they design them, the greater the number of people will be killed. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
I recommend watching The Wind Rises just for the outstanding visuals and the chilling sound effects, but I can’t recommend it for story or character, both of which have problems that were exacerbated on a second viewing.