Content to portray the daydreams, everyday life and sturdy determination of a nerdy kid turned genius aeronautical engineer, Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki has some observers ticked off at him. Based on the life of Jiro Horikashi, the designer of the Zero fighter plane used in Pearl Harbor, The Wind Rises exhibits the usual amazing virtuosity of Miyazaki. I didn’t find the film a glamorizing or glorifying look-the-other-way treatise on a committed yet self-deluded eventual possible war criminal. Unfortunately, stretches of the film suffered from a different malady usually absent in Miyazaki’s work: dullness. More on that later.
Much like an inverted The Act of Killing, The Wind Rises holds up a mirror to the creators of the war machine. In The Act of Killing the perpetrators of a near-genocide level of killings of suspected Communists in 1960s Indonesia are still alive, and freakily get to make their own movie within a movie. Their harshness, still intact more than 40 years later, is strangely celebratory, and a lack of remorse hangs over every frame. In The Wind Rises, it’s practically the opposite. Jiro (Joseph Girdon-Levitt) goes about his business as calmly and as oblivious to its eventual effect as if he were designing medical instruments. Miyazaki, whose father ran a munitions factory in Japan during World War II, may very well be subtly providing an even greater critique of Jiro’s passivity than if he were to have jumped up and down with more obvious agitprop.
Jiro’s innocence is further softened by a sub-plot where a commitment to his tubercular lover is as persistent as his lifelong obsession to build the lightest and fastest warplane. Here Miyazaki inserts Tatsuo Hori’s The Wind Has Risen as his text for the scenes between Jiro and Nohoko (Emily Blunt). Although the scenes where they first meet, during a sublimely evoked Kanto earthquake of 1923, may be the most compelling work Miyazaki has done, the film bogs down a bit from the repeated sentiments of their difficult relationship. The two different stories don’t always mesh well. Further, although Jiro’s dream sequences (most of them with his hero, Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caroni, voiced by Stanley Tucci) are refreshing at first, they, too, become repetitive. Perhaps Miyazaki, now 73, and proclaiming retirement, is such an unassailable figure in Japan that editing him is a near-impossible chore.
So much for nitpicking. While The Wind Rises may not be at the top of Miyazaki’s canon (a spot reserved for Spirited Away, in my view), the film is still head and shoulders above the digital doodads and CGI glop posing for animation these days. Watch the hand-drawn brilliance of this master filmmaker and literally enter another world. You may be haunted by that earthquake for some time but you’ll thank yourself for watching.