"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, "The Wind Rises" tells the tale of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, the lightweight and highly manoeuvrable fighter plane that enabled many Japanese victories early in World War II.
"Humans have always dreamt of flight," Gianna Caproni, an Italian aeronautical engineer, tells Jiro, "but the dream is cursed!" In sequences like this, Miyazaki sets up the film's central theme: not only that flying machines will inevitably be used to massacre human beings, but that every human endeavour, every piece of art, every piece of technology, is inevitably compromised.
Later, Jiro and Caproni discuss the Great Pyramids. "I'd rather live in a world with pyramids than a world without," Caproni states. The implication is clear: dreams may be cursed, pyramids may be built by slaves to honour tyrants, but better them or nothing. That this is a false binary, or giant straw-man argument, is lost on Miyazaki; one can always extricate oneself from problematic actions or systems.
But the difficulty in extricating oneself from such things, or noticing them in the first place, is what seems to interest Miyazaki. Jiro himself eventually emerges as a "Little Eichmann". A reference to Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, the term refers to anyone who on an individual scale seems dutiful, benign or harmless, but is nevertheless complicit in aiding or propagating destruction. As such, Jiro's romantic idealisations are subverted throughout "The Wind Rises", culminating with the death of his wife to tuberculosis. Jiro may remain naive, but bombarded with much dread and apocalyptic imagery, Miyazaki's audience is never allowed to forget the darker ramifications of Jiro's actions.
Though Miyazaki never really sanctions Jiro and Caproni's romantic rationalisations, the intensity at which Miyzaki portrays Jiro as a wide-eyed moron has led many to accuse "The Wind Rises" of whitewashing Jiro's historical role. Jiro's planes, after all, were built by Chinese and Korean slave labour. They were used to attack Korea, invade China, the Philippines, Vietnam and so forth. Historians point out that Japan's militarism was hardly unique in terms of early 20th century Imperialism (no better, the Empires of France, Russia, Britain and the burgeoning United States would account for far more deaths), but "you did it too" is no defence.
Odd for a lead character, Miyazaki's Jiro is passive, lacking in any self-reflexivity, and never questions what's going on around him. Despite (or because of) this, the film works well as an allegory about the innocence, arrogance, myopia and culpability of artists, and the way in which states co-opt and pervert the aspirations of individuals. Such themes are typical in Japanese animated features (everything from "Akira" to "Sky Crawlers"), the nation seemingly forever sceptical of urbanisation, modernisation and every new piece of technology it rampantly gobbles up. Miyazaki is himself a bit of a technophobe. "Modern life is thin and shallow and fake," he moans in interviews, "I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over!"
"The Wind Rises" is as gorgeous as Miyazaki previous films, bouncing from bucolic, agrarian Japan, to urban spaces, to several long flying sequences. Elsewhere scenes in 1930s Germany echo a German tourist's visit to Japan, and the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 foreshadows the atomic destruction of 1945. Jiro's wilful naiveté itself resembles that of the physicists who split the atom.
What's perhaps most remarkable about "The Wind Rises", though, is the way it accurately captures the psychology of those working at the cutting edge of high tech industries. Jiro is intelligent, passionate and single-minded, but always moving between hotel rooms, offices and lonely spaces. This alienation, Miyazaki says, is precisely what makes Jiro's intelligence so dangerous. Cacooned and sheltered, Jiro belongs to a learned class which rarely meaningfully interacts with "ordinary people", and so rarely questions the morality and ramifications of its own behaviour. The result is a lead character whose brain is incredibly parcellated, steeped in all forms of sophisticated denial.
This being Miyazaki, "The Wind Rises" is also obsessed with notions of "Progress". Miyazaki's Japan becomes corrupt and perverse as it embraces the "emacipatory" tenets of Modernism. These "perversions" are subtly mentioned by Miyazaki (if we ignore his heavy-handed dream sequences), such as sequences in which poor children roam the streets, or when banks foreclose on civilians. The result is a very sophisticated portrait of a nation in decline at the precise moment it embarks upon a project to lift itself up.
Many have complained that "Rises" isn't as fun as Miyazaki's other works. Indeed, the film at times seems like a dour melodrama by Yasujiro Ozu. But Miyazaki subverts the conventions of the melodrama at every turn. Consider, for example, the way Jiro's blindness (literal and metaphorical) echoes the film's very own aesthetic and narrative structure, which relentless avoids looking at or thinking about warfare. For this is a film about a young man who is so preoccupied with love, life and aviation, that he doesn't realise that he's helping rain destruction down upon Japan (the spectre of the atomic bombings loom over the film). In this way, "Rises" plays like an anime version of Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" (or De Sica's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"), another film in which surface beauty and foregrounded decor ironically counterpointed thematic underbellies.
"Rises" boasts Miyazaki's most autobiographical script since "Whisper of the Heart". Parallels are drawn between aeronautical engineers and animators, between hanger bays and animating studios, and Jiro at times resembles Miyazaki himself, with his bespectacled eyes and love of wind-swept wings. Elsewhere Jiro smokes Cherry cigarettes, Miyazaki's brand of choice, and scenes in which Jiro's sister accuses Jiro of neglecting his family echo Miyazaki's own outspoken fears. "The Wind Rises" is reportedly Hayao Miyazaki's last animated feature; farewell Master.
8.5/10 – Multiple viewings required. See "The King of Pigs".
