Just a little more of The Wind Rises

Miyazaki and Co. love inserting callbacks to previous projects into their films, little moments where a shot composition, a character’s expression, a movement, or a design element are clearly modeled on others from before.  Ghibli Blog author Daniel MacInnes calls them “Ghibli riffs.”  Most of them are simple in motivation: the animator is reusing a movement he/she used before, or offering homage to a moment he admired in a previous film, or perhaps just inserting an in-joke for fellow animators to get.  Occasionally, they seem more motivated, coming at the storyboard or design stage of the production rather than the key animation.  In The Wind Rises, they seem to be especially intentional and thematically apropos, even revealing.  By repeating previous designs and compositions, Miyazaki is creating linkages in meaning, connecting this film to ideas permeating his entire career.

The Kami-Electrified World: Hayao Miyazaki and The Wind Rises

I. Which movie? Why?

The movie this post is about is Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, which I think is pretty much the best movie of 2013, and the main reason I’m writing it is there don’t seem to be all that many people who agree with me.  Which isn’t to say everybody hated it or anything.  The reviews were by and large very kind, some more than that, but far too many were of the perfunctory “it’s-nice-to-see-one-last-movie-from-a-guy-who-made-better-movies-before” variety, and far too little of that aforementioned kindness tended to show up when it came time for awards and 10-best lists and such.  Even among anime fans, the film garnered little excitement or celebration, being far outside the otaku wheelhouse in subject and style.  (Not to get too far into the weeds, but this is a movie that barely made Film Comment’s Top 50 poll--below stuff like American Hustle and Room 237, only got 4 mentions in the Village Voice poll, and didn’t even make this Metacritic list at all.  It’s safe to say that while it has a few admirers, the film is not overpraised, is what I’m getting at.)

Why is that?  At this point, it’s not even a controversial statement to describe Hayao Miyazaki as the greatest director of animated films the world has ever seen.  But if that is so widely acknowledged, why is every film from him not treated as an event, an occasion for cinephile geek-outs and think-pieces and in-depth dissections, the way a movie by Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino or Steven Spielberg is?  Especially when it’s his last film.  There are probably many reasons for this reception, including but not limited to: the limited-release rollout of the movie that prevented most audiences from seeing it until 2014, the particularly Japanese (hence foreign) focus of the plot, the lack of magical fairy-tale elements, the fact that Miyazaki’s oeuvre primarily addresses children/family audiences, and even the fact that the film is, yes, animated.  (More difficult are the ethical objections some have raised concerning the film’s stance on WWII and Japan’s role in it, but let’s table those for the moment.  Keep ‘em in mind, tho.)

The last one in that list might raise an eyebrow or two.  After all, we are in the era of Pixar.  Animated movies have decisively overthrown the old live-action tyranny, been recognized as every bit as worthy as “regular” movies, topped critics’ lists year after year, and even nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (thrice)!  Yes, but they’re still ghettoized in the US, relegated to fantasy plots and family entertainment.  The bigger issue with animation, though, is that so few cinephiles and critics actually know that much about it as an art form.  So few cinephiles and critics actually know anything about the history of animation outside of Disney and Warner Bros.  So few cinephiles and critics know there is such a thing as “world animation” that extends beyond Aardman and Studio Ghibli and maybe a couple other movies from Japan and France.  Why is it not a controversial statement to describe Miyazaki as the greatest director of animated films ever?  Because nobody can think of anyone else.

Which is just ignorance.  Simply among his Japanese peers, here are ten (10) major figures worth searching out, watching, lauding:  Isao Takahata, Gisaburo Sugii, Rintaro, Osamu Dezaki, Mamoru Oshii, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, Hideaki Anno, Mamoru Hosoda, Masaaki Yuasa.  And those are just mainstream feature directors.  In the realm of the animated short--the arthouse and avant-garde of animation--witness the names Yuri Norstein, Frederick Back, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Aleksandr Petrov, Norman McLaren.  They are masters of animation, and ignorance of them while claiming to understand animation is like being unfamiliar with Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kurosawa, Kieslowski, and Godard, while claiming to understand cinema.  Both lists barely scratch the surface, or course, and I don’t claim to be an expert in either realm--but I have been watching animation intensely for the last few years, and I can at least recognize ignorance when I see it.  If we are going to understand Miyazaki we have to understand where he’s coming from.

But first, to the movie:  The Wind Rises is the semi-fictionalized life story of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aircraft engineer most famous for the A6M Zero fighter plane used extensively in WWII.  Film follows him from boyhood to eve of WW, as he pursues his dreams of flight in college and then as star designer at Mitsubishi--set against backdrop of Japanese history, and including lengthy romance section w/ tuberculosis-stricken woman named Nahoko. Said dreams are also interspersed throughout film as surreal/hyperreal windows into Jiro’s creative consciousness.  

The whole thing is told with a David Lean-style sweep that I’ve simply never seen in an animated film before, and which is remarkably difficult to do--the length, number of scenes/settings/characters are all highly unusual in animation because of their high cost in money/time/manpower, to the point that only a handful of other traditionally animated films have ever been made that compare with the scale of this movie.  It is also clearly the most personal film of Miyazaki’s career, allegorizing his own life and relationship to art even as it explores the past attitudes of his country and implicitly critiques the politics of the present.

At least half of my argument for TWR’s greatness lies in the experience of watching it.  If you aren’t left in awe of the film’s grandeur, fascinated by it’s details, moved by it’s narrative, then I don’t know what to tell you.  Our tastes simply differ.  The best I can do is try to convey to you what the experience is like for me.  If OTOH, you find yourself attracted to the film but left cold or put off or confused by certain aspects, perhaps this review can help.  New information and new perspectives can often give us new eyes to see a film.  The film’s themes are built in deep, and their nuances easy to miss.  It is my hope that at least some of the information and perspectives in this post are new to you.

So what makes this movie special? And what’s going on inside it?