The Wind Rises (2013) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / January 30, 2015

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are experiencing some storytelling difficulties, so unfortunately our film won’t get interesting take off any time soon. See how I combined plot and aviation into one joke? Huehuehue… Seriously though, I don’t know what I was expecting Miyazaki’s last directorial effort to be, but it sure wasn’t this.

The Wind Rises is a fictionalized account of Jiro Horikoshi, a famous Japanese airplane engineer. The film starts during his childhood years where he finds out he’s nearsighted and is thus unable to become a pilot. Instead, he decides to design planes instead. He joins a company in 1927 with his friend and colleague and he designs planes that were truly groundbreaking at the time (though don’t ask me about the specifics). Around this time he also meets his future wife…who has tuberculosis. If that’s not enough, his designs are eventually used during WWII. Jiro also has recurring dreams about meeting Caproni, another aircraft designer. Wow, a surprisingly messy plot summary…

Now, it’s obvious to anyone that Miyazaki’s films are characterized first and foremost by flights of imagination and fantasy. This is what’s made him so popular over the years. It’s also precisely why The Wind Rises is so interesting, since you notice it carries an air of maturity given the historical themes on display. Quite a break from his previous efforts. There’s even an implied sex scene. Of course, Miyazaki has made a name for himself with his representations of ecological and feminist themes etc., so it’s not to say he was never ‘mature’, it’s just that he often packaged those themes in kid-friendly fare. Now, he’s adapting a real life story filled with mature themes. Save for the Caproni dreams and the earthquake scene, there are no flights of fancy fantasy. It’s all much more grounded and slow-paced. But it’s also where things take a turn for the worse.

Let’s take a look at some of the themes at work here: we’ve got the ‘science abused by governments’ theme. This is the central tragedy of Jiro’s legacy, i.e. how his designs were used for warfare purposes in WWII, even though all he wanted to do was “create something beautiful”. We’ve got Work vs Family as exemplified by Jiro. We’ve got Love as seen in the relationship between Jiro and Naoko. These are all interesting themes, the first one obviously being the key theme of Jiro’s life as contrasted by his passion for planes. The problem, however, isn’t just that these themes aren’t really dealt with, but that sometimes they’re are also confusingly handled: for instance, you could either blame Jiro for indirectly contributing to Pearl Harbor or absolve him. When Caproni tells Jiro that planes are beautiful even if humanity uses them for inhuman purposes, does this mean Miyazaki absolves Jiro or is it a veiled criticism, stating that Jiro was too naïve? I couldn’t tell you. That’s my problem: it’s not that the themes aren’t present, they are, and I see what Miyazaki is aiming at, but I don’t think the film deals with these issues in a manner befitting this incredibly complex, rich and tragic history. Miyazaki occasionally slightly touches upon them and then hastily retreats to yet another Caproni dream or another uninteresting scene between Jiro and Naoko. I’m not saying the wise option would’ve been to turn the film into a politically centered thesis, but you can’t just adapt a story that inherently deals with these issues and not really deal with them.

So not only are the main themes inadequately and unsatisfyingly handled, the film’s portrayal of Jiro also tends to feel simplistic, which brings me to the second problem: characters. I’m going to come out and say I didn’t really care for Jiro as the film presents him in such a boring way. He’s always this quiet reserved man and that’s fine, but where’s the conflict? The inner turmoil? The self-doubting? I know there are scenes like this, but they don’t seem to affect his actions overall. There is no character arc. Not only that, but he never ‘makes mistakes’. By that I mean we mostly see him as a classic Hero. He endlessly carries a young girl (Naoko, his future wife) on his back during the earthquake. As a kid he judo throws a bully, you know, so the audience realizes he’s a morally righteous guy. After all, nothing screams ‘quiet character piece with political undertones’ than judo throwing a bully. Even worse is Naoko, the token love interest. I can’t remember anything about her besides her desire to ‘stand by her man’. The sequence where they fall in love is way too short to be believable or even likable and that’s not to mention her tuberculosis which is code for ‘I’ll be dead soon.’ So clichéd, so uninteresting. There are people out there who actually consider this relationship heartbreaking. Really!? What’s worse is that these scenes have nothing to do with and detract from the two key themes: flight and the tragedy of Jiro’s designs eventually being used in WWII. The whole thing just feels forced, like Miyazaki realized his story risked being one-note if he didn’t throw in the requisite romantic subplot. To make matters worse, according to various articles, real life Naoko didn’t even suffer from TB which renders the whole thing as being nothing more than pointless melodrama. So clichéd, so uninteresting.

In the end, I don’t feel like I got to know Jiro Horikoshi. Now, I don’t expect a film to encompass everything as that would be impossible, but these kinds of biopics are required to at least give you a distillated version of the protagonist’s life and I don’t feel they succeeded. All the nuances about Jiro’s life, how his planes were used during Pearl Harbor, etc., I discovered purely by reading web articles. That’s the vibe I’m getting: I feel like I could understand the film only after extensively reading about Jiro afterwards and how the film contains autobiographical elements from Miyazaki’s own life, rather than by letting the film speak for itself. Look, I get that The Wind Rises is part biopic, part meditation on how people’s inventions are used for evil purposes, but Miyazaki is unable to combine the two into a satisfying whole. Any knowledge on how the film secretly symbolizes Miyazaki’s own thoughts and doubts about his own life, Jiro and Japan’s role in WWII only serves to make me appreciate Miyazaki himself, but they don’t solve the problems inherent to the film. In the end, you can hide behind comments on how wonderful the animation is (which is what every review seems to do), but for me the amount of storytelling and pacing issues were enough to make the experience a very frustrating one.

One last thing: what I fear is that this film might’ve been praised primarily due to Miyazaki’s reputation, this being his last (quasi-autobiographical) film and that it was such a ‘mature’ departure from the norm for him, without actually analyzing the film itself. It’s ironic and a bit sad that this first true attempt at ‘mature’ storytelling by someone called Japan’s ‘master of animation’ should be quite disappointing. It makes me wonder what Ghibli director Isao Takahata would’ve done with this material.