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.
