The Wind Rises (2013)
In the movie The Red Shoes (1948), the main character is forced into a binary choice: devote herself completely to her art or to her true love. The main character in Hayao Miyazaki’s 2013 animated masterpiece suffers no such Morton’s Fork; his true love and passion are both equal manifestations of his spirit. Miyazaki appears to be making the argument that both are necessary for success in life, though it is no easy task to balance them. This gives the events of the film a persistently optimistic tone despite being surrounded by incredibly somber events.
The Wind Rises, which was supposed to be the director’s last movie, is about the Japanese engineer who designed the Zero fighter for Imperial Japan during World War 2. As one would expect, the film deals with heavy subjects like Japan’s involvement in the war and the effects of totalitarianism. There are a lot of interesting and morally critical questions raised and few (if any) are answered. While there is a lot to unpack in the background; ultimately, the movie is about the positive consequences of Jiro’s passion for building airplanes, not the negative ones.
The film is first and foremost an investigation of the passions of Jiro Horikoshi. Miyazaki expertly fills in the background with hints of the complex situation surrounding Jiro but the exterior situation never distracts from the character study. The choice to focus on character rather than circumstance, especially when the circumstances demand attention, is an odd decision and one that surprisingly works. Jiro evades the secret police, Nazis run after a Jew in Germany and millions die from airplane bombings, in other films, these moments would be centerpieces but here they take up a minuscule amount of screen time.
The Wind Rises is a curious movie in the animated genre. The narrative structure alone is far from the tropes of western animation. And even by Miyazaki’s normally fantastical standards, the film is grounded in reality. It is Miyazaki’s first character study and his first biopic. But the director’s obsession with fantasy pervades even here. The character of Jiro shines in the dream sequences, which are surprisingly effective at communicating character information. Unlike some lesser sequences, they’re effectively used to forward the narrative momentum of the story and our insight into character.
There is a joy that pervades Miyazaki’s work, it comes out in the sheer brilliance of the artistry. You can tell from every shot that this is the fullest expression of the animator’s imagination, it’s especially fitting for this movie’s subject. The movie itself is about the pursuit of artistic perfection. It’s a film that is driven by its own beauty and is fittingly about a man who looks only to perfect the beauty of his own creations. One can easily imagine that Miyazaki connected with Horikoshi while creating the character and grafted part of his own obsessive nature onto the character.
Little in the way of conflict happens in the movie. Jiro tries to make the best plane he can under the circumstances all the while trying to maintain a relationship with the love of his life. That’s it. The narrative is rather simple even though it explores a multitude of complex topics. It’s driven, not by overt conflict like most other movies are, but by the moral questions it poses, the beauty of its imagery and the simple desire to see the characters succeed.
History is filled with inventors of terrible things, people whose actions, through the lens of time, are morally dubious. But those people, like Jiro, are slated to fade into the background of history and it’s easy to see them as one-dimensional characters. The Wind Rises is a film of uncommon empathy that looks past the surface level of history and explores the potential humanism behind it. I for one would be very interested to see more movies about the tragic creators of history, those who were cursed with the inspiration to create terrible things. As long as there are artists, engineers, and inventors of any kind they will continue doing what drives them, whatever it may be. For Miyazaki, there is no other choice. We don’t choose our passions, just like we don’t choose who we fall in love with, but we must embrace all of it in order to live fully.
The Wind Rises poses many morally complex questions that it refuses to give answers to, and that might frustrate some audience members. But that’s not the point, it’s an aesthetically gorgeous exploration of art’s inseparable relationship to love and life. It is to the movie’s credit that it never gets bogged down by the heavy themes it traffics in, partly because the story maintains such a ridged focus on simple character moments rather than the monumental ones happening all around. This is a must-see animated classic and one that will always have something new to tell you on a re-watch.