The Wind Rises

Synopsis: The story of Jiro Horikoshi, a young engineering student in Japan during the pre-WWII days who dreamed of designing the perfect fighter plane and loved the beautiful, but terminally-ill, Nahoko.

Hayao Miyazaki has had a six decade film-making career and is one of the world’s most revered animators. His films all feature a most extraordinary style of animation – one based not upon today’s digital wizardry but upon a painterly style which often employs exquisite watercolour backgrounds with simply-drawn characters moving upon them.

Apparently this will be the last film from Miyazaki who is now in his mid-seventies and perhaps for this reason it is more deeply personal and more adult than many of his previous, more fantastical films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, and Spirited Away. There are flights of fancy when Jiro dreams but these are woven with the real life story of the young man’s rise in the Mitsubishi firm and his deep love for the girl whose hat he once saved from the wind years before.

At times, one feels that one is watching actual characters, the simplicity of the drawings all the more remarkable for the way it captures the truthfulness of the nuances of human movement. Whilst occasionally mystifying, there is as always the exciting sense of heightened reality that characterizes Miyazaki’s films. In one particularly stunning and tense scene, we witness an earthquake that devastates Tokyo. It is a tour-de-force of painted animation and the emotion evoked is unnervingly real.

The look of the film is suffused with the colours of the Japanese landscape and the stunning rose-tinged clouds above. Against this the spare drawings of the characters stand out. But at other times, the drawings become serious engineering sketches and designs and I almost felt that I was in an aeronautical lecture.

Whilst throughout the film there is always the underlying subtext of the impending war, ultimately it feels like the pure beauty of the aeroplane for its own sake that is being celebrated. For some viewers this could at times seem a bit disingenuous but for me the film soared on many levels and it will be a memorable swansong for a master animator.  

The Wind Rises is screening exclusively at Elsternwick Classic and Cinema Nova

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