"The Wind Rises" is a beautifully crafted and highly enjoyable movie. Its story of an obsessively brilliant young man given to dreaming extravagant dreams and then actually realizing those dreams is timeless. When viewed purely as a cinematic experience, "The Wind Rises" is an achievement of a very high order.
Unfortunately, the film has two significant flaws. First, the handling of the character of the movie's protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, is regrettable. Jiro is portrayed in uniquely heroic terms. From an early age, we see him acting with the utmost virtue under any and all circumstances -- rescuing young children from bullying, carrying a woman for miles and miles on his back in the aftermath of an earthquake, etc. Given the complexity of the animation, this oversimplification of Jiro's character is jarring and his portrayal sometimes becomes mawkishly sentimental and irritating.
More significantly, this film glorifies the work and life of a designer of military airplanes that were used to kill many thousands of people. In scene after scene, the Japanese military-industrial complex of the 1930s is portrayed as employing a wonderfully sincere and good-natured group of men who were ready to roll up their shirtsleeves and work day and night to build "beautiful planes." The passing references to what those planes would be used to do, to the devastation of war, are noticeable but have little impact on the viewer. Bathed in the warm glow of Miyazaki's incredible animation, the audience feels the few brief references to war and devastation as if they were mild bumps on a very smooth airplane flight.
The scenes of Jiro and his colleagues when they visit pre-war Germany are quite telling in this regard. Although the scenes in Germany do include some highly controlling German behavior, as well as a scene of someone being pursued at night by a gang of well-dressed thugs, not one single swastika is shown during perhaps 20 minutes of footage. The word "Nazi" is never uttered. Although the name "Mr. Hitler" is uttered much later in the film during a conversation Jiro has with a German at a Japanese resort -- the man has a very large nose and is perhaps a regrettable caricature of a Jewish person -- the name "Mr. Hitler" is spoken only once and with complete neutrality, as if Jiro is saying the name "Mr. Smith."
This movie's brief allusions to wartime devastation and its omission of any mention of Japan and Germany's heinous ideologies greatly compromised my experience. It portrays Jiro, an enabler of terrible worldwide aggression, in the most heroic and reverent terms. If for domestic Japanese political or commercial reasons Miyazaki could not offer a more realistic and balanced story of Japan's preparations for, and its predations during, World War II, then he should have chosen a different subject for his film. This comic book fantasy-adventure left me angry and sad, and for all the wrong reasons.
Unfortunately, the film has two significant flaws. First, the handling of the character of the movie's protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, is regrettable. Jiro is portrayed in uniquely heroic terms. From an early age, we see him acting with the utmost virtue under any and all circumstances -- rescuing young children from bullying, carrying a woman for miles and miles on his back in the aftermath of an earthquake, etc. Given the complexity of the animation, this oversimplification of Jiro's character is jarring and his portrayal sometimes becomes mawkishly sentimental and irritating.
More significantly, this film glorifies the work and life of a designer of military airplanes that were used to kill many thousands of people. In scene after scene, the Japanese military-industrial complex of the 1930s is portrayed as employing a wonderfully sincere and good-natured group of men who were ready to roll up their shirtsleeves and work day and night to build "beautiful planes." The passing references to what those planes would be used to do, to the devastation of war, are noticeable but have little impact on the viewer. Bathed in the warm glow of Miyazaki's incredible animation, the audience feels the few brief references to war and devastation as if they were mild bumps on a very smooth airplane flight.
The scenes of Jiro and his colleagues when they visit pre-war Germany are quite telling in this regard. Although the scenes in Germany do include some highly controlling German behavior, as well as a scene of someone being pursued at night by a gang of well-dressed thugs, not one single swastika is shown during perhaps 20 minutes of footage. The word "Nazi" is never uttered. Although the name "Mr. Hitler" is uttered much later in the film during a conversation Jiro has with a German at a Japanese resort -- the man has a very large nose and is perhaps a regrettable caricature of a Jewish person -- the name "Mr. Hitler" is spoken only once and with complete neutrality, as if Jiro is saying the name "Mr. Smith."
This movie's brief allusions to wartime devastation and its omission of any mention of Japan and Germany's heinous ideologies greatly compromised my experience. It portrays Jiro, an enabler of terrible worldwide aggression, in the most heroic and reverent terms. If for domestic Japanese political or commercial reasons Miyazaki could not offer a more realistic and balanced story of Japan's preparations for, and its predations during, World War II, then he should have chosen a different subject for his film. This comic book fantasy-adventure left me angry and sad, and for all the wrong reasons.