The Wind Rises: An artist's portrait of an artist, made artistically.
Can you separate the artist in someone from the evil their work does? Would it be in good taste, for example, to make a biopic of Hemmingway if The Old Man and the Sea could also be used as a land mine and killed someone? And to which degree should a review of such a biopic weigh in on that particular issue? I'm not entirely sure, and actual professional reviewers (of the sort good enough to actually make *money* off of it) have probably beaten this horse to death during the months this film has been out in Japan and the Colonies. For brevity's sake, I think I'll just review the film and not the subtext.
Anyway, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu in its original Japanese). A 2013 film by Studio Ghibli, it is directed by director Hayao Miyazaki (and if you have no idea who *that* is, I wonder why you're here). Intended to be his for real, honest, I-mean-it-this-time-guys swan song and final film, The Wind Rises is a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi, an aircraft engineer responsible for designing the Mitsubishi Zero, an aircraft comissioned by the Japanese Navy and used rather heavily during a little frackas in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945.
Miyazaki has long been rather overt about his passions about planes and shown it in his films, from Nausicaa's glider to the entirety of Porco Rosso (which I maintain was his best film), and so it feels sort of fitting his final creation is a homage both to his passion and to that of the artist itself. But is it a good homage?
Well, yes. It is. Very much so. I'd appreciate if you let me explain just how and why though.
Art & Animation: 10/10 -- The animation budget probably cost more than the budgets of every fall 2013 TV anime series, combined, and it shows.
What do you want me to say? It's Studio Ghibli. Animation and detail are *not* on their 'skimp' list (very few things are, come to that, but especially not art and animation). The backgrounds are drop-dead gorgeous, the character animation is flawless, the faces are expressive, the colouring is amazing, I sat the entire film enraptured by the visual effects. The presentation of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake is especially poignant, but really I could stand here gushing about every scene in the same manner. Flawless victory for Ghibli, next category.
...Ok, fine, I guess I can add one more thing. The only thing I can possibly criticise this for is that Miyazaki is using the same 'cute young girl' model he's used since Nausicaa without virtually any variation ever. This is an artist's signature, of course, and probably a reference to his earlier works and thus hardly matters as a big 'flaw', but one notices these things. Of course, Spirited Away, Mononoke and My Neighbour Totoro didn't use it either so it's probably just me singling out Porco Rosso and Arrieta here.
Sound: 8/10 -- Man, Jirou sure mumbles a lot. Who is his voice actor, and what possessed them to let him *anywhere* near the anime industry? *Checks aniDB* ...Oh. Oh. Awk-waaaaaaard....
The soundtrack of The Wind Rises is a showcase in just how a small dosage of 'know what the heck you're doing' can change a soundtrack. The Wind Rises is a period-piece drama and, as expected, goes into the 'piano and harp' territory for a light background ambiance supported by a recurring riff or motif that runs through the film. And it works. These are things every drama, quasi-soap or cute-sad-girl show in the history of anime use for musical staples, but The Wind Rises are able to use the recurring motifs effectively, underbuilding scenes without dominating and making the music, if not the film's A-game, at least memorable enough to build it. I can only blame this on an actual competent composer and music director, since normally I let these sort of things pass me by without comment or notice.
The voices are similarly solid, balancing well the demands of acting it up a bit for the kids and yet sounding like human beings. Jiro's voice *does* take some time getting used to, as the college student and twenty-ish junior engineer spends most of the film being voiced by a man old enough to be his own father. That's not to say he's entirely *bad*, and the subtext behind the casting decision is certainly *very* interesting... But, um... Well. Pure quality-speaking mr. A would not be my first choice. The German and Italian sounds silly, but that's also about as much as can be expected.
Story & Character: 7/10 -- In this film, they're practically one and the same.
The Wind Rises follows the aforementoned Jiro Horikoshi from his childhood in late 19th century Japan, a young boy fascinated by aviation, and finishes with the successful test drive of the Zero prototype in the 1930ies, taking us through his education, living through the Great Kanto Earthquake, working at Mitsubishi, a marriage, and the problems arising from being married to the project.
The best way to describe the story would be as a 'character study' similar to, oh, There Will Be Blood (but with less insanity and moustaches). The Wind Rises is no documentary: There is no narrator, the scenes and characters presented are mostly fictional and some (like Jiro's wife) have no basis in reality, and the scenes presented are hand-picked more to showcase Jiro as a human being and provide a coherent narrative of his life up to the creation of the Zero. Several of the scenes depict obvious dreams and visions, usually driven by Jiro's spiritual guide/mentor figure Giovanni Caproni (presented as a bombastic, Willy Wonka-like figure).
Jiro himself doesn't really develop much as a character and remains a somewhat static 'dreamer' through the whole thing, but looking at so much at his life makes it almost impossible not to find him sympathetic. He doesn't really have much in the way of character flaws or drama to overcome: His character arc is more akin to someone spending the film putting down a jigsaw puzzle, with the closing scene being an overlook of the jigsaw itself.
As a story, it works passing well enough, but I can't help but feel the whole 'marriage' aspect near the end added some extra drama to the proceedings which felt slightly like padding. There may be some obvious Japanese sensibilities in play: Parallels to draw between the fleeting beauty presented by a plane in development and Jiro's wife (who is suffering from terminal Soap Opera Disease... Well, actually it's outright said to be Tubercolosis, but it's presented in the same way). The plot began dragging in places and I feel the film could have lost half an hour without too much trouble, making the story a bit guilty of having more to say than strictly necessary.
In focusing so much on Jiro it also leaves some of the supporting cast feeling slightly undersold in places: I liked most of them (especially Jiro's sister and the German man), but it feels like the film were dismissing some of them in places in favour of more introspection from Jiro. It feels almost as though, beyond his wife in a few scenes, he was unable to form really meaningful connections with other humans; something that may have held true for the real man but is still a somewhat awkward legacy to leave behind.
Value: 8/10 -- Caproni: "An artist only has 10 years' shelf life." Miyazaki: "...Let's see how many pick up on that one."
The Wind Rises is perhaps Miyazaki's most Japanese film by far, and what I mean by 'Japanese' is that it's very finely tuned to Japanese cultural sensitivities. The recurring motifs of transient beauty, the behaviour of the people, and above all its cavalier attitude towards being the portrait of an artiste whose "grand work" helped a genocidal empire conquer and repress quite a lot of people is something you probably won't find in a Disney production (beyond, you know, proudly using the name of a wife-beating anti-semite as a sales point).
In addition, next to Porco Rosso it is also probably Miyazaki's most adult film. The pacing and plot aren't completely alienating towards children, but takes a lot more of the mind than your average eight-year old will muster. Scenes specifically aimed at kids are fairly far between and the drama is very "adult"; think Blade Runner more than Bambi's mum.
For all that, it's still a Ghibli film, it still has something it clearly wants to say and a story it really wants to tell, and the proficiency to pull it off. It is memorable, but it's memorable as a dramaticised portrait of an adult rather than the playful childishness of Totoro or Spirited Away.
Enjoyment: 8/10 -- Yes, I had quite a bit.
With the whole "film for adults" motif, I (being one) found this film enjoyable. The pacing is good, the story is an interesting sequence of events (if a slightly less interesting character study), and the audio-visual effects are brilliant for an animated film. Despite peetering out slightly in the middle it comes to a fair conclusion and while I'm not sure I'm comfortable with all the implications lying *behind* the work, the work itself is rock solid.
Total: 8/10 -- Thank you, mr. Miyazaki. Take a curtain call if you wish; you've deserved it.
Keeping to what I said about reviewing the work and not the subtext, I can only sum up the experience as enjoying the two-plus hour character study as a portrait of a beautiful dreamer, thousands of victims of his creation aside (ok, maybe a *bit* of subtext). When I compared The Wind Rises to There Will Be Blood it was because I found it somewhat apt: Both are similar films, made of fictional men in their particular idiom, but the latter made me leave the theatre in confusion and frustration mixed with a bit of boredom while this mainly left me feeling like I'd watched something good and the boredom from the slow bits mostly washed away by the end.
Personally, I would rank The Wind Rises about mid-tier to high-mid-tier of Miyazaki's films, probably not reaching up to Spirited Away and Porco Rosso but better than Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo (objectively, of course, it will probably outrank most anime I've seen the last three years because it's Miyazaki and Ghibli, who know how to make these things properly). A quiet, if worthy, send-off for the
greatest anime director of our time.
