(Japan, 126 min.)
Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt,
Martin Short, Werner Herzog.
Former Film.com editor David Ehrlich called The Wind Rises “perhaps greatest animated film the cinema has ever
seen.” He then proceeded to give the film a rating of 9.7 out of 10. How The Wind Rises serves as the best
example of an entire form of filmmaking, yet falls three decimal points short
of a perfect ten, however, illustrates the sentimental character of this admirable
but undeniably flawed film.
It’s been said that The Wind Rises is the final film from acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki. If The Wind Rises is indeed the last film that cinephiles will ever see from the director of 2001’s Oscar winner Spirited Away and other acclaimed hits such as Princess Mononoke (1997) and Ponyo (2008), just to name a few, then it’s a bittersweet finale to a filmmaker that has made a great mark on world cinema. The Wind Rises is bittersweet, though, for it’s both an impeccably poetic film and a deeply problematic one. Saying goodbye to a favourite filmmaker might lead some film buffs to look the other way, but the film might have been received otherwise if Mr. Miyazaki had another film in the works.
The Wind Rises is
a loosely biographical tale of Jirô Horikoshi, a young man who becomes a star
aeronautical engineer after his poor eyesight thwarts his dream of becoming a
pilot. The Wind Rises is truthfully a
poetic tale of shattered dreams, for Jirô goes on to design cutting-edge planes
for Mitsubishi, which are flown once and touch ground only to make a kamikaze
landing at Pearl Harbour. Jirô sees an airplane as a thing of beauty and
Miyazaki’s tale laments how human nature seems to corrupt everything it touches
in the name of power and greed.
One could just as easily take issue, though, with a film
that romanticizes the life of an engineer whose final product took countless
lives. The gunsmith might not deliver the killshot himself, but he knows full
well that he makes something that kills people. A semi-comical sequence, for
example, sees Jirô derided by his peers when he suggests that the planes will
fly better if they lose the burden of guns, but he continues to throw
himself into the work. His focus and determination to make a great plane become
more pronounced as it becomes more obvious that his efforts serve a military purpose,
yet The Wind Rises lets Jirô off the hook for clinging to his
fantasies and his naïveté in the face of obvious corruption. The Wind Rises consistently reiterates Jirô’s
belief that he is building a thing of beauty and not a weapon. Dream sequences
with an Italian engineer illustrate Jirô’s love for planes as a flight of the
imagination, but The Wind Rises
overlooks Jirô’s complicity in the war machine in favour of accentuating the
elegiac element of his faded dreams.
Jirô’s story, while wildly problematic, also happens to be a
beautiful, poignant tale that Miyazaki conveys in tangible metaphors and poetic
references. The Wind Rises makes
ample reference to Pierre Valéry’s verse “Le vent se lève…” which appears as an
epigraph at the beginning of the film, as countless characters quote the line
whenever the wind flutters through the trees, rustles hats, and carries Jirô’s
planes to freedom. (It’s a bit repetitive.) Jirô hears the poem from a young
girl named Nahoko he meets on a train. She quotes the line after catching his
hat from the wind, and it becomes a mantra for their tragic relationship. (He
catches her parasol; she catches his paper planes, etc.) Their relationship
fuels much of the latter half of the film when Jirô is in the midst of
realizing his aeronautical dreams and it underscores the film’s wisely
reflective sense of loss.
Jirô and Nahoko are voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily
Blunt as the adult versions of the characters, but the dubbed star power
doesn’t work in the service of Miyazaki’s script. A stiff cast of all-stars
makes The Wind Rises an awkward
affair and, at times, an unintentionally funny one, since the voices of the
characters aren’t nearly as animated as the film itself. It’s impossible to
appreciate The Wind Rises to its
fullest—or to connect with it emotionally—when it has a dub job this atrocious.
(No theatres in town are screening the film in its original form.) What could
be a swan song for Japan’s great animator plays like self-parody, although the
appearance of Werner Herzog as a prophetic German traveller is an inspired (if
distracting) bit of casting.
Why The Wind Rises
had to be dubbed for its North American release is unfortunate, since Miyazaki’s
film hardly caters to children, nor does it present much chance that young
viewers will appreciate it. The Wind
Rises truly has the air of a wise man reflecting upon the years that have
come before him, and it has the artful expression of a creative talent using
his craft to meditate upon the world he could soon be leaving. The beautiful
hand drawn animation of The Wind Rises
serves the nostalgia perfectly, as the simple characters bear a refreshing resemblance
to real-world counterparts, which seems rare in animation nowadays when
characters are either cartoonish Croods or dead-eyed humanoids from The Polar Express. Jirô, Nahoko, and
company have just the slightest hint of storybook/manga charm to serve the
allegorical fluttering of the film. The painterly landscapes and the immaculate
attention to detail, likewise, are stunning enough to let one call the
animation of The Wind Rises as some
of the finest work the art form has ever seen. The film overall, however, isn’t
quite as strong a breeze.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Wind Rises is currently screening in Ottawa at Landmark Kanata
and Cineplex Silvercity Gloucester.
What did you think of The Wind Rises?
