Today we watched The Wind Rises, Miyazaki's final film before his retirement (and then his un-retirement). It is a fictionalized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the chief designer of the Zero, Japan's fighter plane during World War II. Neither of us had seen it before.
First, the value judgement: it's a pretty good biopic. The main character is interesting, and the time period he lived in was definitely compelling. So yeah, it's good, and I enjoyed it.
But this film is full of contradictions. The main contradiction is of course that Miyazaki would choose to make a movie about a warplane engineer when he himself is a pacifist (he opposed changing Japan's Constitution to allow a standing army). He's been quoted as saying he has "very complex feelings" about World War II. He said Japan had acted out of "foolish arrogance," but also said the Zero "represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of – they were a truly formidable presence, and so were the pilots who flew them".
The Jiro Miyazaki presents also has some jarring contradictions. From his youth he is shown as being extremely passionate about flying. He will never be able to fly himself because he has severe nearsightedness, so, after a dream featuring some pretty odd plane designs and Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, he decides he's going to design them instead. This passion carries Jiro throughout the film, but it also seems to leave almost no room for anything else. The three times we see his sister, he is late to meet her because he stayed at work and forgot she was coming, or ignores her completely because he has a new aviation magazine. He leaves his sick and dying wife Naoko alone the whole day so he can go design. He comes back late every day, if he comes back at all. He professes to love her, but then ignores her for his work. Even when he's home, he takes a table and works on a design instead of talking to her.
(It's hard not to see Miyazaki in this. His passion for his work also kept him away from home, and harmed his relationships with his family.)
In the original Japanese, Jiro's voice actor is none other than Hideaki Anno, of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame. When we started the film, I joked that Anno should stick to staying "behind" the camera because his line delivery was flat as hell. There was almost no emotion in his voice, regardless of the situation. As the film progressed, I started thinking maybe that was on purpose. Jiro had a drive that he was passionate about, but maybe that passion wasn't borne out of emotion. Maybe the Jiro in this film was a sociopath, only mimicking the emotion he saw in others.
Or maybe Anno is just a bad voice actor. One or the other.
Jiro's dreams permeate the film. From the opening scene to the last, Jiro dreams of airplanes and Gianni Caproni. His dreams are always about flight, never about anything else. Even as he is forever grounded, his dreams take him to the air. Except his final dream, which starts with him walking out of the wreckage of multiple Zero fighters. In this dream he stays on the ground and finally dreams of something other than flying: his dead wife Naoko. She tells him to live, right before she disappears. Had he not been living before, engrossed in his work as he was? I think it also says something that, after being told to live not just by Naoko but also by Caproni, he instead continues the dream, and follows Caproni to his house for a drink.
My favorite character in the film is Jiro's supervisor Kurokawa. He's a short man with the most expressive hair (it bounces and flaps all the time!). He's constantly grumpy and critical of Jiro even as he protects him from the secret police (for befriending a German who was anti-Hitler). When Jiro and Naoko marry, Kurokawa is the only person who cries.
I guess my feelings for this film are contradictory as well. It's a good, well-made movie, and I do like it, but it kind of nags at me too. It feels almost like I just watched some well-made propaganda. And even though I know it's propaganda, and the thing it's propagandizing for is maybe not the best, I still like it. It's a weird feeling.
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