Revolutionized by a graceful 73-year old presenter, Hayao Miyazaki states: ”Wind Rises” will be the author’s last nominated work. His isn’t the best answer. Since the emergence of his first international hit “Princess Mononoke” in 1997, the audiences have always rushed to watch his gorgeously created fantasy films, and the world that he has offered us, the colors and sounds and sights, the stories and the characters, is full of epic impact for his legacy. In “The Wind Rises,” which is based on semi fictitious story of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who built Japanese airplanes in Second World War (the one who was able to design a very deadly “Zero” fighter aircraft), there’s this one character who keeps her gaze on the fast moving clouds and says, “Aeroplanes are beautiful dreams.” Fans also call it the same with “Miyazaki’s films,” beautiful dreams. He is already missed.
Nearsighted Jiro Horikoshi as a child used to want to become an airplane pilot; he had very special obsession – airplanes. All his dreams always come true of him flying high and low, even swooping across the green plains populated by people soaring higher and higher disregarding the imaginary lines drawn by people on the ground just for the sake of their fanced circumstances. For such an aspiration, it is impossible for him due to his eyesight, however he aims for the college education so that he can become an engineer who will create circumscribed objects known as ‘that wonderful thing’ for other people to occupy.
In engaging in this activity, he finds that he is visited in dreams by popular Italian aircraft designer, Count Caproni, who is of a boot-shaped country’s descent and appears and shows to the young manga artist the immense possibilities in everybody’s favorite dream – the flight. Such inspiration does make young Japanese boys dream of various scenarios imagining how far one can actually go with one’s creativity. First the dream has to be if it is to happen in reality later on. And so it has always been with such makers of progress.
Jiro is rather efficient in his mission without being too insistent. There is no way to even begin tackling this question because Japan is “backward,” they are 10, 20 years behind the rest of the world and out there they still have to use oxen to drag the planes out in the field for a trial run. They build the aircraft with trees instead of metals. With the likes of the United States and Germany, how will they desire stand out in the field of advanced machinery? Also, there is civil unrest and poverty, people on the roads coming to the train stations as if it was a war and huge crowds desperate for jobs beating a path into the cities. It is not long after Jiro starts working with Mitsubishi that he is assigned as a delegate in Germany to study its airplane machineries and related matters in order to bring back some ideas to Japan.
They are worried about waging war, and so the events unfold in the 1920’s and the 1930’s. “The Wind Rises” is a somewhat antiwar movie (in an early episode, when Jiro punishes a class bully, his mother scolds him saying, “There is no reason such as war to hit people.”), and her criticism is understandable given what the subject matter is about. Nevertheless, Miyazaki remains focused on Jiro’s narrative by travelling through his dreams, going to school, making several trips to Germany for research, and courting a young lady, Naoko, who will eventually become his wife. It remains, however, that way. The Wind Rises too contains a nauseating element about what these ‘beautiful dreams’ will be used for when the time for war comes. That’s when planes become machines of terror, systematically decimating everyone’s life.
In Jiro’s world, however, the sky is filled with planes and they come in all colors and shape trapezium but colourful as felon orange paper kites or genial torpid turning dragons. Still further in the film, as Mitsubishi is on contract hunt with the army and the navy, he comes to know that he is not building an aircraft but a weapon. There were many like him in his generation of early aviators and airplane engineers. Man has struggled to conquer the heights for centuries. To go against the forces of gravity, to move around in the skies, how marvelous that is as an illustration of what mankind can achieve if only he is willing to dream big! Back in 1927, after Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing, in commenting in his remarks on the event, former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes said this, “As ships are measured by their displacement, so also, heroes are weighed by their pose. This one displaces all. The great Colonel Lindbergh.” The stunning hopes of aviation quickly spiraled into the dreadful dark ages of World War II, where planes pursued an unrelenting brutality in battle. These offshore weapon systems, and much of what they designed, go far beyond what these designers had willingly engaged.
“The Wind Rises” explores these ambiguities of ethics, when Jiro’s dreams become darker and darker with a clouud looming overhead, when beautiful swooping biplanes begin to turn into terrible lunging beast coming down through rugged clouds. Jiro is faced with the problem of technology and the WInd Rises much the same as the Aviator slowly walks us through his several developments in construction and devolopment aspectos (he gets an inspiration for curved wings from looking at a mackerel bone). The Zero, the aircraft that help place Japan in the map during the second world was long range intetceptory aircraft that was with very good manueverability. At the close of the war, technology was advancing at such rampaging pace that there was no place for the Zero among fighter planes and Japan came to apply the Zero particularly for the Kamikaze missions. This film has also been condemned because they say it idealises the Hulk like deadly Zero in “The Last Samurai”, the director idealises Horikoshi and portrays his more unsavoury facets in positive or neutral light. The same could indeed be argued, and the gentle tempers with which the historical record to all that the Zero did in the war, and the actual use of it, nothing seemed to me to be weak in the film.
Everyone seems to remember Jiro fondly and with esteem, and Jiro is one of those characters who grows on you—his pink outfit and disheveled locks. The best part comes when he is ready to defend her love because they worked on a satirical love story. During one such outing in the rain, Dr. Post’s daughter, struggling to keep an umbrella balanced between the two of them says, “Life is wonderful isn’t it!” While such a declaration might have you scratching your head, a concern for her well being would immediately follow after realizing that she is a tuberculosis patient. One cannot avoid looking over, for example, the sky with its beautiful clouds, which get painted with rainbows, or the trees that sway vigorously, and appreciate how beautiful they all are. As early in the conversation as this, she quotes Paul Valery to him, and turns to the longest of them: “The wind rises, we must try to live.”
Wind is everywhere and his presence is there, too, as a narrative device and of course literally in every scene. The war winds, which are there even in the very beginning, and have a very strong combination with the revolutionary changes in the atmosphere. Japan has to “get up to speed” with the rest of the world and Jiro is located in the fore of that movement. Wind is also synonymous to warm air, describing life, in this case, warm air trapped in the TB-affected lungs of Naoko, but as long as enough of it exists, there is still life.
Like a child hurrying himself to determine the wind’s potential and wrestle it, the above-named criticator works to ascertain the best way to lay a listener who has traveled on hot air ballooning. There is nothing going on as power is building slowly but surely. Wind is nothing but name for air that is in motion.
Forever, artists will express ideas employing the medium they want – some may use pencil, and some would use pure logic. The images in “The Wind Rises” are breathtaking, potent with one astonishing scene after another of creativity, fancy and brute strength. There are two classic segments of epic proportions, one being the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake which if I’m not wrong was the largest earthquake in the history of Japan. It rendered Tokyo and habitation for much of the population to ashes within the Mezeta. The great flammable object took address of building classes following the earth tremors in the form of violent hot wind flames augmenting the burning intensity to a mile long pathway of over three hundred structures. The proper mix of surrender and violent emotion cannot be placed into words – the whole rhythm is shaking clouds in the sky, encouraging the urge to strain planes and sweep the air around in circles.
In ‘The Wind Rises’, we see a complex person with a pair of glasses, who is both a dreamer and a thinker, wrapped in case studies as regards the working of machines and their assembly; a boy who looks around himself and knows what he wants to be and makes it happen. Something of the sort could be said about Hayao Miyazaki, and, to some degree, “The Wind Rises” is the most personal of all Miyazaki’s films.
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