The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki has announced that The Wind Rises is his last film. It was released in 2013 and was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar (it lost to Frozen). It was somewhat controversial because it dealt with the story of the man who designed the Zero fighter plane, a killing machine. And it has a lot of cigarette smoking.

So I wasn't prepared for how wonderful a film this is. It's tough to decide if this is a better film than Miyazaki's masterpiece Spirited Away, because they are so different. The Wind Rises has no supernatural elements, unless you count the many dream sequences. It's grounded in reality, but it just as wondrous and beautiful as any of his other films.

This is the story of Jiro Horikoshi, who as a boy in the 1910s is fascinated by airplanes but because of bad eyesight knows he can never be a pilot. He dreams about an Italian plane designer, Count Caproni, who encourages him to follow his dreams. But he warns them that though airplanes are beautiful creations, their primary use is for war.

Jiro does become a plane designer, and is a great one. He works for a company that is preparing for war, and he is sent to Germany to study Junkers' designs. At the same time, this film is also a tender romance. He meets a young girl on a train, moments before a great earthquake hits Tokyo. He leads her to safety, but they lose touch, until they meet again years ago when he once again helps her (everytime they meet there is a large gust of wind). She is consumptive, so there is an urgency to their romance.

If you'd ever told me I'd get choked up watching a romance about an aeronautic engineer I would have laughed, but The Wind Rises is extremely poetic and touching. It's also very complex--Jiro knows his designs will be used as war machines, but he just wants to make something beautiful. At one point he tells his team that they could save weight by removing the guns from the plane, and everyone laughs, but you know deep down he's serious.

The animation is also breathtaking. This is hand drawn stuff-no motion capture CGI, which makes it all the more amazing how Miyazaki is able to reproduce human movement. In watching a simple scene of Jiro sitting down at his drafting table I marveled at how accurate the movements were. The dream sequences were also great. Everyone dreams differently, and thus no one can say that dreams are accurately presented on film, but these seemed like actual dreams.

The English-language voice cast is a good one: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiro and Emily Blunt as his girl, but also with Martin Short, John Kransinski, and Werner Herzog as a mysterious German who meets Jiro in Japan before the war. "Germany will blow up," he predicts. "Japan will blow up."

I'd also like to give kudos to Joe Hishaishi for a beautiful, haunting score. The Wind Rises is one of the best animated films I've ever seen.