The Wind Rises

The con­cept of tak­ing flight, of casu­al­ly defy­ing the sor­ry lot of the human land-lub­ber, is a cen­tral con­cern of Japan­ese film­mak­er Hayao Miyaza­ki. That gos­samer film which sep­a­rates the realms of bustling fan­ta­sy and hor­rif­ic real­i­ty is often punc­tured by some plucky hero (or, more often, hero­ine) lift­ing off the ground and leav­ing such Earth­bound givens as the laws of physics in a beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered dust trail.

Ani­ma­tion, the cre­ative medi­um in which Miyaza­ki oper­ates, is fan­tas­ti­cal by design, mean­ing that sus­pend­ing dis­be­lief when ​“human” char­ac­ters take flight is far less of a push. It’s iron­ic, and per­haps even a lit­tle per­verse, then, that the director’s pur­port­ed final encore opts to lit­er­al­ly chron­i­cle the won­drous world of ear­ly avi­a­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the cre­ation of the Mit­subishi A6M Zero, which was piv­otal to the Japan­ese fire-bomb­ing of Pearl Harbour.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li diehards may be unsure of what to do with the film, how best to cat­e­gorise and com­part­men­talise it among a cat­a­logue of films that all make some kind affir­ma­tive con­ces­sion towards age, gen­der and (rel­a­tive­ly) broad taste. Gone are the loopy, expres­sion­ist flights of fan­cy, the occa­sion­al­ly hec­tor­ing envi­ron­men­tal sub-themes and the cus­tom­ary panoply of cute crit­ters and goofy com­ic side-players.

In their place, though, is a melo­dra­ma so earnest, rous­ing and robust­ly built that you’d swear it had been penned by some on-the-clock huck­ster chain-smok­ing in the back­rooms of a Hol­ly­wood stu­dio cir­ca 1940. Miyaza­ki has select­ed Jirô Horikoshi as his sub­ject, a gog­gle-eyed boy won­der engi­neer from the pre-war era work­ing for the then-fledg­ling Mit­subishi cor­po­ra­tion and giv­en cre­ative free rein to invent fight­er planes to rival those of Ger­many and the US. Yet Horikoshi’s paci­fist ten­den­cies mean that he finds it tough to hand over his designs for use in war games.

In many ways, The Wind Ris­es is biog­ra­phy as auto­bi­og­ra­phy, telling of the tri­umphs and trau­mas of Horikoshi’s young life as much as it does the director’s own, much pub­li­cised feel­ings about his cho­sen méti­er. Horikoshi’s avi­a­tion idol, Count Gio­van­ni Caproni, assures him dur­ing a num­ber of marked­ly restrained fan­ta­sy sequences that, ​“Air­planes are dreams” – could the same not be said of cin­e­ma, with the two men tasked with pro­duc­ing a prod­uct that’s ide­o­log­i­cal­ly root­ed in the realms of fantasy?

Both men are also prone to bio­mor­ph­ing – that is tak­ing the sim­ple, stur­dy designs offered up by nature and co-opt­ing them as inspi­ra­tion to exe­cute their craft: Horikoshi bases his wing ribs on the dain­ty curve of the mack­er­el bone; Miyaza­ki, for exam­ple, uses sam­ples of human voic­es for all of the film’s sound effects (pro­pellers, trains, an earth­quake, etc).

Though The Wind Ris­es would arguably fall into the brack­et of the tra­di­tion­al biopic, it’s inter­est­ing by dint of it being a for­mal con­ceit nev­er before adopt­ed by the Ghi­b­li sta­ble. And yes, it does adhere to con­ven­tion­al sto­ry arcs and reach­es a some­what pre­dictable con­clu­sion, yet Miyaza­ki stands at a valu­able dis­tance from his sub­ject, nev­er sec­ond guess­ing his intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment and nev­er over­play­ing his lengthy bouts of sad­ness and confusion.

Sat­is­fy­ing­ly, for a film about an inven­tor, there’s a notice­able dearth of ​“eure­ka!” moments, where cir­cum­stances hand­i­ly con­spire to move the plot for­ward. Instead, this comes across as a dra­mat­i­cal­ly unadorned take on Horikoshi’s life, a saga that works as a col­lec­tion of episodes and imper­a­tive moments and that steers thank­ful­ly clear of con­trivance – some­thing that Miyaza­ki the writer has, in the past, not always been capa­ble of.

The Wind Ris­es stands along­side Grave of the Fire­flies as one of Ghibli’s most adult-ori­ent­ed works. Though it’s chore­o­graphed with all the prig­gish whim­sy of a pre-code romance, it even offers up the studio’s first bona fide sex scene. Still, it’s doubt­ful that ankle-biters will get very much at all from the film, unless they’re ankle-biters with a fix­a­tion on cross ver­sus flat-head screws or the mechan­i­cal minu­ti­ae of wing struts.

With its abrupt down­er end­ing, the film final­ly reveals its con­cealed sense of mor­bid curios­i­ty, jux­ta­pos­ing the mass destruc­tion of Horikoshi’s glid­ing dream machines with the nat­ur­al, very sad dis­in­te­gra­tion of the human body. On deep­er reflec­tion, this is per­haps a film which – like all great works of art – strives to embed its themes so deep with­in the text that, to some, they might appear invis­i­ble. More than a film about one man’s mys­ti­fi­ca­tion as to how cre­ativ­i­ty can direct­ly equate to vio­lence, the over­ar­ch­ing philo­soph­i­cal inti­ma­tions sug­gest a work which high­lights the unseen knock-on dev­as­ta­tion that comes from any and all acts of nobility.