The Wind is Rising

“Le vent se leve, il faut tenter de vivre.”

          The opening sequence to Studio Ghibli’s newest release, the Hayao Miyazaki-directed Kaze Tachinu, is rather unassuming.  It begins with a quote from French poet Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimetiére marin.”  No bright colors, no whimsy – just words.  Followed by a sleeping boy.  Just sleeping.  And just as I was beginning to lose hope, anthropomorphic alien-bombs appeared in a dream sequence.

          Yep, this is a Miyazaki film.

          Kaze Tachinu focuses on the life and career of Dr. Jiro Horikoshi, one of Mitsubishi’s top aeronautical engineers and the developer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane during WWII.  From its introduction to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fleet in 1940 until 1942 when Allied Forces developed its own technology to better combat the IJN, the A6M Zero was widely considered the most efficient – and deadliest – carrier-based fighter in the world.  It’s agility and long-range abilities were unparalleled.  But this isn’t a movie about a fighter; it’s about a man with a vision and passion for flight.

          It would have been easy to make Kaze Tachinu into a war-film, which frankly Studio Ghibli has released before.  Many of their films examine themes of environment and consequences, but most overtly war-related with Hotaru no Haka, directed by Isao Takahata.  The conditions are right: the effects of the Kanto Earthquake, imperialism, economic depression, an alliance with Nazi Germany, threat of the Allied Forces, etc.  Despite these conditions, Miyazaki instead took the route of showcasing a man’s talent, rather than the destructive result of this man’s talent.

LEFT: Theatrical poster of Kaze Tachinu featuring Jiro Hirokoshi.  RIGHT: Photograph of Dr. Hirokoshi taken while he was a student at the Tokyo Imperial University (Wikimedia Commons). 

          The film blends Jiro’s factual biography with the fictional novella Kaze Tachinu by Japanese author and French to Japanese translator Tatsuo Hori.  Originally serialized in the socialist magazine Kaizō between 1936 and 1937, the novella features a young woman in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Nagano as she struggles with her disease.  Miyazaki’s film embodies this character as Naoko Satomi, the young girl Jiro meets as a university student during the Kanto Earthquake, and their paths continuously cross as they grow up, until finally Jiro asks Naoko’s father permission to marry her.  It is revealed half-way through the film that Naoko is seriously ill, and by the end of the film her fate is unsure.

          Ultimately, Kaze Tachinu paints Jiro as a man curiously and passionately obsessed with flight.  Aircraft and the skies are constantly on his mind, and he is consistently searching for ways to increase a plane’s speed and efficiency.  He is a myopic individual, and at times he seems to prefer his charts, sketches and equations more than the people around him.  And this is where I started having trouble with Jiro in the film.  At times he is a compassionate and selfless man, but otherwise he is nothing more than a nutty-professor archetype.  His relationship with his younger sister seems strained and ineffectual, and when his wife Naoko leaves him, his sister and landlady appear more affected by her disappearance than he does.  It could be argued that his models and plans are his first and only love, and everything else comes after.

          While I would consider Kaze Tachinu to be similar in terms of approach and tone with Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), there is still something very sophisticated and mature about the story.  Hotaru no Haka is easily one of the most touching and tragic films I’ve ever seen, but it still feels as though the primary audience is children and families.  The story is told through the eyes of Seita, a fourteen-year old student who tries his best to care for his four-year old sister Setsuko in the final months of the war in Kobe after their mother is killed in an air raid.  It views the struggles and hardships of war through the experiences of these children, for the benefit of a younger audience.  Meanwhile Kaze Tachinu’s story is woven like a romantic drama, focusing more on Jiro’s personal life and career than the technology he developed, which was of course used in WWII.

          Miyazaki has taken great creative liberties with the story.  Blending a biography and a fictional novella together can’t be easy, but I felt as though Jiro’s relationships with other characters in the film, especially Naoko, the supposed great love of his life, were underdeveloped and rushed.  The greatest personal interaction Jiro had in the film was with Giovanni Caproni, an Italian aerospace engineer who inspired Jiro as a child and, in the film, would routinely appear in his subconscious to offer encouragement and praise.  Given that this film was intended for an older audience, and the focus was on the man, not the history, for me the general relationships were lacking. 

The two most important people in Jiro's life: Naoko and Giovanni Capproni.

          After finally seeing the theatrical trailer before seeing the actual film, I thought that Kaze Tachinu was going to be an historical drama, but mostly a love story between the two main characters.  But really, Caproni got more attention and air time than Naoko did – so is this really more like a bromance?  In my opinion, don’t include a romance if you’re not going to thoroughly develop the relationship.  I thought the film would have been stronger if Miyazaki had chosen to put the same emphasis and time into Jiro and Naoko’s relationship as he had into Jiro and Caproni’s relationship.

"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy. You've got TB, so let's get married."
Word to Miyazaki-san: Don't write love stories like Romeo and Juliet.  They always end badly.

          But that all being said about relationships and characters and whatnot, did I like the movie?  As I was talking to my Japanese tutor about the film this week, we decided the appropriate phrase (at least at my current nihongo level) is:

Watashi wa, Kaze Tachinu wa ii eiga dewa nai to omotte imasen.  Demo, Kaze Tachinu wa yokunai eiga dewa nai to omotte imasen.

I don’t think Kaze Tachinu was a good movie, but I don’t think it was a bad movie either.

This was my first time watching a Japanese movie in Japan without subtitles.  It’s a given that most of the Japanese would go completely over my head, and around the block for good measure.  So, I don’t feel like I can adequately judge this film without having a better understanding of the story.  There were some conversations where I frankly had no idea what was going on.  And after talking with Japanese friends who have seen Kaze Tachinu, they said the Japanese used in the film is an older and more formal usage of the language, which makes trying to understand what’s being said by noobs like me even more challenging.  I’d love to see the movie again with English subtitles, but I’ll probably have to wait at least a year for that to happen. 

          But just visually, the film is stunning.  The animation was some of the best I’ve seen from Studio Ghibli; it was clean and precise, and reflected the sophisticated nature of the plot.  It still had its Miyazaki-nuances – specifically all of the dream sequences, where Miyazaki and his team of animators could really get creative – but even the machinery could really be considered characters in this film.  Even how the earth rolled during the Kanto Earthquake sequence, and down to the puttering of bi-plane engines and oil splatters, was still very Miyazaki-like.  Though the colors were generally muted, again, probably to better reflect the tone of the story, there was great contrast between the country sides and the cities; the country was always bright greens and purples with clear light blue skies, while the cities were much darker and duller, the most vibrant color being a reddish brown.  One of my favorite scenes in the movie was the wedding; Naoko’s kimono is gorgeous, and her walk during the ceremony is poignant and really highlighted the fluidity of the silks she wore, making everything that much more tangible.

          And overall, I think that Kaze Tachinu offers a great message.  Despite all of Jiro’s failures (and, spoiler alert, most of his designs fail throughout the film) he still tries.  He is convinced that just one more equation, one more design, will result in the “beautiful plane” he promised his mother as a child that he would create.  And Jiro himself is a good guy, a little absent-minded at times, but he perseveres and becomes a likeable character, despite the audience knowing what he’s creating, and what that creation was eventually used for.

ABOVE: Kaze Tachinu the manga, written and published by Hayao Miyazaki in 2009, which became the inspiration for the film in 2013 (BELOW).

          This is a film that Studio Ghibli can be proud of, and a great comeback for Hayao Miyazaki, whose last full-length feature film directorial work with the studio was 2008’s Ponyo (which is easily my least favorite Miyazaki film I’ve seen…but that’s its own post).  This is a must-see for Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki fans, and I’ll hold off giving a full review until I figure out what exactly is happening in the story.

“The wind is rising; we must endeavor to live.”