The Wind Rises (2013)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.
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As is, it's something more akin to Studio Ghibli's own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible.
Seriously, as feeling more conscious of its overlooked dark side, now I wonder whether my viewing of this film could have been improved by a double feature show with other Japanese animation " Grave of the Fireflies " (1988).
Yet just as with Isao Takahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies,” about two children surviving amid the terrors of World War II, it would be hard to argue that the subject of Mr. Miyazaki’s film was cavalierly seized upon.
The sickly sweet tone reminds me of Luchino Visconti's pageant of fascist "beauty," The Damned (1969), as well as his adaptation of Mann's Death in Venice (1971).
Miyazaki has often been referred to as “Japan’s Walt Disney,” but that somewhat flip comparison falls flat in the face of Miyazaki’s body of work, which more often takes its cues from the early 20th century cartoonist Winsor McCay’s whimsical and rollicking Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland strip and Japanese mythology.
The sickly sweet tone reminds me of Luchino Visconti's pageant of fascist "beauty," The Damned (1969), as well as his adaptation of Mann's Death in Venice (1971).
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(The sequences reminded me a good bit of the recurring dream in Satoshi Kon’s 2006 film Paprika.)
There have been many superior producers of anime, led by the late, great Satoshi Kon (“Millennium Actress,” “Paprika”), but the septuagenarian Miyazaki is regarded as Japan’s answer to Walt Disney and gets his films distributed to American art-house theaters.
It actually reminds me of “Madadayo,” the last film of another Japanese master, Akira Kurosawa.
It has the elegiac feel of other career-twilight movies, such as John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn," Akira Kurosawa's "Madadayo," Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband," Terence Fisher's "Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell" (yes) and Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion," a movie literally haunted by an angel of death, albeit an attractive one ( Virginia Madsen ).
The Wind Rises, believed to be his swansong, certainly feels like a final film: grand, eloquent and epic, it’s Gone With the Wind-esque in scope and purpose, an inspired-by-history love story/biopic centred around Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II.
For one thing it brings “Gone With the Wind” emotional-historical sweep to a piece of animation.
Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the March 2 Academy Awards, the film can be read as Miyazaki’s Amarcord or Fanny and Alexander, but it’s not technically autobiographical, as the Fellini and Bergman reflections were.
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No one who’s seen My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service,or Spirited Away is likely to forget the outré imagery that defines those films, even if the details of their somewhat random stories fade away.
Miyazaki is best known for cartoons like “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” movies featuring imaginative fantasy worlds that appealed to children and adults alike.
Hayao Miyazaki has been a critical darling as an animator almost since his films started being imported to the U.S. He’s been hailed as a master and even given an Oscar for “Spirited Away.”
“The Wind Rises” is a lyrical animated historical fantasy from the maker of the children’s classics “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke.”
(Start with "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke" or "Spirited Away.")
Like our dreams, his animated features — which include such modern masterpieces as “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” among others — mix day-to-day concerns with imaginative fantasy that propels us to other times in other worlds.
The Wind Rises is a lovingly-constructed wonder, a grand and sweeping work that harkens back to Hollywood epics of yesteryear like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.