The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki

The Wind Rises is Miyazaki’s swansong to an incredible career in the animation industry. Having created some of the best animations I’ve ever seen, creating that final animation must have been a difficult decision. He has chosen not, like many of his animations, to go for an adventure story, but to go for a historical story, based on the aeronortical engineer Jiro Horikoshi. Being Miyazaki though, he hasn’t simply gone for a historical biopic. This has a more poetical feel to it, filled with dream sequences of his hero, the Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni. There is the obvious conflict in the film between the honorable Jiro, whose life long dream is to design aircrafts and the fact that the planes were used in the second world war. The title of the animation comes from the French poet/philosopher Paul Valéry. The line “The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!” comes from his poem “The Graveyard by the Sea”. With all this destruction and horror around us the best we can do is try to live. This is a theme that goes through the animation, from the destructive earthquake at the beginning of the film, with the associated wind, to the destructive power of the war. There is also the determination to live the relationship he has with Nahoko despite the fact that she has tuberculosis.

The film reflects Miyazaki’s own love of aircrafts and his own conflicts between their beauty and what they were used for. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki said he had “very complex feelings” about World War II since, as a pacifist, he felt militarist Japan had acted out of “foolish arrogance”. However, Miyazaki also said that the Zero plane “represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of – (Zeros) were a truly formidable presence, and so were the pilots who flew them”.