Hayao Miyazaki’s fictionalised life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Zero, is as lovely as anything Studio Ghibli has drawn, and its earthquake is its finest sequence. It also keeps being asked what its hero’s planes are for, and keeps changing the subject.
Hayao Miyazaki had never made a film about a real person before The Wind Rises, and he picked a hard one. Jiro Horikoshi designed the Zero, the fighter Japan flew through most of the Second World War, and Miyazaki, who has spent a career hating war and adoring aeroplanes, puts both into one quiet man. The result is as lovely as anything his studio has drawn. It is also a film that keeps being asked what its hero’s planes are for, and keeps changing the subject. We recommend it, with that reservation kept in view.
The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 arrives early and is the finest thing in the film. Jiro (voiced by Hideaki Anno) is on a train to Tokyo when the ground lifts beneath it in a slow wave, and the sound is not a rumble but a groan. Roofs slide, the city burns orange under a brown sky, and Atsushi Okui’s photography layers the smoke so thickly that the crowds on the bridges seem to wade through it. We sat still and forgot to breathe. It was the quiet of the first second that did it, the moment before anyone on the train understands.
Against the earth Miyazaki sets the sky. Jiro’s dreams are visited by Giovanni Battista (Mansai Nomura), an Italian designer who builds aeroplanes with wings stacked like shelves and flies him over green fields and a warm sea. Joe Hisaishi scores these scenes for accordion and strings, and the theme is the most hummable thing he has written for Miyazaki in years. The Italian knows his planes are impossible. He asks Jiro whether he would rather live in a world with pyramids or without them, and the question hangs over the rest of the film.
The waking scenes are harder work, for Jiro and for us. He joins an aircraft company under Kurokawa (Masahiko Nishimura), a small furious man drawn to the height of a filing cabinet, beside his friend Honjô (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who says aloud what Jiro will not: that the country is poor, behind, and buying fighters it cannot afford. Takeshi Seyama cuts all this at a walking pace, and at 126 minutes the middle hour sags. Anno gives Jiro a flat, unhurried voice that suits a man who only comes alive over a drawing, and leaves the rest of the cast to carry him.
The second half belongs to Naoko Satomi (Miori Takimoto), the girl from the train, met again at a mountain hotel where she paints in a meadow and he launches paper aeroplanes at her from a balcony. It is a love story, and a sad one, for a reason we will let the film give you. Naoko is drawn with such care that it took us a while to notice she has no faults, no temper and no wants of her own. Jiro’s sister Kayo (Mirai Shida), who scolds him for forgetting his family, is the sharper woman and gets a fraction of the time. At the hotel a German called Castorp (Stephen Alpert) plays an old Werner R. Heymann song on the piano and remarks, between verses, that Japan and Germany are both about to blow up. Nobody argues with him.
That is how the film handles the war. Honjô says it, Castorp says it, the Italian asks it, and Jiro never answers, and Miyazaki does not make him. It is a film about a man who makes weapons and would rather talk about the wind. We think Miyazaki meant the sadness. We do not think he meant the evasion; it is the reason we put it below Porco Rosso, which had the same planes and the same decade and the nerve to laugh.
It was announced as Miyazaki’s last film, and was widely read as a will. It was not his last; The Boy and the Heron came ten years later. What remains is a middle hour that asks for patience and perhaps twenty minutes, spread across the earthquake and the dreams, that we would put beside anything the studio has made. Watch it subtitled, and notice how often the wind is doing the acting.
