Love Letters: The Wind Rises
Being reuploaded here, written on 2/9/22
Just finished watching The Wind Rises
Wonderful movie, one of the best ive seen in my whole life. As someone who grew up in America it feels like a slice of an exotic cake, baked well and long with rich flavors of culture and love. It demonstrates to me that all wars are waged between evils and at the cost of everything which is good and wonderful in this world, but that good and love still exist under all that filth.
Even for Ghibli standards, the movie is breathtakingly beautiful. Colors pop out into the foreground with stunning clarity and to great effect. The color choices always feels vibrant, as if each one wants to help bring the story to life. Beautiful blue skies truly feel as though they stretch out before the characters, giving hope as it contrasts with the grey steel and black smoke of the war ridden world below.
Every single frame present breathes with the weight of beautiful wind. It draws in drama and character and scenery and exudes love and and wisdom and hope. Hope that even in a world obsessed with violence and hatred while being content to ignore death, an artist can still weave a tapestry of dreams on the canvas of their own reality. The blue sky, even when filled with weaponized planes, can still bear dreams along with it.
Moving into the story itself, it does in fact center around a man whose planes killed hundreds of my own country men in the last World War: Jiro Horikoshi. The film builds sympathy for Jiro; not by making the military men waging the war seem like patriots and Jiro himself as a noble hero only trying to defend the inocent, but by painting him as a dreamer above all else whose dreams are used to wage war despite his apathy towards the war being waged.
Jiro dreams not just of planes but in planes. He dreams in their language: lift, drag ,and tension are not just ideas to him but ingredients which combine to make something amazing to behold. Jiro dreams of clear elegant lines worthy of living in the kingdom of the sky above him. Nightmares are manifested as the destruction of his planes through a lack of forethought in his design: which feels very core to the idea of passionate devotion to a craft yes, but also to engineering in some particular way.
As an aside, the difference between an engineer and an artist is their concern with reality. To the artist, reality is everything they are trying to escape. Their goal is to create something beyond reality, something which can lift the consciousness and the mind above their daily toiles toward some kind of clearer more human message. The world after all can often feel a drab and difficult place, so often the further removed from reality a piece of art is, the better.
The engineer also seeks to alleviate human suffering, but though through much different means. Rather than trying to make humanity forget their troubles, engineers can seek to actually eliminate them. They identify problems, dream of solutions, and then try to bring those solutions into reality. Reality then, rather being the enemy, is a keyhole which dreams must pass through to become a piece of the fabric of reality. The struggle to bring dreams to fruition exists for the artist as well in the form of the difficulties they might feel with their technical abilities or their medium to express their deep dreams, but for the engineer this is only half of the battle. After going through those struggles and laying down design, it must enter the world as an object with a function, and that’s where dreams are shattered.
Jiro’s dreams are a main focus of The Wind Rises. He dreams along with the Italian engineer Caproini of elegant planes which do not have to account for machine guns in their load balancing. However to make any kind of plane both men have to go through a lot of failure in order to achieve their dreams. I love how even though Caproni is very much the Obi Wan wise man mentor of the film, we see one of his dreams fail to come to fruition on the first attempt, even on a craft with no war waging or youthful ignorance to hinder its design. Such a sequence presents a wonderful theme: if you’re not failing, you cannot possibly be learning.
Jiro too perseveres through a lot of failure in order to achieve his dreams. Many of his planes fall to the ground, some in his head and some after already going through the struggle of bringing their design into the real world, however he perseveres through all, and in the end does follow through on his dream of building a magnificent plane with clean lines which enhances the beauty in the sky even when there are as many planes as birds.
Plane making is not the subject of the film however. Jiro is. And Jiro would not be complete without Naoko, his true love. The relationship begins with Jiro is a teenager and Nahako an older child, as Jiro saves Naoko mother from an earthquake. Jiro’s instinct to do the right thing regardless of reward or outcome earns him the title of heroic knight in the eyes of Naoko and her mother, and both remember him even as Naoko mother succumbs to Tuberculosis and dies. Even though Jiro saves the mother and prolongs her life, she still passes all the same. Her daughter eventually shares the same fate, but not before being saved in a fundamentally larger and more loving way by Jiro. The beauty of the way he saved Naoko’s mother lies in the fact that Jiro acted without knowing who this women was and receiving nothing in return for his efforts.
The most beautiful aspect of the film has to be how Jiro and Naoko both save each other from straying too far in their extremes. Jiro helps Naoko to take some risks and live with him in Tokyo so they can share a life, if only for a fleeting dream. Similarly Naoko gives Jiro a home, something to work for, which motivates him just in the way Honjo said it would. Honjo is a pleasant presence in the film, I like how he serves as a depiction of a more typical salary man in Japan of the time for those of us who might otherwise miss how radical and different Jiro really is in his own context.
The last thing I want to touch on, and I am leaving some things out in this love letter, is a symbol which is used as Jiro and Naoko are falling in love. Naoko is in her room in the top floor of her father’s hotel trying to recover from her Tuberculosis and Jiro wants to send a message to her. His instinct is of course to use a paper airplane. He needs to iterate on the concept a few times before he finally reaches her, but when he does, it brings a smile to both of their faces, and I knew at that moment that their love was real.
The Wind Rises represents our reality better than any Ghibli movie: the story is raw and genuine while still containing all the beauty and wonder I have come to crave from Mr. Miyazaki.