Hayao Miyazaki’s final film The Wind Rises is set in World War II Japan. It follows the aeronautic engineer Jirô Horikoshi (voiced by Joseph Gordon Levitt) and his quest to build airplanes.
The heart of the film lives in the illustrations of nature and in the dream sequences. The nature backgrounds are like impressionist paintings that bring to mind Renoir or Monet’s water lilies, and the dream sequences have animated clouds so well that the line discerning animation from reality blurs.
In most of his dreams, Jirô speaks with his hero Count Caproni, voiced by Stanley Tucci. Caproni, a boisterous, amiable Italian man, very well could have been a character straight out of Fellini’s Amarcord. The first time he meets with Jirô, he says to him, “Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.” Miyazaki plays on this line throughout the whole film with some sort of self-deprecation as he, too, turns dreams into reality as a filmmaker.
Miyazaki, in his final film, makes amazing feats in animation. In his portrayal of houses during an earthquake scene, he creates painted houses that look like they are attached to marionette strings moving in and out of the screen. Miyazaki also does a point-of-view shot from our optically impaired hero. Seeing part of the world in focus while another part is not, in addition to seeing the reflection of Jirô in his own glasses, creates an effect that has yet to be done in animation.
Throughout the film, Miyazaki flirts with duality. He either went into detail drawing the faces of his characters or played with shading. The crowds would be characters that had one discernable feature and a single color to offset their hair. Contrasting them with breathtaking portrayals of the countryside, that can only be described as Miyazaki’s personal odes to nature.
Miyazaki plays with the Western lens as well. Throughout the film, Jirô and his best friend Honjô, voiced by John Krasinski, critique Japan for its backwards ways and praise the superiority of Western technology. Aside from having characters overtly praise Western society, the film raises up the West in small tacit ways. The soundtrack is filled with classical and accordion-laden music. The backgrounds are done in the style of impressionist paintings. Even the title, The Wind Rises, comes from the French poet Paul Varléy’s “The Graveyard By The Sea.” Not to mention, the pack of cigarettes that Jirô pulls out and apologizes for being Japanese had their brand name written in English. Miyazaki juxtaposes these Western praises with the fact that his film is done in the form of anime, an intrinsically Japanese art form.
The art of the film is not just the animation, but it’s also the anti-war message that Miyazaki sends out. The Wind Rises’ anti-war influences owe credit to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
Despite the film’s anti-war messages, Jirô has this almost naive love for airplanes. He makes airplanes, not for war, but for the sake of art. He wants to make his dreams a reality, but in order to do so, he causes innumerable deaths. So, he makes these airplanes real and remains in his dreams with a purer form of airplanes.
In the last scene of The Wind Rises, Jirô talks to Caproni and says, “None of them [the airplanes] came back.” To which Caproni responds, “There was nothing to come back to.” It is almost as if Miyazaki is commenting on his place in the animation world. He has made art, and he has sent his art out into the world like Jirô and his airplanes. The Wind Rises surpasses by far anything that Miyazaki has made in the past, and it could not have been a more perfect final salute to the art and film world.