Film Review - The Wind Rises by Studio Ghibli

Synopsis:

Jiro dreams of flying and designing beautiful airplanes, inspired by the famous Italian aeronautical designer Caproni. Nearsighted from a young age and unable to be a pilot, Jiro joins a major Japanese engineering company in 1927 and becomes one of the world's most innovative and accomplished airplane designers. The film chronicles much of his life, depicting key historical events, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Great Depression, the tuberculosis epidemic and Japan's plunge into war. Jiro meets and falls in love with Nahoko, and grows and cherishes his friendship with his colleague Honjo.

Check out the film here

Review:

Despite having read a little about the film before actually seeing it firsthand, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Of course, Studio Ghibli’s animations are extraordinary. I’ve seen quite a few of them and absolutely love the beautifully-drawn landscapes and characterisations, but most of all the themes that are caught up throughout each one. Sure, there’s the obvious ones like love and friendship, but there’s the idea of nature against man, the beast of war against humanity. 

The Wind Rises begins with us delving into young Jiro’s dreams to fly. Awake he knows he will never be able to, due to his near-sighted vision (I know how that feels!), but even as a young boy he wants to spend his life within the world of aviation. You get the impression he is very intelligent throughout the film, although this is not pushed too much on the audience. It is just a story of a boy’s dream becoming a reality. Of the history of how it happened and what it meant for him and his country both. 

I don’t know much about the true history of Dr Jiro Horikoshi and I know Studio Ghibli claims this is a mostly fictional version of his biography. The main elements are there of course, but I wonder if certain situations or characters were truly in Jiro’s life. The strikingly-animated earthquake he felt while travelling on a train back to Tokyo and the girl he met who would become his wife in later years, the man he met at a country hotel who seemed to disappear quite quickly and left Jiro with the threat of his country’s government in his wake, and again, even his wife who contracted tuberculosis and died it seems only a short time after they married - these seem true enough but the film ended with too many questions and I’m curious as to how much of it was truth and how much was fiction.

The film itself, while a beautiful animation, was quite leisurely. It did however tend to jump in terms of Jiro’s age. There was a short passage of him as a boy, and the next scene saw him as a young man, travelling back to the University of Tokyo. For me that was a little disjointed. I almost wanted some kind of in between bit to show the time flow.

Overall though I enjoyed the film. It was remiss of anything magical or mythological, but it was still a great animation and a great show of Hayao Miyazaki’s skills. 

I give it four out of five paper aeroplanes.