The Wind Rises - film review

The hand-drawn animation of what is being billed as Hayao Miyazaki's last film roars with life, but the story is inert
Charlotte O'Sullivan16 February 2015

A new film by 73 year old Hayao Miyazaki is always cause for joy. But lovers of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Howl's Moving Castle may find their spirits sinking as they watch this fey, saccarine biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane (used, amongst other things, to bomb Pearl Harbor). The Wind Rises is being sold as an adult movie but its protagonists aren't nearly as complex as the phantasmagorical figures crammed into the Japanese director's kid-friendly oeuvre.

With the poetic, decent Jiro (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in English language versions) ugly realities are kept hidden from view. His angelic wife has tuberculosis, yet shuffles out of his life before death strikes. She wants Jiro to remember her “as she was”, which we're supposed to find beautifully tragic. It's creepy.

Meanwhile, Jiro's conflicted relationship with the arms industry is clumsily explored via fantasy sequences in which Jiro converses with Italian engineer, Caproni, whose brilliant designs, too, became synonymous with carnage. Craft vs Conscience; it's all spelt out. The film has provoked outrage in very different quarters (Miyazaki has come under attack for being both anti-Japanese and for being soft on Japanese war-crimes). But the politics aren't the problem. It's the lack of dramatic tension. The hand-drawn animation roars with life (shadows crawl over walls like spiders, an earthquake gobbles up homes). How gutting that the story is so inert. It's being billed as Hayao Miyazaki's last film. He can't leave us this way.

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