The Wind Rises

The great Japanese animator, Hayao Miyazaki, directed this animated feature in 2013 and it is his valedictory work -- Miyazaki has said that he is retiring from films and that this will be his last movie. The movie illustrates in unmistakable form the fact that the Japanese, or, at least, Japanese artists of Miyazaki's age, remain unable to come to terms with World War Two. A sad and extraordinarily gentle work, the cartoon simply comes to an end, one that seems profoundly unsatisfying, when the war appropriates the aeronautical designer Jiro's plans for graceful, feather-light aircraft to military fighter production. Miyazaki doesn't know what to make of this and so he fills the screen with images of war-planes like delicate origami constructions -- they are shown to be derived from the hero's study of fishbones -- the same kind of elegantly folded and graceful bird forms, cranes, that the Japanese put afloat in the river at Hiroshima each year on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of that city. We learn that of all the war planes built to Jiro's plan, none returned. Giant clouds livid with fire fill the screen and, then, there is a final elegaic sequence in which Jiro dreams that he has arisen from a field strewn with smashed fragments of his planes; in his vision, he climbs a hill away from the brutal wreckage of the war, meets his muse, the Italian plane designer, Caproni, and, then, sees his wife who had died of tuberculosis -- and, suddenly, the screen goes black. The audience is puzzled. The whole film has been building toward a conflict, Jiro's appalled recognition that the aircraft that he created as things of pure and abstract beauty have been defiled, used to rain fire and death from the sky on other human beings. But, the film averts its eyes and, instead, ends abruptly, in an unsatisfying fantasy. This is not to say that the war is absent from the film -- in fact, the war is portrayed with unstinting emotional power, but in a sequence that is, ostensibly, about the great Edo earthquake. This is a characteristic strategy of Japanese films -- displacement. Godzilla, a movie featuring a fire-breathing nuclear-spawned city-destroying lizard, of course, is really about Hiroshima and the incendiary fire-bombing of Tokyo; the war is implied but the imagery of destruction is displaced away from its actual context (the war) and fantasized into imagery about a giant reptilian monster. (The apocalyptic fantasies of Neo-Tokyo wracked by catastrophe in the anime "Ikiru" have a similar evasive effect -- we see a city destroyed, and, in fact, repeatedly destroyed, but this is shown as taking place in future.) The destruction wrought by the aircraft, accordingly, is invoked allusively in the powerful, and grandiose (and disturbing) imagery of the great earthquake and fire. By evading the dramatic conflict that drives the entire film, Miyazaki makes the movie seem fundamentally pointless, an exercise in pure aestheticism -- it is as if the movie is as blinkered and short-sighted as its somewhat dim-witted, if earnest and brave hero. Nonetheless, any film animated by Miyazaki and his Ghibli Studios is worth seeing and this movie is fantastically beautiful if, perhaps, twenty minutes too long. The opening half-hour, comprised mostly of glorious fantasies of peaceful aviation, is extraordinarily moving and beautiful (but the pay-off for these episodes -- the depiction of planes used for warfare-- isn't provided and so this sequence retrospectively ends up seeming rather remote and disconnected from the real substantive issues that the film addresses. (The dream sequences, which occur frequently in the film, are its highlights -- but this, in turn, emphasizes Miyazaki's evasion of real-life conflict in favor of visionary dream.) The movie luxuriates in countless details that are fantastically beautiful: the halo of insects around a light in the evening, wind stirring water, subtle light effects, clouds lit, as from within, and radiant as stained glass, the texture of an ancient beam supporting a house. There is a sex-scene (implied) in which a woman lies underneath a startlingly red kimono hanging like a flayed and crucified angel over the lovers' futon -- when Jiro's bride exposes her chest, decorously covered in a white garment, the movie has a startling erotic charge. One sequence in which a woman is praying at a sacred spring in a forest and, then, after encountering her lover, is caught in a sudden rainstorm is one of the most rapturous and gorgeous sequences of pictures in film history -- it is like the great imagery of rain puckering the surface of the French river at the end of Renoir's "A Day in the Country". The wind rises and the water in the spring becomes opaque and we see the storm darken the landscape and pelt a little Shinto shrine -- this all has a visionary clarity that is also stylized and the falling rain is arrayed in powerfully abstract patterns. There is a wondeful frieze-like image, repeated in the film, of oxen hauling planes to an airstrip where they will be tested and the quotidian details of aeronautical engineering are carefully shown, Brancusi-like images of graceful curves and hyperbola in flight. The movie is generous and cosmopolitan -- in one sequence, we hear Schubert's "Winterreise" sung from within a tenement house while streetfighting, portrayed expressionistically by shadow figures, convulses the streets of Dessau. A kind German cites Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and there is an extraordinary image of people dying from tuberculosis wrapped in cocoons on the terrace of a sanitarium while a snowstorm, filmed aerially, fills the air with falling flakes. The movie is crammed with depictions of the wind, many of them very beautiful. But this all has a sinister edge: when we see the sky fill with crane-shaped origami of fighter planes, we recall that the wind ("kaze") was central to the imagery of the Japanese war effort -- "Kamikaze," that is, "divine wind."