Two
quick notes: first, please try to watch “The Wind Rises” before reading this as it will be easier to understand some aspects of my analysis,
and second, Miyazaki’s inspiration for this film came from a single quote from
the real-life version of the protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi:
In late 2013, Hayao
Miyazaki, the famed director of anime and masterful storyteller, announced that
his upcoming film, “The Wind Rises,” would be his final film. After watching
the master’s supposed final work a number of times, I have come to the
conclusion that “The Wind Rises,” not the often-picked “Spirited Away,” is his
most ambitious, beautiful, and thematic creation of his enduring artistic
career; it is his masterpiece. I firmly believe that “The Wind Rises” captures
the very essence and nature of humanity better than any of his other works.
Above all, it is a deeply sad but very human story of the wind rising and a man
striving to live.
Now, I’d like to tell
you about a maxim that I both love and utterly despise because of this film.
That maxim is “live your dream.” This has reverberated through my ears hundreds
of times from various friends, family, and people that I’ve met, so let’s just
say that I’ve heard this maxim a lot, maybe a little too much. But, Miyazaki
does a great thing with this film. He confronts this maxim with the case of
Jiro Horikoshi, a man who simply wanted to build beautiful airplanes, who is
faced with the true dilemma of pursuing his dream, even if it takes the love of
his life and results in the single greatest conflict in the history of
humanity.
In
the film’s opening sequence, we see Jiro literally dreaming about airplanes.
His dream is full of idealized versions of both airplanes and Japanese society,
reflecting his dream’s innocent nature. After he reads accounts of the Italian
aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, he has dream where Caproni is real
and his creations reign supreme, like “building(s) out of ancient Rome” (“The Wind Rises”).
Caproni tells him that he can pursue his dream of creating beautiful airplanes,
despite not being able to fly them. He tells Jiro that “airplanes are beautiful
dreams, engineers turn dreams into reality” (IMdb.com). With that inspiring
maxim firmly planted in his mind, Jiro resolves to make the creation of
beautiful airplanes his purpose in life. His dreams are a compass that will
guide him through thick and thin, good and bad times, until that dream is truly
realized.
Jiro ends up enduring
many failures in his pursuit of his dream, but he weathers those setbacks and
fulfills his dream by designing the greatly feared and respected Mitsubishi A6M
fighter, commonly called the Zero. He leaps past Japan’s apparent backwardness
and creates a truly masterful piece of aviation technology. He creates his
masterpiece, a stunningly beautiful airplane that powers past all that weighs
it down to soar high in the sky. However,
his masterpiece was commissioned as a tool to wage war and kill Japan’s enemy,
whether or not Jiro wants to admit that fact or not.
The
fact of the matter is that Jiro Horikoshi created the planes that helped to
bomb Pearl Harbor and kill hundreds. He created the planes that were used as a
means to inflict damage to U.S. ships via kamikaze attacks, in which both
Japanese and American lives were lost. He created the planes that only
prolonged the greatest conflict in human history, World War II. Miyazaki really
wants you to make this deeply human and empathetic connection between creator
and creation. He uses terrific sound design and visuals to make this connection
firmly and effectively (he uses sounds made with human mouths to create the sounds
of the planes’ engines and flight). The film creates a situation where you
cannot physically separate what the creator is and what the creation is; like
any good Miyazaki film, that line is all but totally blurred. Miyazaki doesn’t
want you to even consider trying to separate creator from creation because he
thinks that they are inseparable, and because he thinks that you should not
even try as that just creates an exception to a person’s responsibility and
totally defeats his prevalent theme.
Miyazaki
simply wants to show just what the pursuit and fulfillment of one’s dream can,
and it often will, costs. Throughout the film, Jiro is slowly and subtly shown
just what the pursuit of his dreams may bring to bear. From Dr. Junkers help in
creating the Third Reich’s power by designing airplanes and helping to boost
Nazi Germany’s economy, to loss of the woman he loves, Naoko. Soon after
falling for one another, the two lovers get engaged despite Naoko’s possibly
deadly infection of tuberculosis. As engaged partners, Jiro goes back to
designing his masterpiece while Naoko suffers a lung hemorrhage. Naoko simply
wants to live and share her love with Jiro, but he remains distant steadily
working on his dream’s fulfillment. She rejects the alpine sanatorium that is
keeping her alive to simply be with Jiro. She treasures the brief moments she
has with him between their marriage and the completion of Jiro’s masterpiece,
but she slowly begins to succumb to her illness. As Jiro’s masterpiece soars
far above the cloud tops, breaking records and astounding his colleagues, he
senses Naoko’s death via a gust of wind. He then truly sees the cost of his
dream: the loss of one of his loves and I would argue a significant portion of
his humanity.
With
Naoko’s passing, Jiro is forced to weather the storm called World War II that
all but destroys his creations and his country. In the end, he walks in his
kingdom of dreams that he created and shared with Caproni. Now, that kingdom is
full of the grounded hulks of his fallen airplanes. He and Caproni see
squadrons of Zeros fly off and up into the sky, and they marvel at just what
Jiro created, a truly masterful piece of aeronautical engineering and art. As
B-29s and the few remaining Zeros duel in the sky, we see clearly see that the
fires that have all but engulfed Japan are of his own making. I think that this
is Miyazaki’s most melancholic, reflective, and perhaps greatest scene. We see,
with eyes unclouded, the true cost of Jiro’s pursuit of his dream. He did what
many of us strive to do; fulfill our dreams. But by using Naoko as a deeply personal
cost and the Zero’s involvement in World War II, Miyazaki is able to hit us
with a double bladed sword of empathy and understanding for both Jiro and the utter
dilemma of a situation that he was faced with.
I don’t think that
Miyazaki is saying that Jiro should not
have pursued his dream of flight because he simply wanted to show that dreams,
like life itself, do indeed cost something. I think that Miyazaki, like Jiro’s
projection of Caproni, believes “that airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams” (“The Wind Rises”),
but Miyazaki might as well be saying that all
dreams are cursed. But like Mr. Caproni and Kozo Fuyutsuki, my favorite
side character from “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” Miyazaki would, to borrow some
quotes, “prefer a world with pyramids” and “a world with humanity, not matter
how stained with sin,” that is he would
rather have a world where dreams are cursed than a world where there are no
dreams at all (“The
Wind Rises”) (“Neon Genesis
Evangelion, Episode 12”). Miyazaki would prefer a world where the Zero fighter
exists more than a world wherein it does not exist simply because that the Zero
is a testament to a fulfilled and realized dream. Ultimately, he would rather
have a world where dreams are cursed, wherein they cost something in their
fulfillment, than a world where those same dreams simply don’t exist.
Most people write off
Miyazaki as a pessimist because of his distaste with modern society in general
and his longing for younger, more innocent times, but I think that’s due to a
fundamental misunderstanding of both Miyazaki and his themes (Hayao
Miyazaki). To me (and I’m borrowing a quote here and I can’t
find my source, sorry!), Miyazaki, like many other people I admire and some of
his characters, is a pessimist that really, really wants to be an optimist. He
uses his greatest characters to convince the audience, and perhaps himself,
that humanity is innately good and worth saving. He uses them, especially the
character of Jiro, to convince us that a world with cursed dreams really is
worth the costs in suffering, heartbreak, and tragedy.
“The Wind Rises” is a very subtle and haunting
tragedy because we as the audience can see the costs of his dream early on,
while Jiro, the main character in the story, simply cannot. Over the course of the film, the very
innocence that spawned his high-striving dream is slowly, but abruptly,
destroyed in the end by the very same dream that was spawned from that very
same innocence. That is the single most
poignant and melancholic idea that Miyazaki has ever put to film.
So
with that, can we morally fault Jiro for simply doing what many of us strive to
do? After all, he simply realized and fulfilled his dreams.
That is why I hate and
despise the maxim of “live your dream” as the almost stupefying positive
connotation associated with the phrase both ignores and defeats the themes
learned in the case of Jiro Horikoshi. Sure we could say that he never fired a
shot in that war or we might say that the decision to ignore what was best for her
health was solely Naoko’s, but I think, as well as Miyazaki, that is a very
dangerous path that could lead us, a Western audience, to do just what people
hate about modern Japan: ignoring or avoiding responsibility. The maxim of
“live your dream” creates an air of total positivity that, when the situation
is different, can lead to a slippery slope of denying responsibility for making
events occur the way they do. In essence, that maxim creates an atmosphere of
exceptions that only deny the repercussions and effects of a person’s actions.
And
should Jiro have been locked away and remembered as a war criminal?
Essentially, why should anyone empathize with someone that created war
machines, intentionally or not?
Well, Miyazaki has
answers to these questions within the film itself. He wants us, the audience,
to simply remember Jiro as someone that pursued his dreams so fervently that he
ended up ignoring or not realizing the costs of those dreams. Jiro thought that
fulfilling his dreams was life, but in fact that is not the only part to life. Jiro
strived and strived, and thought that fulfilling his dream would complete his
life, but if anything, that striving and pursuit only opened a bigger hole in it.
It is only at the end,
only with the help of Naoko, that Jiro realizes that living is more than just
fulfilling his dreams; it is one long journey that has many ups and downs,
twists and turns. He was so adamant about living that he forgot to enjoy and
create a life. This isn’t a cautionary tale, or at least Miyazaki doesn’t want
you to think that. After hearing Naoko’s words, “You must live, darling. You
must live!” Jiro realizes that he must put his dreams, their costs, and even
his love behind and accept them as simply parts of life itself; the ups and
downs, twists and turns (“The Wind Rises”).
Ultimately, Jiro has no
regrets; he, like Miyazaki, chose a world where pyramids, airplanes, and the
cursed nature of dreams exist, and he has wrought the consequences of those
decisions. Miyazaki wants you to simply endure, even if you’ve lost the
innocence he features so prominently in his films. Perhaps Miyazaki thinks that
humans are doomed to be pessimists, but perhaps he thinks that even while we
have the tendency to be crushed by the world and our influence upon it; we
should live on, no matter the circumstances. Perhaps that is only way to discovering
the path towards optimism and renewing one’s innocence in Miyazaki’s view.
That
is the single most optimistic thing I know, and Miyazaki shows this idea brilliantly
by presenting it through the case of Jiro Horikoshi, a man that just wanted to
create something beautiful.
A quick final note: This film is a
perfect example of why I love the storytelling medium of film so much (the fact
that it is anime is icing on the cake). It has the very unique quality of being
able to generate a very strong emotional and empathetic response to characters
and the choices that they make. Films take my notions about the world, crumple
them up, and spit on them with situations, characters, or decisions that all
but eviscerate my ideas and notions. And guess what? This is accomplished in
this film with minimum dialogue; it’s a perfect example of “show, don’t tell.”
I love film!
~
Works Cited ~
If
you enjoyed this analysis, then you should totally check this one out:
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