As depicted by Miyazaki, Horikoshi is a dreamer and idealist, whose fantasies of soaring high above the clouds in machines of the utmost serenity are, in the end, perverted by the cold, hard reality of war.īut Miyazaki’s film isn’t a war story any more than My Neighbor Totoro is about the specter of a dying parent.
It’s a shame to know he’s taking his leave, but to paraphrase Casablanca’s Rick, we’ll always have Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and, finally, The Wind Rises.Ītypical of Miyazaki’s more fantastical outings, this film is a fictionalized account of a real person, Jiro Horikoshi, a young boy entranced by the idea of flight who grew up to be the man who invented the A6M Zero fighter plane, which would go on to become the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most infamous weapon against the Allies in World War II. Short version? Miyazaki’s body of work is unlike anything else the world of cinema has ever produced. Miyazaki has often been referred to as “Japan’s Walt Disney,” but that somewhat flip comparison falls flat in the face of Miyazaki’s body of work, which more often takes its cues from the early 20th century cartoonist Winsor McCay’s whimsical and rollicking Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland strip and Japanese mythology. Thankfully, Miyazaki’s relative obscurity was brief and, before long, his Studio Ghibli films were licensed for distribution – and redubbing, with high-profile, English-speaking voice actors – by Disney, leading to a slew of international awards, among them the Best Animated Feature Oscar for Spirited Away. I can still recall in detail Roger Ebert’s hyper-enthusiastic “two thumbs up” for a filmmaker who, at the time, few outside the budding Japanimation fan base in the U.S. For the uninitiated, Miyazaki, 73, has been Japan’s undisputed king of thoughtful, morally complex, and achingly beautiful animation going back – in my case, at least – to 1988’s enchanting My Neighbor Totoro. When Hayao Miyazaki announced, in 2013, that The Wind Rises would be his final film, fans of animated filmmaking the world over, myself included, took it to mean the end of an era.
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