The Wind Rises: Thoughts on, rather than a more traditional movie review

It begins, as most things do, with a dream.

A young man dreams of building a career, a life, in a young, growing profession. The field isn't taken seriously by many at the time, but the young man works at at, imitating his idols for a time, before deciding to scrap things and go his own way. He travels the path from salaryman to head visionary, respected by his employers and those who work for him, His work takes him across the world, permitting him to develop a stronger understanding of what will help him improve his work. Shadows cross his dream, yet he comes back, supported by love. And through it all, a dream grows, is built, until all can see the dream given form.

I might be talking about Hayao Miyazaki. I might be talking about Jiro Horikoshi, as presented in Miyazaki's film The Wind Rises, a fictionalized biopic on the early career of the designer of the Japanese Zero. I wonder how much of the film is autobiographical. Miyazaki's father was the director of Miyazaki Airplane, which made parts for Japanese fighters during World War Two. This permitted young Hayao a more comfortable lifestyle than many in Japan at that time.

While overt magic and fantasy elements are absent this time, The Wind Rises has familiar Miyazaki themes and signatures. Lush, beautiful landscapes liberally pepper the film. The presence of war, both in understanding of what the aircraft will do, to what Japan is building towards, and even echoes of the end of the war shown through a natural disaster in Tokyo, the earthquake of 1923, that resembles, not accidentally, I suspect, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Perhaps I am wrong to say there is no magic in The Wind Rises. There is always magic in a tale well told.

It ends, as it begins, and shows that the dream continues, even when the animators, or engineers, put away their tools.