The Wind Rises, the new film from 72-year-old Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, takes its title from a line in a Paul Valery poem ("The wind is rising! We must try to live!") and is inspired by the life of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi who designed Mitsubishi's A6M Zero fighter. It's probably the gentlest animated feature about an armaments designer you'll ever see.
"Poor countries want airplanes," Jiro (Hideaki Anno) is told, as they watch oxen haul the latest prototype out onto the field for testing. Lacking the power of western engines, Jiro and his fellow engineers must instead work with everything at his disposal – flush rivets, split flaps, retractable undercarriages, the lightest aluminium alloy – to reduce the drag on that aircraft and pluck it into the vast, blue yonder.
In that face-off between western power and eastern ingenuity you have both a portrait of pre-war Japan, its economy in the tank, desperate to pull itself into the 20th century, and a clue to what gives Miyazaki's film its lyrical lift. In many respects, the animation traditions of America and Japan follow the course of their aeronautics industries.
Whether it be Mickey losing control of his magic in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, young Dash learning to temper his speed in The Incredibles ("I'll only be the best by a tiny bit"), to the young sorceress of this year's Disney hit Frozen, relishing the icy thrill of female empowerment, America's animated features are, to a large extent, soft power tutorials – parables of the risk and responsibilities of great power. They put kids in the cockpit and teach them how to take their country for a spin.
Mizyaki's hero is instead marked by a more modest, even self-effacing gallantry. Too short-sighted to be a pilot, Jiro peers at the world through thick Harold Lloyd spectacles, watching planes carve great arcs against slowly moving cloudbanks. In his dreams, he talks a walk on their wings alongside his hero, Italian aviator Giovanni Caproni (Mansai Nomura), who tells him "Airplanes are not for war or making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams waiting to be swallowed by the sky."
Miyazaki's fascination with flight goes all the way back to 1984's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, whose heroine negotiates the post-apocalyptic jungle by glider; was most fully explored in 1992's Porco Rosso, about a flying ace who happens to be a pig, chasing air pirates in the Adriatic sea.
The Wind Rises certainly doesn't scrimp on its aeronautic minutiae; taking inspiration from a mackerel bone, Jiro's designs for strut fittings spring to life from his table in demonstration of aerodynamic principle. But for Miyazaki, the wonkishness equally edges into another abiding obsessions: the animating power of nature herself. From its shots of blooming parasols, breeze-filled curtains, fluttering snowflakes and rustling bamboo grass, there is barely a frame of The Wind Rises that doesn't serve as a reminder why Miyazaki named his studio after a wind, the Ghibli, capable of reshaping whole desert landscapes at a single stroke. Sounds awfully lot like an animator to me. It even blew Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas into each other's arms in The English Patient, if memory serves.
Wind plays cupid here, too, in the aftermath of the 1932 earthquake that flattens Tokyo, here a roiling behemoth that ripples the earth like a rug, although as always with Miyazaki it's the aftermath that interests him most: a series of subterranean groans and burps, as ash and embers fill the air, threatening the stacks of the Tokyo library. Jiro rescues a beautiful young girl, Nahoko (Miori Takimoto), using his slide-rule as a splint for her broken arm, before going to work for Mitsubishi, who send him to Nazi Germany to study the work of that country's all-metal planes. "Who are they planning to bomb with this thing?" he asks. "America, probably".
A naif who dreams of birdlike flight while his country readies itself for war, Jiro returns to Tokyo, where he raises laughter from his colleagues with his suggestion that "If we leave the guns out we should be OK."
In some ways, he is something of distant cousin to the young Jim Ballard, who in Empire of the Sun gazed on the fuselage rivets of Japanese Zero fighters, "dizzied" by their "magic and poetry": "An immense pathos surrounded the throttle and undercarriage levers, the rivets stamped into the metal fabric by some unknown Japanese woman on the Mitsubishi assembly line."
In Spielberg's film adaptation of Ballard's book, Ballard's identification with Japanese pilots became an image of transcendence, a flowering of international friendship amid a shower of sparks, but in the book Jim's gaze is a little beadier, more unnerving, with just a dash of Stockholm syndrome: he is fetishizing the likely instruments of his own death.
A similar paradox enfolds Miyazaki's film, which has come under fire from some critics, both in Japan and here in America, where it's nomination for the best animated feature by the Boston Film Critic's circle brought objections from members who objected to its canonization of the man at least partly responsible for the carnage of Pearl Harbor. The looming cataclysm is not absent from Miyazaki's canvas; in Germany, Jiro witnesses Nazi thugs delivering a beating in an alleyway and later crosses paths with a Jewish emigre who warns him of Hitler's plans for world conquest.
"Japan will blow itself up," he hears. But it is telling that the most vividly realized scenes of devastation are nature's doing, not man's. The only blood spilled is that coughed into a handkerchief by Nahoko, whom Jiro later marries, their love shaped by their dwindling time together: she suffers from tuberculosis.
This is Miyazaki's major departure from Horikoshi's life story, partially inspired by Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, and there is a certain poetic symmetry to Nahoko's suffering from a respiratory disease – more airways, only this time internal and blocked. I wonder if Miyazaki's poetically occluded view of the bloodshed to come is as myopic as some of his critics maintain: the latter half of the film comes suffused with melancholy and loss, it lovely processions of images is all the more poignant for Miyazaki's recent announcement that this will be his last film. "I'm retiring" Caponi tells Jiro in a dream. "This is my last design." The loss is ours.
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Naturally the animation is a joy to behold. The film's crisp colours and commanding lines summon up a ravishing portrait of pre-war Japan with its puffing steam-trains, huddled neighbourhoods and lulling nocturnal tram-rides through town. Some of the setpieces (most notably the apocalyptic earthquake that leads to the burning of Tokyo) are the equal of anything the director has produced in Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totoro. But the film itself is genteel to a fault. It's too polite, it needs more bite.
• The Wind Rises is on limited US release beginning Friday. It will expand to more theatres on 28 February, and will be in UK theatres on 9 May
