Review: The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises is a fictional story of Jiro Horikoshi

Since spring, VIFF has held a Studio Ghibli film festival, showing some of the best animated films during spring break, the summer and now a few more to wrap up the year. This past weekend I watched The Wind Rises for the first time and really enjoyed its message and how the story unfolded.

Just before the film began, a guest speaker gave a short introduction to explain the meaning of the title. The Wind Rises is from a line from a poem by Paul Valery called Le Cimetiere Marin, or The Graveyard by the Sea.

The romance between Jiro and Nahoko is sweet

The last stanza starts with: "The wind is rising!... We must try to live!", which is the theme of Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 swan song film (since then it's become The Boy and the Heron). Basically, it is about living life to the fullest and feeling alive.

The Wind Rises is a semi-autobiography or Jiro Horikoshi, who was the chief engineer of many Japanese fighter planes used in World War II. Originally Miyazaki published a manga series about Horikoshi from 2009-2010, and was later persuaded by his staff to make it into an animated film three years later.

His personal interest in planes comes from his father being a director of his brother's company that manufactured rudders for fighter planes in World War II. As a result planes feature in many of his films.

In The Wind Rises, the animated film follows Horikoshi's life from when he was a boy fascinated with planes and later went on to study aeronautical engineering, and later worked on designing planes for the military. However, Miyazaki added some fictional characters, including Jiro's love interest Nahoko Satomi, and fictional encounters with Italian aeronautical engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni. It's funny that he starts speaking Italian and then suddenly switches to Japanese.

Horikoshi was an engineer

The pace of the 126-minute film is never rushed, giving time for each scene to unfold and breathe before moving onto the next one. The dialogue is thoughtful and at times sprinkled with wry humour.

Many sarcastic lines come from Jiro's boss, a short man with spectacles and is basically a slave driver, but Jiro is so passionate about planes he is willing to work overtime and calmly takes on assignments even though his boss is anxious about meeting deadlines and pleasing clients. 

The romance between Jiro and Nahoko is very sweet and the storyline shows how fate -- or rather wind -- brings them together many times.

However, the plot has a strange detour when the Japanese secret police are after Jiro, so he hides in his boss's home; this storyline doesn't seem to be resolved at all in the end.

Nevertheless, The Wind Rises is a good reminder that we should not take anything for granted and appreciate what we have. Life is too short for regrets and to always move forward enjoying what we love to do.

The Wind Rises

Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

126 minutes