I'm going to pull out all the stops as I'm trying to verbalize how mightily impressed I am with "Kaze tachinu" (2013), or "The Wind Rises". Miyazaki has now been at the top of his game for well over thirty years, and his latest and apparently last film is remarkable in all the usual modi operandi – luxuriant use and understanding of colour, extraordinary level of detail in even the most mundane-seeming particulars that make the scenes come to life, fantastical sense of the relationship between dreams and imagination and reality, and how the story stems from the images and extends to the world of the creator, and ours.
The film tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, a genius whose enthusing search for perfection makes him descend the dream-path laid down in his youth. A story of determination, the film is also a profound meditation on the forces of nature: Tokyo destroyed in the earthquake and by fire, the aircraft in shreds and pieces. The influence and inspiration given to Jiro by what only he seems to be able to see around him makes him the visionary that he is.
Airplanes, trains, ships, radiators. The path to advance technology, first by exposure, then by imagination and invention. To be either Achilles, twenty years behind, or the tortoise.
Filmmaking is very much the same: seeing the unseen, imagining that which has not been imagined. This is not compromise or pampering to the lowest common denominator, but art that goes all the way beyond our wildest dreams and is still able to describe the indescribable so lucidly we become enraptured and immediately converted.
All the Miyazakis I've seen have some incredulously indelible moments without compare. Here there are several, including the utterly beautiful dreams, especially the wind, the opening five minutes in full, the remarkable sound design during the dreams and the earthquake, the water, the rain, and the flight.
And speak of the wind! It has personality, it's brilliant and as powerful as in "Ran" (1985), "Zerkalo" (1975) or "The Wind" (1928), in some ways even more so because it's animated in ways impossible to achieve in live action.
And the love that uncharacteristically seems to evade and elude, as it does in Wong Kar-Wai's "Fa yeung nin wa" (2000). She paints, and the picturesque mise en scène and the atmosphere is comparable to "Van Gogh" (1991) and its languorous lushness. Then there's Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" used by Castorp as an allegory for forgetting, yet the novel becomes real through Nahoko's illness and not as a token of forgetting but instead of never forgetting.
And then there's the war. "It flies like a dream", the pilot says, thanking Jiro during the apparent climax of the film, and Miyazaki cuts to a scene of utter destruction, a cemetery of people, ideals, ideas and technology, a disaster not unlike the earthquake in the beginning, yet so tragically unlike.
The name of the film comes from a quotation from Paul Valéry, but refers to Ghibli: the name of the studio but also the engine of the aircraft in "Porco Rosso" (1992). It's a real engine used in an Italian aircraft during World War II, designed by the Caproni seen in the film. In a way, then, this is as natural a conclusion to Miyazaki's career as one could imagine: a flight of imagination, carried by the most powerful wind, and a shared dream of great minds that we are lucky to be invited in.
The film tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, a genius whose enthusing search for perfection makes him descend the dream-path laid down in his youth. A story of determination, the film is also a profound meditation on the forces of nature: Tokyo destroyed in the earthquake and by fire, the aircraft in shreds and pieces. The influence and inspiration given to Jiro by what only he seems to be able to see around him makes him the visionary that he is.
Airplanes, trains, ships, radiators. The path to advance technology, first by exposure, then by imagination and invention. To be either Achilles, twenty years behind, or the tortoise.
Filmmaking is very much the same: seeing the unseen, imagining that which has not been imagined. This is not compromise or pampering to the lowest common denominator, but art that goes all the way beyond our wildest dreams and is still able to describe the indescribable so lucidly we become enraptured and immediately converted.
All the Miyazakis I've seen have some incredulously indelible moments without compare. Here there are several, including the utterly beautiful dreams, especially the wind, the opening five minutes in full, the remarkable sound design during the dreams and the earthquake, the water, the rain, and the flight.
And speak of the wind! It has personality, it's brilliant and as powerful as in "Ran" (1985), "Zerkalo" (1975) or "The Wind" (1928), in some ways even more so because it's animated in ways impossible to achieve in live action.
And the love that uncharacteristically seems to evade and elude, as it does in Wong Kar-Wai's "Fa yeung nin wa" (2000). She paints, and the picturesque mise en scène and the atmosphere is comparable to "Van Gogh" (1991) and its languorous lushness. Then there's Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" used by Castorp as an allegory for forgetting, yet the novel becomes real through Nahoko's illness and not as a token of forgetting but instead of never forgetting.
And then there's the war. "It flies like a dream", the pilot says, thanking Jiro during the apparent climax of the film, and Miyazaki cuts to a scene of utter destruction, a cemetery of people, ideals, ideas and technology, a disaster not unlike the earthquake in the beginning, yet so tragically unlike.
The name of the film comes from a quotation from Paul Valéry, but refers to Ghibli: the name of the studio but also the engine of the aircraft in "Porco Rosso" (1992). It's a real engine used in an Italian aircraft during World War II, designed by the Caproni seen in the film. In a way, then, this is as natural a conclusion to Miyazaki's career as one could imagine: a flight of imagination, carried by the most powerful wind, and a shared dream of great minds that we are lucky to be invited in.