Review of The Wind Rises

Always a sad affair when you go into a film expecting to fall in love and find yourself mostly disconnected. The Wind Rises showcases Miyazaki still at the height of his directorial powers; it is gorgeously rendered, and the man does not miss one opportunity to put his love for the intricate mechanics of planes on full display. It was also novel to hear Hideaki Anno move from director to seiyuu, and even better to discover that Anno truly gives a great, distinct performance (as expected of the master). The actual story itself, however, was a struggle for me. This is a film about a mandriven by a single-minded obsession to design and perfect aircraft, even if his only avenue of doing so - contributing to the Japanese war machine - is in direct contradiction to his peaceful ideals. It sounds like the perfect internal conflict for a character, but the problem for me was that it did not feel like there was any conflict at all. There are oblique references to wartime destruction, but they are almost entirely peripheral, and Jiro is really entirely blase to the collateral consequences of his dreams (whether it be to the world or to his sickly wife). On paper, I can understand the decision to keep the presentation of the consequences oblique to match Jiro's own perspective, but the problem is that it gives his character very little conflict, and it therefore gives the movie very little narrative drive for so much of its runtime. I would never have thought to describe a Miyazaki film as plodding, but here we are.

The Wind Rises feels like it only really gets going in the last thirty or so minutes, in which Jiro works tirelessly to design his magnum opus as his wife's health deteriorates. "Finally," I thought, "drama!" Unfortunately, as soon as Jiro completes his plane (you might know it as "the Zero"), the movie comes to a complete stop. There is no time for Jiro to process the costs of his lifelong obsession, no time for him to grieve or reconcile his artistic achievement with the horror he's unleashed upon the world with anything more than the briefest acknowledgement. These were the moments I was aching for all film long, moments that would let us truly understand and empathize with this man, or at least give us insight into what surely must have been the struggle at the core of his being post-war. Unfortunately, Miyazaki seemed to have no interest in such things, or was perhaps too enamored with the subject to explore any deeper. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I would genuinely think that somebody had accidentally cropped the real ending off of my copy. It is jarring and wholly unsatisfying.

Maybe I will have to come back to this one, but reading 5-star review after 5-star review to see what others saw in this movie, I have found nothing to explain away my disappointment. A weak Miyazaki film is still a noteworthy project with a litany of details to scrutinize and discuss, but The Wind Rises just felt bereft of the heart and soul that I've found in all his other works thus far.