With The Wind Rises, animator Hayao Miyazaki paints an empathetic portrait of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed many of the fighter planes used by the Japanese military during World War II. The film is one of the most rapturously beautiful that Miyazaki has made, and all the more unsettling because of it. Miyazaki, who previously told this story in a 2009 manga, claims he didn’t want to judge his subject, though Horikoshi was indirectly responsible for countless deaths. Instead the movie presents Horikoshi as he might have imagined himself—as a romantic who loved airplanes and mathematics for their abstract beauty and believed his work transcended its military application. To call The Wind Rises a success is a bit like calling Horikoshi a success; doing so makes you feel disgusted with yourself.
The Wind Rises may be the first movie in which Miyazaki presents the two as being in conflict. Many of the significant passages take place in Horikoshi’s imagination, suggesting that he could design warplanes in good conscience only because he never had a solid grasp of reality. One of the first scenes is a dream Horikoshi has as a grade-school boy; in it he meets his hero, the Italian aeronautical engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who urges him to act on his love of airplanes and design them when he grows up. As imagined by Miyazaki, Horikoshi retains a childlike wonder as he rises through the ranks of Mitsubishi’s aeronautics division in the 1930s. The adult Horikoshi continues to dream of Caproni, meeting him in fantastic settings that recall those of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986); the Italian becomes a sort of amoral guardian angel, materializing to assuage Horikoshi’s guilt about how his designs will be used. In a particularly chilling moment, Caproni likens airplane designers to the architects of the pyramids. When people see the pyramids today, he asks, how many think of the countless slave laborers who died in their construction?
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
