The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises struck me from the very beginning with its epitaph: “The wind is rising. We must try to live.”

To live…Miyazaki’s work here reminded me of the greatest of bittersweet Japanese films: Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa. Both films feature men who obsessively pursue their goals, but haven’t quite figured out how to live. Ikiru’s Watanabe, like Jiro in The Wind Rises, has high ideals, common notions that for a life to be successful, many lives must be changed – one must become a deluge of life instead of a small drop in a vast ocean.

What each man figures out in these respective films is that life is is only imbued with the meaning that they themselves give it. Jiro’s beautiful planes are used as suicide bombers in WWII, and Watanabe’s actions are questioned by his colleagues after his death in ikiru; however, none of this matters. Jiro and Watanabe pursue their passions because doing so helps them to live, to understand their lives and the people around them. How the world twists their work to its own end in order to placate the human desire to make order out of what they don’t understand is irrelevant to the meaning of the character’s lives. They lived for a brief moment (or for ten good years as Jiro’s hero, Caproni, tells him in a dream) and that is all that they could do.

Come to The Wind Rises for the trademark Miyazaki whimsy – the planes are “voiced” by actors making their sounds, rather than recordings of the actual engines, and somehow that makes them more real – and stay for a beautiful romance between a man, his dreams, and the woman he falls in love with. The wind is rising; we must try to watch more films like this.