“All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.”
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| Jiro Horikoshi |
Great artists and artisans don’t always have control over what their art is used for. Did William Barton, who designed the Eye of Providence on the American one dollar bank note, have any idea it would become a symbol of unhinged conspiracies for decades? It’s certain Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson didn’t approve of the popular bootleg image of Calvin peeing that began circulating as he was drawing the strip. The guy who first made that Guy Fawkes mask would likely have been taken aback by how it became a cultural symbol of anarchy and revolution. And Jiro Horikoshi absolutely hated the war in which his Mitsubishi fighter craft were employed for aerial combat. The truth is that once a work of art is out in the world on some level it no longer belongs to the artist -it can be taken and twisted by whoever finds new meaning or value or purpose in it. There’s nothing the artist can do but hope that the art stands on its own. It’s an aspect of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” theory that ultimately it is only the art that matters, contexts and derivations and appropriations be damned. The sketch, the cartoon, the visage, the composition, the painting, the building, the book, the film, the airplane -they are what will last and be remembered when everything else once relevant has been forgotten. Perhaps that is comforting for some, but it is nonetheless difficult for the artist who pours their soul into work destined to be misunderstood or misappropriated by the world they create the art in.
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| Hayao Miyazaki |
A few years ago it was announced that Hayao Miyazaki, the great master of Japanese animated film, was coming out of his supposed retirement for one more movie that would be called How Do You Live? But amid the rejoicing in the anime and film fan communities, my own enthusiasm was tempered by a slight wistfulness. Because Miyazaki had already made the perfect film to leave the medium on, and to make one more afterwards runs the risk of deflating that movies’ poignancy and power. For The Wind Rises is Miyazaki’s most important film, and his ideal swansong.
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The Wind Rises is a 2013 animated period drama film, the only movie from Miyazaki to contain no elements of fantasy or whimsy bar the occasional dose of magical realism. It is also one of the only examples I know of, of an animated biopic (though a not insignificant chunk of the film is fictitious), telling the story of real aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed fighter planes for Japan in the years leading up to the Second World War. His passion for aviation overpowers his distaste for the destructiveness his planes will inevitably be used for. His planes are works of art and the act of creating them gives him purpose. “Airplanes are beautiful dreams that engineers turn into reality” says his facsimile of his idol with whom he imagines meeting at various junctures in his life.
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The movie is one of Miyazaki’s greatest triumphs, which is saying a lot given his track record. It’s by a stretch his most adult movie but also his most personal one, where he gets to indulge most fully his love of aviation and his craftsman-like approach to artistry. There’s an irresistible romance to its’ atmosphere and sense of time and place, but a keen understanding of how everything will change. The war happens off-screen but it has an incredible effect on the films’ tone. The characters are wonderful, driven folks very easy to empathize with, and Jiro most of all as his subtle internal conflicts are played out. And the English voice cast is surprisingly great -this came near the end of Disney’s distribution of Studio Ghibli films in the west where they would often cram the movies with celebrity dubbers (Ponyo and From Up on Poppy Hill being the worst offenders); and while this is true also of The Wind Rises, everybody cast seems to fit nicely, from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and John Krasinski to Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, and Stanley Tucci -with Gordon-Levitt and Tucci shining especially well.
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It must be noted too, that even for a movie couched in a directorial filmography where every effort is uniquely beautiful, The Wind Rises is utterly breathtaking, with some of the most evocative images of Miyazaki’s entire career. I could look all day at that shot of the flying airplanes reflected in young Jiro’s face or Naoko painting on the hillside or Jiro and Caproni together above that netherworldly battlefield at the end. It’s all so enrapturing, coloured by the music of Miyazaki regular Joe Hisaishi -possibly his most underrated score, that sets me at ease to listen to.
Miyazaki was persuaded to make the film by Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, adapted from a manga series he published from 2009 to 2010 that combined details from the life of Jiro Horikoshi with the plot of a Japanese novel called The Wind Has Risen by Tatsuo Hori. There was something in both that story of a tragic romance and in the life of Horikoshi in the 1930s that really spoke to the auteur. According to Miyazaki he was primarily inspired by a quote from Horikoshi: “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.”
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Jiro Horikoshi worked as a designer at Mitsubishi Internal Combustion Engine Company from 1927 through the Great Depression and the war years. During that time one of Mitsubishi’s parts manufacturers was a company called Miyazaki Airplanes, operated by Katsuji Miyazaki, an engineer himself, who may have met with Horikoshi on occasion, while his young son idolized the flying machines they were working on. Hayao’s early years were marked by the war, he lived through a couple major bombings –from a young age he likely had to reconcile a palpable love of airplanes with their capacity as weapons. His Jiro does too, though in a less dramatic more abstract sense; dreaming as a child of being a flying ace (much like Snoopy) going up against the cartoonish avatars of German air artillery that would be conjured in the mind of a child a world away from the conflict on the western and eastern fronts. His love and admiration of aircraft is very idealistic, and yet there is a degree to which it is reflective of Miyazaki, who never quite lost that sense of their romance, and to whom airplanes soon became connected with his other early passion, drawing: they were some of his first subjects.
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There are a lot of parallels between Horikoshi and Miyazaki, and especially Miyazaki’s interpretation of Horikoshi and Miyazaki, conscious or unconscious though they may be. In The Wind Rises, Jiro is determined from childhood to become an aeronautical engineer and he sees it through more or less exactly as he wanted. In his own life, Miyazaki was likewise determined from childhood to be a manga artist and then an animator, also ultimately achieving that dream. But it is in that success that the echoes become more interesting as Miyazaki makes his point about art and the contexts in which artists must work.
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In one of Jiro’s early daydreams where he meets his hero Gianni Caproni, a famous Italian aircraft designer, he is told by the maestro not to make airplanes for war. But the truth is that Jiro doesn’t have a choice. In order to design planes for a living, Jiro has to get a job with a military-funded organization like Mitsubishi, which is in the arms game desperately trying to catch up technologically to the rest of the world -something which is of particular concern to Jiro’s more practical-focused friend Kiro Honjo. Yet Jiro, working within this system and its’ requirements, still tries to find ways to capture beauty in his airplanes. His conception of the A5M is clearly more aesthetically driven than anything else -it just looks so pretty!
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But this idealist is never shown to be bitter or frustrated, his reservations are subtle and he makes do with what he has to, incorporating armaments and munitions into his designs while trying to maintain their intrinsic grace. It was a very conscious choice by Miyazaki not to depict Jiro during the war itself, ending his narrative in about 1935. This lessens a touch the moral conflict of his work building weapons for an imperialist regime, allows that reality to be characterized abstractly; his art at least not yet is being used to cause direct harm. Nonetheless, the war is an ever-present looming dread all throughout, and Miyazaki makes known how he feels about the rise of the Nazis and Japan’s cooperation with them, even as Jiro remains outwardly apolitical. In fact, Miyazaki seems to blame Japans’ alliance with the other Axis powers for the nations’ aeronautical pivot to bombers. Jiro is not ignorant or apathetic, he and Honjo harbour a cynicism over what’s become of Japan, secretly longing for a world in which they can follow their dreams without having to do so through militaristic channels. Where they can make their art freely and where it can be taken as such.
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Miyazaki feels this profoundly. The film is a requiem for that world that never came to pass, and so he envisions it in all the grandeur and romance it deserves in those daydreams with Caproni and in the exuberance of Jiro’s imagination at work. There’s a moment where Jiro seems to literally take flight as he sits at his board designing, and it occurred to me how both Jiro and Miyazaki’s work requires sitting at a desk sketching. Airplanes and animation are not a one to one comparison obviously, but they both require a similar level of intricacy -and of course Miyazaki clearly values both in high regard. And he sees his own relationship to animation in the contradictory ambitions of Jiro’s aims and his career.
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It’s not much a secret that Miyazaki has a low opinion of most other anime. He has expressed on multiple occasions his dissatisfaction with the animation industry in Japan, and honestly it’s easy to see why. So much of the form is given over to youth-oriented fluff and melodrama or outrageous comedy and action, a lot of the staples of anime style and cliches can grow very annoying very quickly, and particularly many of the series seem hastily produced and animated, generally never holding a candle to the best looking anime movies like Akira or Perfect Blue or indeed the works of Miyazaki. Miyazaki has very high standards and has specifically criticized anime for not being interested in real people or real life -you can certainly tell the difference between even his fantasy films and virtually all other anime of that genre. But it’s where he has had to work, and you can tell he resents somewhat his films being affiliated with anime in general outside Japan, that he and Studio Ghibli are often lumped in with the rest of that industry regardless of the higher critical praise his films have attained.
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However he recognizes that art is a compromise, and on some level has come to terms with it. His art is out there in the world and is beloved by many. He achieved what he wanted, rarely stifled, even if it comes with less savoury associations. And while I don’t think he considers modern anime as much a perversion of art as airplanes being made for war, that attitude of The Wind Rises is doubtless informed by his own experiences of his work being taken as something he didn’t intend, incorporated into a machine he’d rather not be a part of. Yet the love of the art and the drive to create overpowers those drawbacks considerably. Creative people, truly creative people, would make their art for its’ own sake if they had to; the opportunity to do so occupationally then being one that can’t be passed up. “Artists are only creative for ten years,” says Caproni in a statement that very much sounds like something Miyazaki would believe (in spite of all evidence to the contrary in his case). “Live your ten years well.” Create as much as you can in what time you have, whatever the circumstances. Perhaps that was Jiro’s philosophy.
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It’s a romantic pursuit, yet one that even Miyazaki recognizes is not wholly fulfilling. Why else would he incorporate the plot of The Wind Has Risen into his film? The real Jiro it seems managed to strike a healthy balance in his work and family life. Why did Miyazaki decide to give him a terminally ill love interest? Why was he so interested in pitting Jiro’s work against his personal life? Only Miyazaki can answer that. But perhaps there is something we can infer. Miyazaki is a well-known workaholic and perfectionist. Whether making a movie or drawing a manga, that task is arduously the only object of his attention to serious detriment. He has expected this level of dedication in those around him too and so has dangerously overworked his employees on multiple occasions. But there has also been a tangible personal cost. He was an absentee father to his son and fellow animator Gorō, who long-admired him but felt he never knew him; and even as adults in the same career at the same studio they’ve been pretty estranged (Hayao was notoriously a dick about Gorō’s debut directing effort, Tales from Earthsea). One can imagine how the elder Miyazaki’s obsession with his work has likewise affected his wife and other son.
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This portrait of Jiro sees him too as a workaholic, someone who only ever thinks about airplanes. And for the first half of the film its’ framed almost poetically -he sees a wingspan in a fish bone, he falls asleep reading schematics… until he meets Naoko. After he falls in love his tendencies are seen to be less noble -his constant work and absence even puts her at risk, as she ventures out by herself to see him in spite of her debilitating tuberculosis. They agree to her moving closer to him to be together, accommodating his career more than necessarily her health. It should be stressed these are mutual decisions, but there is a tangible consequence to Jiro’s conflicting priorities. And even once they are together, he still spends his nights working, and ultimately she passes from her illness while he is observing a test flight. A tragedy.
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Jiro is drawn sympathetically throughout this, which might seem like a lapse in judgement on the part of his artist. After all he is on some level responsible, as alluded to by his sister. But he is our protagonist and more importantly the avatar for Miyazaki, who imbues this story with a sense of fate and inevitability. Her illness, like the Japanese military complex, threatens to take away something that Jiro loves –there’s nothing he can do about it, and that’s where the tragedy is most potent. But did he spend his remaining time with Naoko well? “The wind is rising, we must try to live.” That quote is repeated often, hammering its’ message into the audience. There’s an importance to life beyond art, beyond work, and we must not lose sight of that. Jiro did not take for granted his love of Naoko, but it was always in conflict with his love of airplanes. Which was really more important? The wind rises for Jiro, but did he remember to live? Did Miyazaki? I wonder how much he ponders this. Does he relate to the innate, bittersweet melancholy he illustrates? Does he have regrets?
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Perhaps there’s a reason there for Miyazaki’s retirement upon completing this film. It’s certainly poignant. He makes one last movie about a mans’ passion for his craft and the price of dedicating his whole life to it, and then leaves his own craft to presumably experience more of that life outside of it that he may have taken for granted before. That knowledge adds real weight to this “stop and smell the roses” theme, as does the likelihood that Miyazaki genuinely believes it after all this time as a juggernaut. It’s a message to artists to keep things in perspective, to not let their personal lives be waylaid by work. Take that time to live, to love. Art after all is just one of life’s beauties.
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And yet it is a beauty that makes life good. There is a notion brought up in the movie, that cuts to the heart of Jiro’s passion and is arguably Miyazaki’s rationale for his aiding a war effort. It is that the world is better for the existence and beauty of airplanes, despite their being put to evil use. And the film makes a pretty convincing argument for this, showing airplanes in flight in the most lush and gorgeous ways you would assume they’ve always belonged up there in our skies. You get the sense that Miyazaki applies this to his animation, and that artists should take heed as well: in spite of what their art is used for, the world is better for it. It frames the creation of said art as inherently noble. Whether or not you believe it, it is a powerful idea, and a great incentive to create. All Jiro Horikoshi wanted to do was create something beautiful -isn’t that enough?
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Jiro’s whole story is one of compromise. He has to compromise his first dream for a more realistic goal, compromise his designs for their weaponry function, his values for his passion, his career for his love and vice versa. Such is the way of life. Miyazaki has always valued a particular realism with his films amidst all the fantasy: an authenticity in details and emotions and depth of ideas. The Wind Rises is his most vividly real movie in just about every regard. And for that, it is on some level his greatest work, surpassed in popularity though it is by just about everything else in his filmography. The movie is, as David Ehrlich called it, “a devastatingly honest lament for the corruption of beauty.” It’s bittersweet to the core. Yet it is also movingly inspirational in the suggestion that the corruption is impermanent. At the end, Jiro is proud of his creations in spite of the circumstances he made them in and for. He cherishes the time he had with Naoko for all its’ difficulties and its’ sadness. He is happy with the art and the love he has left. It is the best anyone can do. I hope Miyazaki feels the same, as I hope each artist does. As the wind rises, we all must live.
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