"Le vent se lève!... Il faut tenter de vivre!"
("The wind rises!... We must try to live!")
- Paul Valery
Netflix started making all the movies of 'Studio Ghibli' available from February or so. Being a big fan, I started re-watching my favorites - 'My neighbor Totoro', 'Spirited Away', 'Princess Mononoke' - and the rest of the movies I've loved from the first time I saw them.
There were movies I have not seen - like the farewell classic of Hayao Miyazaki - 'The Wind Rises'. The movie's name comes from the poetic lines of the Paul Valery and is suppose to mean the resilience of life in hard times and how it fits into life as we know it today.
The movie is the semi-fictionalized story of Jori Horikoshi - the aeronautical engineer from Mitsubishi- who designed, what was arguably the best, fighter plane of the World war 2, the Mitsubishi zero. The movie recounts his tale with a lot of fictionalized moments mixed in.
Though the story line sounds triumphant - a little boy from a rural place gets his dream of designing a great airplane fulfilled - it is, in reality, a tragic story. As I watched through the movie, I cannot but think of the word 'cursed'. The romance that builds between Jori and Naoko - also take the familiar route towards tragedy and the moment Naoko passes away - as the wind rises from the Zero - probably is the most poignant scene of the movie.
Miyazaki said that he decided to make the movie when he heard the real Jori say that he built the plane because it is the most beautiful thing. However, what Jori designed was a fighter plane used in a devastating war against China and other countries to subdue them, causing irreplaceable damages to places and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
While building the plane itself was a dream, beautiful and ambitious, the moment it was realized, the dream becomes cursed. Jori realizes it that much in the movie at least - not sure whether he regretted being agent of an Imperial Japan in real life - and regrets that he helped building it.
The story starts with a young Jori dreaming of designing a beautiful plane and also fighting the backwardness of Japan in the late 1920's. He becomes an engineer and joins Mitsubishi. He visits Germany and the western countries as part of a Japanese delegation and regrets the backwardness of Japan in comparison to those countries. He decides to close the gap in airplane building when he gets back.
However, to me, the most interesting moments in the movie are when Jori meets Naoko. He meets Naoko in a train during the Great Kanto Earthquake and enamored with her. After a long break, they meet again in a mountain resort where Naoko has come for a respite from Tuberculosis. They fell in love and decide that Naoko should get into a sanatorium to be cured. She does and becomes worse. So she runs away to Jori and marries him. They have a short life together and she leaves when the TB worsens for him to focus on his work. Jori is heartbroken and as his dream airplane take to the skies, he realizes that she is dead.
The curse that haunts him in his art - he designs - and love is the central theme of the movie. As a designer and someone who dreams of new ways of building beautiful air planes - he realizes the horror of what he has accomplished when the plane actually starts flying. As a lover, he falls in love with a sick girl knowing that the chances of her making it is very low and ends up losing her.
The mystery of love is that it does not look into the antecedent of who you are in love with. He falls in love with a sick girl and within the ambit of the love he shares with her, never let that fact come to the fore. They have some beautiful moments together and part forever. As much as it is bittersweet, it is in essence the tragedy of love itself. Similarly, he designs without realizing the consequence of what he is doing - the artist focusing on his work - only to realize later that what he designs is a war machine.
The only issue I've had with the movie is its pacing - it is a tad slow at parts - but overall, the movie leaves you with a sad note of the life we live. Especially in times like this, where a little virus is showing the limits of what we can do, the only thing to say is
"Le vent se lève!... Il faut tenter de vivre!"
("The wind rises!... We must try to live!")
- Paul Valery
Netflix started making all the movies of 'Studio Ghibli' available from February or so. Being a big fan, I started re-watching my favorites - 'My neighbor Totoro', 'Spirited Away', 'Princess Mononoke' - and the rest of the movies I've loved from the first time I saw them.
There were movies I have not seen - like the farewell classic of Hayao Miyazaki - 'The Wind Rises'. The movie's name comes from the poetic lines of the Paul Valery and is suppose to mean the resilience of life in hard times and how it fits into life as we know it today.
The movie is the semi-fictionalized story of Jori Horikoshi - the aeronautical engineer from Mitsubishi- who designed, what was arguably the best, fighter plane of the World war 2, the Mitsubishi zero. The movie recounts his tale with a lot of fictionalized moments mixed in.
Though the story line sounds triumphant - a little boy from a rural place gets his dream of designing a great airplane fulfilled - it is, in reality, a tragic story. As I watched through the movie, I cannot but think of the word 'cursed'. The romance that builds between Jori and Naoko - also take the familiar route towards tragedy and the moment Naoko passes away - as the wind rises from the Zero - probably is the most poignant scene of the movie.
Miyazaki said that he decided to make the movie when he heard the real Jori say that he built the plane because it is the most beautiful thing. However, what Jori designed was a fighter plane used in a devastating war against China and other countries to subdue them, causing irreplaceable damages to places and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
While building the plane itself was a dream, beautiful and ambitious, the moment it was realized, the dream becomes cursed. Jori realizes it that much in the movie at least - not sure whether he regretted being agent of an Imperial Japan in real life - and regrets that he helped building it.
The story starts with a young Jori dreaming of designing a beautiful plane and also fighting the backwardness of Japan in the late 1920's. He becomes an engineer and joins Mitsubishi. He visits Germany and the western countries as part of a Japanese delegation and regrets the backwardness of Japan in comparison to those countries. He decides to close the gap in airplane building when he gets back.
However, to me, the most interesting moments in the movie are when Jori meets Naoko. He meets Naoko in a train during the Great Kanto Earthquake and enamored with her. After a long break, they meet again in a mountain resort where Naoko has come for a respite from Tuberculosis. They fell in love and decide that Naoko should get into a sanatorium to be cured. She does and becomes worse. So she runs away to Jori and marries him. They have a short life together and she leaves when the TB worsens for him to focus on his work. Jori is heartbroken and as his dream airplane take to the skies, he realizes that she is dead.
The curse that haunts him in his art - he designs - and love is the central theme of the movie. As a designer and someone who dreams of new ways of building beautiful air planes - he realizes the horror of what he has accomplished when the plane actually starts flying. As a lover, he falls in love with a sick girl knowing that the chances of her making it is very low and ends up losing her.
The mystery of love is that it does not look into the antecedent of who you are in love with. He falls in love with a sick girl and within the ambit of the love he shares with her, never let that fact come to the fore. They have some beautiful moments together and part forever. As much as it is bittersweet, it is in essence the tragedy of love itself. Similarly, he designs without realizing the consequence of what he is doing - the artist focusing on his work - only to realize later that what he designs is a war machine.
The only issue I've had with the movie is its pacing - it is a tad slow at parts - but overall, the movie leaves you with a sad note of the life we live. Especially in times like this, where a little virus is showing the limits of what we can do, the only thing to say is
"Le vent se lève!... Il faut tenter de vivre!"
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