Revisiting Studio Ghibli #1 - The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises: The Cursed Dreams of Studio Ghibli’s Masterpiece

The Cursed Dream of the Architect

There is a specific brand of melancholy that Studio Ghibli excels at, a "magnificent, depressing beauty" that we as audiences probably most associate with Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Yet, as I sit down and begin to write this retrospective, I find myself drawn first to Hayao Miyazaki’s 2013 historical epic, The Wind Rises.

While I have long admired the studio’s more grounded dramas like When Marnie Was Here, this film strikes a chord with its uniquely complex storytelling. What we have in The Wind Rises is a narrative hybrid. It is ostensibly the biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the brilliant aeronautical engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane used in WWII. However, Miyazaki creates a "collage" of a protagonist by grafting the engineer's professional life onto the personal life of writer Tatsuo Hori, borrowing the tragic romance from Hori's 1937 novel The Wind Has Risen.

You might be led to think that Ghibli usually thrives on fantastical, whimsical settings. While this film dabbles in stunning, dreamlike sequences, it plays out by showcasing the personal tragedies of Jiro and the inevitable doom that global conflicts like WWII bring.

The Wind Rises. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2013.

A Seamless Blend of Dreams and Reality

Miyazaki has spent a career building worlds of whimsy and enchantment, but here, he does something far more complex. He delivers a drama that feels profoundly grounded in the harsh realism of pre-war and builds up towards how WW2 awakened within Japan, yet effortlessly drifts into the surreal. It is a story of two lives: the professional odyssey of Jiro Horikoshi as he navigates the technical mountain of aeronautical engineering, and the internal journey of a man whose world is morphing into an environment of depravity and impending war.

The film operates in the space where fiction and non-fiction bleed together. It questions the very nature of dreaming, showing the stark, often painful contrast between a dream becoming a reality and a reality dissolving into a dream.

The Wind Rises. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2013.

The Tragedy of the Beautiful Machine

At its core, The Wind Rises contains what I believe to be Ghibli’s most poignant romance. Because this relationship is drawn from literature rather than strict history, the dynamic with Naoko is presented with a tragic delicacy that fits the film's central messaging: beauty is fleeting, and the things we love—whether a dying woman or a fighter plane—are often the things that break us.

The Wind Rises. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2013.

Visually, it remains one of the studio's crowning achievements. The frames "pop" with a vividness that felt, at the time, like a definitive "swansong." Of course, with Miyazaki has now returned to the multiplex with The Boy and the Heron, we are left with the thrilling possibility that he may yet top this masterpiece. But for now, The Wind Rises stands as his most humanized work.

Final Thoughts

The truth the film leaves us with is a sobering one: we cannot always achieve our dreams in the way we imagined. Perhaps dreams aren't meant to be fully realised; perhaps they exist simply to guide us, providing a necessary counterweight to the realism of the everyday. It is the idealism within the person that keeps them moving forward, even when the horizon is dark and bleak.

The Wind Rises. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2013.

My final thoughts are summed up by: Le vent se lève... il faut tenter de vivre. The translation: wind is rising; we must try to live.

Note: The next blog post will be in January where we will be looking at the experimental silent Soviet feature Man with a Movie Camera (1929). There will be another issue of Revisiting Studio Ghibli, where will take a deeper look at Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) in February!