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No. 87727
Just got back from seeing The Wind Rises. It's easily the best thing Miyazaki, or Ghibli in general really, has done since Spirited Away. My only two complaints are that the bits with Jiro's wife, while necessary for the character Miyazaki builds for him, fall flat compared to the the rest of the film and that Miyazaki's style gets a bit too silly to fit with the film at times (mostly in terms of facial expressions and a few minor character designs), but it's a minor thing.
Admitting that I know next to nothing about Horikoshi the historical figure, I find the one in the film somewhat interesting, but I don't really think the movie's about the man himself so much as it is about Miyazaki's eternal fetish for flying itself and his interest in creators within their element. The latter I think is particularly significant in a couple points, namely in the way Jiro is shown working and in how the political element of the whole thing comes together. Some of the most painstakingly detailed moments in the film are scenes in which little is going on but a few guys gathered around a set of prints sketching and doing measurements.
Whenever the political element is brought up, rather than getting much into it (although unsurprisingly for the very historically liberal Miyazaki the disdain for fascism and war shines through), the characters dismiss it entirely. They are largely apolitical: the war and all else is a sideshow to them, all the film's notable engineers dismiss it, preferring to focus on the planes themselves. What's done with them once they are designed and produced is irrelevant to Jiro and co. Miyazaki himself, at least if I'm reading the conversation between Jiro and Caproni in one of the dream sequences correctly, seems to be of the opinion that these engineers have no relation to the war itself anyway, they are artists, it's the military who corrupts their artwork.
It's an interesting film, and a good deal more thought provoking than the stuff Miyazaki himself usually does. If the movie were shittier, I'd almost think this was Takahata's work, since while he inevitably fucks it up by technical means or by being a terrible person, he's usually the one who has historically aimed for the harder material while Miyazaki stayed in the considerably less controversial realms of "hey women are people too, wake the fuck up" and "pollution is bad."
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