The Wind Rises is
the final animated feature from Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki. Beginning with
a childhood dream in which he is visited by Italian designer Caproni, the film
follows the life and career of Jirô Horikoshi, a Japanese aeroplane engineer as
he attempts to create a fighter plane for the army in World War 2. Stretching
from the streets of Tokyo to the industrial heart of Germany, the story
explores Jirô’s exploits, his relationships and his dreams.
As someone who has never seen a film by Studio Ghibli, but
having been re-assured by others that their previous work was extraordinary, I
wasn’t quite sure what to expect as I sat down for The Wind Rises. What I was most unprepared for were the visuals.
The animation is breath-taking, whether it chooses to focus on a sprawling
landscape or two friends discussing how planes work, the level of detail is
exquisite, especially on the planes (both real and fantastical), which are
given their own unique personality and features.
This is topped off rather nicely with a charmingly unique
soundscape, the whooshing of plane engines and the rumbling of an earthquake
seemingly constructed from human voices alone, and a quite endearingly simple
musical score which divides its’ attention well between soaring vistas and the
more intimate, piano-led moments.
I usually prefer to see films in their original language
with subtitles but after seeing the voice cast for the dubbed version I was
intrigued as to how they would fare. The stellar voice cast easily put most
dubbing artists to shame, packing just the right level of expression and
emotion into the voices that you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no
dubbing done at all. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great as the timid young Jirô, and
Emily Blunt is almost unrecognisable as Nahoko – the beautiful love interest –
and John Krasinski brings a much needed piece of humour to the proceedings as
Jirô’s best friend, Honjô. Werner Herzog is also given a voice role as a
benevolent German refugee, perhaps delivering his cheeriest performance to
date.
On the down-side, the film is too long. Even at a mere two
hours and six minutes, it does begin to drag its feet within the last twenty
minutes. A few scenes of men having techno-babble discussions in hangars could
have been shed to make room for more development of the love story, which is
given far too little screen time to have any lasting effect. The darkness of
the opening – which contains an intriguing take on an earthquake – is never
again matched, even during the part of the film that takes place at the height
of World War 2. The story jumps this way and that from place to place in the
blink of an eye, and though this may have been the case in the real life
events, it makes the end result feel rather cluttered.
While certainly not the masterpiece that the posters
promised, The Wind Rises is a
visually enthralling and charmingly designed film with enough humour, intrigue
and ambition to redeem its baggy running time and haphazard story-telling. It’s
a film perhaps best seen on a Sunday evening to distract from the oncoming
groan of the working week and pull you into a soaring world of a young man and
the flying machines he helped create.
3 Stars
