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The North-American poster for Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is very zealous in making us recall the directors past glories |
Our hero Horikoshi has had a great interest in airplanes since childhood and grows up to become a plane designer as planned, while his country Japan enters the lunacy of World War II.
The Wind Rises is the swansong of Japanese animation master writer-director Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke/Mononoke-hime (1997)), who retired in its wake. As an innocent-looking animation, it is an odd bird; too adult for most children, and too conflict-averse and languid for most adults. It is clear that Miyazaki has sought to make an uplifting, beautiful film without the horrors of war or any darker, more complex nuances in the characters, - and the film is then set in relation to the two world wars. The plan thereby comes to seem like a feeble tripping around the real dilemmas.
The Wind Rises is still worth seeing, because it is a sweepingly beautiful animation with tremendously fine music (by Joe Hisaishi (Ponyo/Gake no ue no Ponyo (2008)) and sensory sound design (by Koji Kasamatsu (Ponyo). It is a farewell to a master who has simply grown too soft with age. It is based on Miyazaki's own same-titled 2009-10 manga and is a fictional biopic of Jiro Hirokoshi, the maker of two Mitsubishi airplanes used by Japan during WWII, inspired by Tatsuo Hori's same-titled 1937 short story.
Related reviews:
Hayao Miyazaki: Howl's Moving Castle/ハウルの動く城 [Hauru no Ugoku Shiro] (2004) - Miyazaki's hugely successful, gibberish fantasy
Spirited Away/千と千尋の神隠し [Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi] (2001) - Miyazaki's highly Japanese, enormously weird story of a girl
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