FILM: "The Wind Rises", Kazuo Miyazaki's final film

To be in love with flying today must be an unusual experience.  Aviation history has mostly happened; for the last two generations its been spaceships. So the great story of the fulfillment of centuries of dreamers yearning for wings has sat on the shelf for a time. How to summon this richness back? 

My love of flying began at age 10, when a  neighbor took me on a small plane for a trip over my little hometown.  And my early love of movies from attending Saturday matinees for children offered for 10 cents. One gray December day I saw The Spirit of St. Louis.  I remember coming out of the theater to the first snowfall, the softened and whitened world transformed, that possibility fixed for me by snow and Lindberg's great accomplishment.  

I wanted out of what I had, though, that unique Midwestern combination of childhood innocence and rigid oversight.  A flight attendant's job was one of those teen adventure dreams, and a possible pathway to that great world I so wanted to know. 

I loved aviation history; TWA and Pan Am, the SST, the Boeing 747, global route maps expanding.  I read Night Flight and Sand Wind and Stars by Saint-Exupèry and wore Vol de Nuit perfume.

And I loved aviation movies: Top Gun, The English Patient come to mind. World War II movies. From childhood, The Little Prince captures life's poignancy and flight's poetry. Only Angels Have Wings from film class, the best movie about the romantic and dangerous life of early airmail pilots.     

It was easy for me to love The Wind Rises,  the story of an idealistic young aeronautical engineer, who designed the prototype for the Zero which was used to bomb Pearl Harbor. 

Jiro Horikushu and as he is drawn by Miyazaki

I'm entranced by all of Myazaki's films; they have a gentle narrative revelation and unique animated beauty that make wanna-be's of the best Disney moments - Bambi and Snow White in the woods, come to mind, and Disney's straightforward storytelling.

The story though, is adult and rich with its ambiguity.  The great dream of flight, once achieved, leads to undreamed-of destruction, the Japanese defeated in a war conceived in madness. 

Miyazaki shows us this in fluidly edited sequences contrasting scenes of grandly soaring fighter squadrons followed by Horikoshi, the airplane designer, walking through a field of broken airplane parts, grass softening and overtaking like snow.

Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation uses thin black outlines to depict his characters and most of the objects of the material world, and activates them against expansive lush natural settings, drawn by Kazuo Oga.

Upwelling clouds reminiscent of N.C. Wyeth, trains puffing through landscapes yet unmarred by modern industry, all drawn with defined edges but no black outlines, making a profound visual statement about the relation of the art object and its existence in an unbounded earthly setting.

Nahoko's sanitarium 

An earthquake, Japan's 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, is a fine visual sequence, foreshadowing  terrible future events. 

In another sequence Hiro meets Nahoko again at a vacation hotel. Another guest, described as Sherlock Holmes,a large-nosed, avuncular matchmaker, plays the piano while the group sings in German together and toasts the betrothal.  

One inference is that fellowship and good will live in every language and culture, a hard lesson to be wrought from war's savagery.  Nonetheless, the lesson is particularly bitter delivered by a Jewish-appearing character singing a German drinking song.

A stylized device from western cinema is used when characters need to distance themselves emotionally: they sit and smoke. It's odd and dated, unromantic now when it used to signify such sophistication, patience, connection, individuation.

The film's love story is tear-jerker poignant: the lovers will be parted by Nahoko's early death from tuberculosis, an illness which appears in Myazaki's My Neighbor Totoro as well. TB is the classic romantic illness, offing many a filmic and operatic heroine, as well as Miyazaki's own mother. But Hiro and Nahoko make choices and live with the consequences, knowing that both the wind and the tide rise, and "...we must attempt to live."

It's a warmer judgment on a life look-back meditation than Chairman Mao's last song from Nixon in China, "...how much of what we did was good?...outside this room the chill of grace lies heavy on the morning grass."

What a fine opera this film would make. A few years younger than he, I will live with Miyazaki's farewell perspective as I spend these last years well.