Critics reviews

If you want to know why good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation is aesthetically superior to its digital counterpart, look no further than here: the painstaking work required to produce Miyazaki's breathtaking 2-D images lends the film a human touch--and consequently a sense of warmth--that the digital behemoths of Hollywood cannot match. Everything about THE WIND RISES feels handcrafted and deeply satisfying--like a good craft beer.

I've seen few movies that know themselves as well as this one, and none that were confident enough to survive such awareness with such grace. Like its protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, inventor of the Zero plane, the movie is smart enough to understand its own tragic implications and honest enough about its commitment to beauty to continue regardless. Everything that makes The Wind Rises uncomfortable is a result of this honesty.

While it's very unlike Spirited Away in most respects, it's similarly fascinating and baffling, with wild narrative lurches and seeming non sequiturs. It's Miyazaki's most atypical cartoon, yet it might be his most personal self-representation, a portrait of the artist as a myopic dreamer.

On deeper reflection, this is perhaps a film which — like all great works of art — strives to embed its themes so deep within the text that, to some, they might appear invisible. More than a film about one man's mystification as to how creativity can directly equate to violence, the overarching philosophical intimations suggest a work which highlights the unseen knock-on devastation that comes from any and all acts of nobility.

Apart from its handcrafted visuals, which are as lovely and painstakingly precise as anything in the Ghibli canon, the film feels sapped of conflict and energy—a flaw that becomes even more apparent when Miyazaki tries to amp up the melodrama in the second hour with a doomed love story. Ultimately, The Wind Rises's even-temperedness feels less like a principled aesthetic choice and more like a shrug in the face of history.

Miyazaki clearly sees something of himself in Horikoshi; as cofounder of a successful animation studio (whose name, Ghibli, comes from a World War II-era Italian scouting aircraft), he too has transformed his fantasies into large-scale industrial operations. By acknowledging his similarities with a warplane designer, Miyazaki notes our proximity to the atrocities of the 20th century and asks how we live contentedly with this knowledge.

The film builds carefully toward a magical realist end with striking historical subtext that feels like a gut-punch. The Wind Rises, and thus Miyazaki's career, ends with a skyline of flaming wreckage and an emotionally ruined man finally realizing the personal (and ideological) cost of his own artistic expression. Genius can be compromised in the end.

Kids may be bored; their parents, on the other hand, will have way too much to think about. As a movie, "The Wind Rises" is at once beautifully restrained and wildly problematic... I don't doubt the sincerity of Miyazaki's pacifism but I'm appalled by his abstract vision. Like, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of real people in Asia and the Pacific were de-animated thanks to Horikoshi's dreams?

While certain aspects of the narrative—notably the devastating 1923 Kanto earthquake and its resulting firestorms—would have been prohibitively costly to enact in live action, only the scenes in which Caproni appears in Horikoshi's dreams (or vice versa, as Caproni insists) take full advantage of Miyazaki's gifts.

Mr. Miyazaki renders Jiro's life and dreams with lyrical elegance and aching poignancy. At one point, Caproni advises Jiro that artists have 10 years of peak creativity. Yet "The Wind Rises," with its complex diminuendo, underlines Mr. Miyazaki's much longer, richly creative odyssey.

In one tender scene, Horikoshi patiently holds Satomi's hand while making calculations, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for inspiration. Such tempered optimism makes The Wind Rises a fitting "final film" for Miyazaki.

Jiro's genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film, animated or otherwise, with a more honest or nuanced take on the amorality of innovation. That Jiro's planes would become wartime killers doesn't lessen their elegance, or simplify Miyazaki's identification with their creator.