Note: This is a script from a public video you can watch now, or feel free to read and enjoy!
Introduction
There have only been so many movies in my life that after viewing have caused me to rethink my idea of what it means to live. The Wind Rises was one of those movies.
And so today, I wanted to talk about it.
This is my review of The Wind Rises.
Background
Hayao Miyazaki gets the title from from French poet Paul Valery’s famous work, The Graveyard by the Sea. In the poem, the narrator reads in a graveyard full of marble tombstones. He watches the sea, the doves fly in the sky and the sail boats that break through the waves. He is captured by the ocean’s infinite expansion, it’s seeming immortality. He looks to the tombstones and is reminded that he himself is mortal with limited life to grasp. He explains the sea, even if gigantic, doesn’t stand still. At every second the ocean has changed. He is inspired to, instead of waiting for death, take his life in his own hands. He breaths in the strong wind from the ocean’s coast and fills his lungs with it’s breath. Comes the famous line:
“Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!”
The same line expressed in the movie, The wind is rising, we must try to live.
Why try to live?
In The Wind Rises, we follow a young boy named Jiro Horikoshi (based off an engineer of the same name) through his life in the 1920s to the 1930s. Jiro has been in love with aircrafts ever since he was a young boy. He ends up working with a company that makes airplanes for the government, in the beginnings of something called the second world war, you might have heard of it. From here we follow his journey throughout the ten years, and his attempts and failures at creating his dream airplane.
This movie and its story gave me a new perception of what it means to live. It shows in great detail, the beauty of having a dream in the contrast of darkness that parts of the world can be.
We see Jiro struggle and fail, we see his mental health dwindle with that failure. We get to see him find a new reason to live, igniting his passion for life once more. This story isn’t the most spectacular and it certainly isn’t the most fantastical of the rest of Miyazaki’s movies. But that's why this movie felt so much more real to me. It wasn’t something I could directly relate to on the surface, but the messages throughout struck a chord.
The Wind is rising, we must try to live, is a phrase we must not take lightly. You can find your own meaning in that phrase, or just take it as is. It expresses that life has joy, it has uplift in many ways. The man in Paul Valery’s poem sits in a graveyard, surrounded by death. Yet the ocean is beautiful and expansive. The Wind uplifts him as he is filled with the joy of life. We can either decide to be cynical and bitter and stay in the graveyard waiting for death, or we can look to the sea, try to find what brings us rewarding inspiration and follow it.
In the movie, Jiro’s idol Giovanni Caproni tells him this: “Artists are only creative for 10 years, us engineers are the same.”
This isn’t necessarily true as we see many artists be successful well over 10 years, Miyazaki himself being a good example. However, lets think about it differently than the direct message: What if you were told you only had 10 more years to live? Can you think of how you would want to live the rest of your life? What would you want to leave behind?
You can’t depend on hope for the future, no matter how bleak that sounds. And that’s exactly what this film is expressing. Many things in Jiro’s life did not go as he planned, he didn’t expect to have to build a machine that would kill hundreds, and he didn’t expect to fall in love only to have them pass away. Though it may be bleak, this message isn’t a bad thing. Depending on the future is merely waiting for something that doesn’t exist. The wind is rising, and so must you. You must try to live. You may only have ten more years, so what do you want to do with your time?
We are also, in a pandemic, meaning we can’t exactly live the way we would like too, however situations are forever changing. Do with what you can now, and do it with passion. Study, learn and grow as a person. Or play video games and watch shows for too long. That’s okay too, I won’t judge you.
Conclusion
If you have yet to watch this movie, I can’t recommend it enough. Especially in the last year and the next to come, life is certainly wearing us all down. I felt inclined to watch this movie again and dive deeper into the roots of it. It’s definitely one of the more personal and farthest emotional depth Miyazaki has reached in his movies. There’s so much more you can say about The Wind Rises, but this is just my thoughts. See what you can find for yourself.
Life is short, but the wind still rises, so we must try to live.
Thank you for watching, that’s all I wanted to say.
