Two and a Half Dreams in Hayao Miyazaki's New Movie "The Wind Rises"

Caution: This article is a spoiler! Please do not read this if you do not want to know the story of the movie.


Hayao Miyazaki's new film "The Wind Rises" is a definite masterpiece. I think this movie describes the karma of human beings who cannot help chasing his or her beautiful dream no matter how much this behavior is cursed. Some people criticized that their children got bored with this movie, but I dare say that "children" can never understand such a difficult theme.

The main character, Jiro, concentrated on fulfilling his childhood dream, to create a beautiful airplane. (Jiro is modeled on a real person who designed the Zero fighter plane.) He had vaguely noticed that Japan would be disrupted if it would continue to stick to its crooked policy and that his airplane would be used as a war tool and kill many people. However, he could never give up his dream.
The girl he loved, Naoko, had tuberculosis which was an incurable disease at that time. Jiro knew that it was best for her to stay in a hospital in the boondocks for clean air. But he never selected to abandon his career to live there for her, but continued to design his airplane in the city. It was instantly described in the movie that it was common sense for people at that time that only men should prioritize his own work. However, in our time, such kind of masculine egoism is not accepted always.
In the process to realize a dream, something may be sacrificed. I think this movie describes a doomed story of some kind of people who are enchanted (or cursed) by his or her dream and cannot help chasing it despite all the sacrifices.
It is very easy to imagine that Jiro, who was an earnest and tender-hearted person basically, would desperately regret his deeds and be torn apart by them, though the movie describes it very briefly. (If you cannot imagine this, I guess you are not satisfied with Miyazaki's latest movies in which there are too many abbreviations and omissions.) However, Naoko finally appeared in his dream to give Jiro forgiveness and encourage him to live on. Also, the ad copy of this movie coldly orders us to "LIVE" with introspecting our deeds and results from them.
WHAT A SCARY MOVIE THIS IS!
This cursed character seems to precisely overlap Hayao himself, who was accused by his son Goro Miyazaki (the director of another Ghibli movies "Tales from Earthsea" and "From Up On Poppy Hill") that Hayao had never prioritized his family because he was too busy chasing his dream, animations. The story of this movie, that Jiro's deeds were entirely accepted by his girl, seems to directly reflect Hayao's own desire. However, we do not have to know about Hayao's actual family matters, and this movie is alright in this way because Naoko seemed to be contented with her own life in the movie.

Was Naoko really happy? I dare say that she was. Because at the moment she died she must have recalled the days when she once lived with a man whom she really loved and was loved by, and such a memory is definitely worth everything in our life as human beings.
While this movie mainly describes what Jiro's dream is, it actually describes what Naoko's dream is as well.
Naoko's dream is, of course, Jiro himself.
She clearly declared that Jiro, who once saved her when she was in a serious trouble at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake in her childhood, had been her dearest "PRINCE". When she met Jiro again after she grew up, she found that Jiro was really something. I think she was really in love with him.
Although she once told that she was going to marry him after she would cure her disease, she made up her mind to escape the hospital and visit Jiro in the city, presumably because she realized that her disease would never be cured forever. Jiro and Naoko had a tiny wedding ceremony and lived together as a husband and a wife for a very short term. Maybe she and all people around her knew that her deed would further shrink her life which was already short. If I were her parent, I might have wished that she would never have such suicidal behavior. But Naoko eagerly hoped to stay by Jiro from the bottom of her heart, no matter how much she would grieve her family and no matter what she would sacrifice otherwise, just because it was the dream which captured her. I think that her deed was her deadly do-or-die struggle to make her dream come true which she selected by herself.

However, if someone says that love affair is the only dream for girls, someone like me would severely condemn it. Therefore, Hayao prepared another tiny character, Kayo, who is a younger sister of Jiro and is going to survive and fulfill her own dream to become a doctor. What a splendid sense of balance he has!
Actually, there are many working women in Miyazaki animations and he has had many female colleagues in his real workplace, for example, he has a long-term female sidekick Michiyo Yasuda, who is a legendary color designer of Ghibli Studio. I think he likes working women and he has more respect and esteem for them than most men do.
Personally speaking, my maternal and paternal grandmothers were a doctor and a dentist respectively. In fact, they became a doctor and a dentist not on their free wills but because they had to succeed the family business. But anyway, they took the license in the same period as Kayo's, and continued to work from the prewar period to the postwar period and brought up children including my aunts and uncles and my father and my mother. While seeing this movie, I just imagined a little how Kayo lived her own life afterwards, which is not described in the movie.

Japanese version

ご意見・ご感想はこちらまで

もとのページへもどる　　

もくじのページへもどる