The Wind Rises: Hayao Miyazaki's flawed reckoning with Japanese history

The revered animator's final film is an instructive example of Japan's ambivalence about its wartime past

The Wind Rises
(Image credit: (Facebook.com/TheWindRisesMovie))

In the first of many dream sequences in The Wind Rises, the latest and supposedly final film from beloved Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, a boy scampers across the spine of his home's gabled roof to board a small airplane docked at the roof's edge. The plane has feathered wings that flap up and down, a steering wheel glued to one side like an Ikea project gone awry, and a steam-punk engine whose pistons pump crazily and puff smoke. It is, in other words, a classic Miyazaki invention, a childhood doodle brought to soaring life on the big screen.

But the boy's exuberant flight over rice paddies and under bridges, accompanied by applause from crowds below, is brought to an abrupt end by the emergence of an immense airship above him, which drops scores of bombs ridden by black blobs whose red mouths jabber demonically. The boy's aviator goggles bulge in horror, and he strips them from his face; his plane breaks apart and he falls; he wakes up at home.

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Ryu Spaeth

Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.