Miyazaki Countdown Part 11 - The Wind Rises

Hello everyone and welcome to Some Like It Scott's second Countdown miniseries of 2023, a podcast first focusing entirely on the works of Japanese animator, Hayao Miyazaki: the Miyazaki Countdown. To honor one of the living legends of animation, the countdown crew of Scott, Scott, and Jay will watch all 11 of Miyazaki's films to-date, rewinding all the way back to his directorial origins with 1979's action-adventure heist thriller LUPIN III: THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, all the way to his then-final film, 2013's biographical epic romance drama, THE WIND RISES. Join us each week over the next 11 weeks, as we build up to what is Miyazaki's self-proclaimed now-final film (we'll see...), the fantasy epic, THE BOY AND THE HERON.

 

In Part 11 of the Miyazaki Countdown, Scott, Scott, and Jay discuss what seemed for many years toa be Hayao Miyazaki's swan song, the 2013 animated historical drama, THE WIND RISES. Set over 20+ years in Japan, THE WIND RISES goes back to Miyazaki's own roots: World War II and airplanes, crafting a somewhat fictionalized bio pic of the Japanese aeronautical engineer and designer of several Japanese military planes used in World War II, Jiro Horikoshi. Young Jiro grows up longing to become a pilot, though he recognizes his nearsightedness will likely preventing him from doing so. One night, Jiro dreams of his hero, Italian World War I aircraft designer, Giovanni Battista Caproni. In this dream, Caproni tells Jiro that he's never flown a plane in his life, and that building planes is much better than flying them. Fast forward 7 years after the conclusion of World War I, and Jiro is off to Tokyo to study aeronautical engineering to fulfill his dream of building big, beautiful planes. On the train, he meets a young girl, Nahoko, and when the Great Kantō earthquake hits, assists Nahoko and her maid to safety. Two years later, Jiro graduates with his friend, Kiro Honjo, and both are employed in the aircraft manufacturing divisions of Mitsubishi to design and build fighter planes. Throughout the rest of his life, Jiro must reconcile the beauty of his passion and his creations with the terrible purpose it is clear that they will be used for. Something he struggles with, especially with failure after failure to successfully test his designs. The countdown crew discuss Miyazaki's most recent and arguably most personal film, including how many elements of Jiro Horikoshi's internal conflicts and personal reckonings feel like things deeply ingrained within Miyazaki himself, how his animation of airplanes comes to life after so many representations of them in his prior films, and how fitting of a denouement this would have been for his career, if not for the inescapable pull of trying to live, while the wind is rising.