Photo: “End of Summer 2024”. Photograph taken by kawaiidaigakusei. (September 2024)

Ten years before Miyazaki’s latest animated film, The Boy and the Heron (2023), was released last year, The Wind Rises (2013/2014) was announced to be Miyazaki’s final film.

In a Drunk Duck forum post dated February 28, 2014, I wrote:

“There has been a lot of buzz going around Hayao Miyazaki's final animated feature The Wind Rises because of the controversy that its main protagonist was the engineer behind the Mitsubishi A5M and A6M “Zero” fighter aircrafts used in WWII. The issue addressed is that these were the same planes used during kamikaze operations. I do find dangers with romanticizing parts of the war effort, however brilliant the inventor or innovative the design, millions of people lost their lives. Case in point–could a US-based studio make a full-length animated film about J. Robert Oppenheimer without so much as a backlash for the subject matter? Absolutely no. I have been watching Studio Ghibli films since Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro and they rarely shy away from depicting the horrors of war. I definitely want to see The Wind Rises because I have a penchant for somber cartoons aimed at an adult audience.”

Here we are ten years later in 2024.

Not only was Oppenheimer (2023) a HUMONGOUS Hollywood blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan, it earned several accolades including “Best Picture”, “Best Director” for Nolan, and “Best Actor” for Cillian Murphy at the 96th Academy Awards earlier this year.

The world has changed my previous expectations from the last decade.

I wrote that post before The Wind Rises had even been released in the United States and have since purchased, own, and watched the film multiple times. Listening to the movie trailer’s soundtrack alone, featuring Yumi Arai’s 1973 hit “Hikouki Gomu/Vapor Trails”, is enough for my eyes to well up with tears.

Films from the first half of the twentieth century that are told from a different perspective from individual first hand accounts of my own ancestry line are important for building empathy with an entire culture.

The Wind Rises focuses its story on Jiro Horikoshi, a creative dreamer with a strong desire to design airplanes and attends school as a aeronautical engineer. The scenes where Horikoshi sits in front of a drafting table drawing up designs are the most relatable—as a former drafting student who found a home at the parallel bar, the same way a ballet dancer is home at the barre.

In reoccurring daydreams, Jiro Horikoshi meets his mentor, Giovanni Caproni, an Italian aircraft designer. It is more likely that their imaginary relationship was formed while Horikoshi flipped through magazine articles featuring Caproni’s work, but the dreamed up interactions between the two contained conversations that inspired Horikoshi on his journey to achieve his dream. In one conversation during Horikoshi’s early years as an engineering student, Caproni mentioned an idea that everyone gets ten years in the sun to create a masterpiece, suggesting the untapped creative potential from the twenties to thirties. He challenges Horikoshi to make the most of the ten years. The final scene of the film shows a bookended meeting between Caproni and an aged Horikoshi in a graveyard of the Mitsubishi A5M and A6M “Zero” fighter aircrafts he had designed.

Caproni asks, “But what about your ten years in the sun? Did you live them well?”
Horikoshi responds, “Yes. Things fell apart in the end, though.”

Every time I watch the end of The Wind Rises, I wonder how many creative design jobs were focused on the war effort and whether being born two hundred years earlier would have thwarted a profession aiding in building up a war-time defense industry. How would the genius of a theoretical physicist like J. Robert Oppenheimer be used if he was born fifty years earlier? The life achievements made by Horikoshi and Oppenheimer were made possible by the world events that existed at the time that they were alive, at the right place; at the right time.

Not sure whether my ten years in the sun have already started, or ended, or if I am in the middle of them. There is one thing I am certain about: After having a comment I once made on the Drunk Duck forums ten years ago debunked by the Academy, I will make a point to openly share ideas of films that Hollywood would NEVER make in a million years and check back to see if any of them win an Oscar ten years later.


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