- Speaking frankly, I would have enjoyed Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises more if it had starred a talking pig. Okay, it wouldn't necessarily have to be a pig (I'm obviously thinking of Porco Rosso), but some variety of speaking animal, magical spirit, or eerie demon would have helped this film tremendously. As it is, the film's only quasi-fantasy elements involve either dreams or the The Great KantÅ earthquake of 1923. Incidentally, the depiction of that very real earthquake is the film's best sequence, as the growls of some great, unseen monster accompany bouts of uncontrolled shaking and eruptions of fire. Unfortunately, that brilliantly rendered disaster and its terrifying aftermath only occupy the film's first half hour.
- The rest of The Wind Rises focuses with considerably fewer distractions on the life and career of Jiro Horikoshi (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the Japanese aeronautical engineer famous for designing the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. And actually, that's pretty much the only interesting thing about him. Both the movie and historical record make a completely convincing case that he was a gifted engineer, but all of the interpersonal drama involving Horikoshi's tubercular wife (Emily Blunt) and bossy sister (Mae Whitman) are borrowed from the Japanese novel The Wind Has Risen, which has nothing to do with Horikoshi at all. While everyone expects biopics to take some liberties with the truth, this seems like a particularly egregious case of inventing drama that had no business being there.
- Although most of the non-earthquake parts of this film are exceedingly dull -- again, this film is about an airplane engineer who never even rides a magical cat bus -- there are a few highlights. Horikoshi's loud, diminutive boss (Martin Short) is amusing, as is Werner Herzog's singing debut as a discontented German. The dream sequences, featuring surreal conversations with the Italian aeronautical engineer Caproni (Stanley Tucci), are fairly creative, too. This is also the windiest animated film I've ever seen, befitting its title, and the art and animation are up to Miyazaki's usual excellent standards. In the end, I had relatively little sympathy for Horikoshi, whose film persona never acknowledges that his single-minded devotion to building planes almost certainly prolonged Japanese involvement in World War II. There is ample evidence that both Miyazaki and the real Horikoshi disliked war, so it is strange to me that neither party appears to have a problem with building warplanes. Thank goodness Miyazaki appears to have come out of retirement, because I would not have wanted the worst film of his career to be his last.
- Also featuring the voices of John Krasinski, William H. Macy, Mandy Patinkin, Elijah Wood, and Ronan Farrow.
