[Film Review] The Wind Rises (2013) and The Boy and the Heron (2023) (2025)

Studio Ghibli doyen Hayao Miyazaki’s two latest features, released a decade apart. THE WIND RISES is a fictionalized biography about Jiro Horikoshi (1903–1982), the Japanese aircraft designer behind the birth of Mitsubishi A5M and A6M Zero fighters deployed by Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service during WWII.

Cued by his personal hero, Italian aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni (Nomura), whom he often dreams about and heartily confabulates with, Jiro (Anno) firmly sets his sights on his vocation at a young age but what also unsettlingly seeps in his mind is the dread of his creations being utilized as killing machines. First thing first, Miyazaki’s film is anything but an advocacy of Japanese militarism. Audience is spared from the gung-ho fervor of warmongering and aggression, instead, Miyazaki slips in some sober nods of Nazi’s surreptitious goings-on during Jiro’s sojourn in Weimar Republic and later, amid his swooning courtship to Nahoko Satomi (Takimoto), Jiro happens on a German visitor and Nazi criticizer Hans Castorp (Alpert), the namesake protagonist from Thomas Mann’s seminal novel “The Magic Mountain”, their polite rapport is palpably felt, so are its complications.

While the film vigorously and painstakingly limns the “golden ten years” of Jiro's creative period, during which he devotes himself wholeheartedly to his design tasks, it is his ill-fated romance with Nahoko which keeps audience rapt and profoundly moved. The pair first meets on a train journey in 1923 when the Great Kantô Earthquake occurs, and Jiro gallantly comports himself as a knight-in-shining-armor who escorts her to safety. Years later, their crossed paths in a rural hotel feel like a predestination, a pluperfect dream comes true - “good catch!” is their sweet nothings, continuing from a wind-blown hat to a niftily folded paper plane. However the catch is that Nahoko has tuberculosis which casts an ominous pall on their future, taking another leaf from “The Magic Mountain”, wherein Castorp is also contracted with the then-incurable disease.

However, defying the gendered bias of treating a bedridden wife as a liability relative to her husband’s lofty mission, THE WIND RISES is a heart-felt ode to their matrimonial union. Nahoko’s presence and profuse love is acknowledged as the bedrock to Jiro’s eventual success. All those nights when Jiro burns the midnight oil and chain-smokes (which looks rather amiss when your sick wife is smitten by tuberculosis), it is to Nahoko’s hand he holds fast. She is his major emotional and spiritual support, and when she realizes her time is up, the gracious sacrifice she takes is too big for her husband to handle, and Miyazaki defines that moment brilliantly without showing the direct impact, just a susurrus of wind whispering by, and Jiro knows it is her adieu, Miyazaki proves himself, still a master of storyteller.

THE BOY AND THE HERON, Miyazaki’s 12th feature film, comes into being 10 years after THE WIND RISES, which also countermands Miyazaki’s retirement proclamation (a recurring “cry wolf” ploy from the maestro), and chances are it will not be his swan song either. Integrating autographical elements (like losing his mother when he was a little boy) into a fantasy tale about a young boy’s strange encounter with a grey heron, who will lead him down the rabbit hole of another paralleled world, where he must rescue his pregnant step-mother and find peace with his bereavement.

After the lifelike recreations of a past era in THE WIND RISES, which are no less astounding for us to marvel at, what excites audience is the imaginary realm where our hero Mahito (Santoki) descends into, can it top Miyazaki’s pièce de résistance SPIRITED AWAY (2001)? The truth is, that is a tall order. The film’s anthropomorphic ornithological creatures (heron, pelicans, parakeets) are not entirely prepossessing to one’s mind’s eye. The talking heron (Suda), with a homunculus trapped inside the bird’s skin is essentially nightmare-inducing. Also the bubble-like spirits Warawara is a simple concoction for the sake of its irresistible cuteness.

That said, what THE BOY AND THE HERON pertinaciously scrutinizes is something grander and more philosophical than THE WIND RISES: a solemn introspection of a worldview that our world hangs in the balance by the influence of malice, but not without its consanguineous preference. Its dreamlike adventure often defies logic and explanation, it bowls you over incessantly but also keeps you discombobulating about what is happening! For once, Miyazaki forgoes his approachable modus operandi and unbosoms his world-weariness onto an expansive canvas without restraint, he really intends this to be his last film, one might conjecture. As a result, the film beckons repeated viewings and a psychoanalysis of its recondite connotations.

Studio Ghibli’s superlative techniques, beyond the shadow of a doubt, are in full swing in both cases. The richness of palettes, the fluidity of movements, the punctilious attention paid to every single detail, like a character’s quiet breathing or a subtle change of expression, all mark the highest attainments of animation craft, in concert with Joe Hisaishi’s lyrical and euphoniously melancholic scores soaring unto the empyreal sphere of wonderment and wabi-sabi. Both films are top-drawer knockouts, only with a blemish of unthinking feudal vestige impinging on THE BOY AND THE HERON through the normalcy of a man can just marry his dead wife’s sister without causing any eyebrow-raising or finger-pointing.

referential entries: Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988, 8.0/10); Satoshi Kon’s MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001, 7.9/10); Isao Takahata's GRAVES OF THE FIREFLIES (1988, 8.4/10); Yoshifumi Kondô’s WHISPER OF THE HEART (1995, 8.2/10).

English Title: The Wind Rises (2013)

Original Title: Kaze tachinu

Year: 2013

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese, German, Italian

Genre: Animation, Biography, Drama

Director/Screenwriter: Hayao Miyazaki

Music: Joe Hisaishi

Cinematography: Atsushi Okui

Editor: Takeshi Seyama

Voice Cast:

Hideaki Anno

Miori Takimoto

Hidetoshi Nishijima

Masahiko Nishimura

Mansai Nomura

Morio Kazama

Mirai Shida

Stephen Alpert

Jun Kunimura

Shinobu Ôtake

Keiko Takeshita

Rating: 8.0/10

English Title: The Boy and the Heron

Original Title: Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka

Year: 2023

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

Genre: Animation, Adventure, Drama

Director/Screenwriter: Hayao Miyazaki

Music: Joe Hisaishi

Cinematography: Atsushi Okui

Editors: Rie Matsubara, Takeshi Seyama, Akane Shiraishi

Voice Cast:

Soma Santoki

Masaki Suda

Aimyon

Yoshino Kimura

Takuya Kimura

Shōohei Hino

Kô Shibasaki

Jun Kunimura

Kaoru Kobayashi

Keiko Takeshita

Jun Fubuki

Shinobu Ôtake

Sawako Agawa

Rating: 7.8/10