IT DOESN'T BLOW

Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-nominated animated feature The Wind Rises, opening here in the Valley this weekend, is one of the most visually and kinetically beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. Miyazaki has claimed that this dizzying paean to the glories of aviation will be his last film, and if so, he’s certainly going out on top, although it’s a morally complicated, troubling triumph.

In content, the movie is a heavily romanticized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer whose designs for Mitsubishi in the ‘30s led to the Japanese warplanes of the WWII era. According to Miyazaki’s script, as a boy Horikoshi idolized the Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, and the movie dramatizes this hero-worship by making them “friends” through shared dreams of riding in the sort of huge, elegant, multi-winged passenger airplanes that Caproni envisioned, like his magnificent and hopeless nine-winged “Noviplano.” The young Jiro wears coke-bottle lenses on his face, and thus glumly knows he won’t be a pilot, but his dream mentor tells him that designing airplanes is a far more prestigious pursuit anyway.

As a child in rural Pennsylvania, I lived along the runway of a small recreational airpark and flight school, and while I never had aspirations to be a pilot, I can vividly recall dreams not very dissimilar to Jiro’s—blue skies full of impossibly large, roomy flying contraptions. This imagery gives The Wind Rises an epic grandeur, as do, on the darker side, such scenes as a depiction of the 1923 earthquake that demolished Tokyo.

But the film also has, or at least it had for me, a riveting perceptual intimacy. Miyazaki’s intense primary colors, the subtlety of his light-and-shadow effects (and sound effects), and the eccentricity of his compositions deliver the past to us with a joyous hallucinatory immediacy that live action filmmaking, no matter how fine, couldn’t equal. There are moments, lots of them, which feel, somehow, like time travel. Strictly as cinema, The Wind Rises is heavenly.

It’s not that simple on the level of content, however. In one of their dream conversations, Caproni also tells the young Jiro that airplanes aren’t for war, or for making money; that airplanes are, rather, “beautiful dreams.” Well, yeah, but….

Herein, of course, lies the difficulty with The Wind Rises. The charmingly told hero struggle we’re watching is the development of the Zero, the airplane that attacked Pearl Harbor and brought so much misery and death to so many people, Allies and Axis alike. Toward the end of the film, Jiro and a friend are discussing the uses to which their design will likely be put, the other countries against which it will be used. “Japan will blow up,” says one, little knowing how literally right he will be, as a result of another, less aesthetically pleasing innovation in weaponry in another country.

“We’re not arms merchants,” says the other. “We just want to build good aircraft.” That justification might be acceptable from a boy, but from grown men, fully aware of the implications of their work, it just sounds obtuse.

Of course, anyone can find themselves on the wrong side of a war, and even if you’re on the “right” side you’re still peddling ruin and slaughter to the innocent if you’re a weapons designer. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate you morally, but there’s something a little queasy about celebrating the pure creative spirit that led you to build flying death machines.

That Miyazaki fully recognizes and acknowledges this difficulty, maybe even regards it as the point of his movie, doesn’t entirely banish the queasiness. Like Miyazaki’s other works, The Wind Rises is a movie to be savored, even loved. But it carries with it a stubborn unease.

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of 10 Terrible Earlier Movies by this Year’s Oscar nominees. Enjoy Oscar night, if you care. Come to think of it, enjoy the night, whether you care or not.

REVERSAL TO FORTUNE

Opening tomorrow here in the Valley is the Oscar-nominated animated feature The Wind Rises, which the great Hayao Miyazaki claims will be his swansong film.

So this week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to a Japanese monster, or rather to a Western reimagining of a Japanese monster which a pal posted to my facebook page:

I like the idea; I’m calling him “Allizdog.”

SMALL WORLD

Even if, like me, you’re not an especially big fan of the Japanese anime style, don’t miss The Secret World of Arrietty. We’re only in February, but I would have to have an outstanding year at the movies indeed for this 2-D animated feature from Japan’s Studio Ghibli not to be somewhere on my 2012 top ten list.

The film is a loose adaptation, & perhaps a deepening, of Mary Norton’s 1952 British children’s book The Borrowers, by Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind the 2001 masterpiece Spirited Away & other extraordinary Studio Ghibli works. On Arrietty, Miyazaki is credited as screenwriter & “planner”; the director, making his feature debut, is Hiromasa Yonebayashi.

The Borrowers of the original title are a race of insect-sized people who reside inside the walls or under the floorboards of human houses & survive by making sorties into the house proper to “borrow” tiny, unnoticeable amounts of whatever they need—a sugar cube, maybe, or a pin—from their human hosts, to whom they refer as “beans.” Our adolescent heroine Arrietty lives in bourgeois comfort with her taciturn father Pod & her hysteria-prone mother Homily beneath a closet in a lovely home in the Tokyo suburbs.

Arrietty (voiced, in the U.S. version, by Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler) has a taste for adventure that outstrips her caution with regard to a cardinal rule of the Borrower lifestyle: Never being seen by humans. Shawn (David Henrie, another Disney Channel favorite), a sensitive human boy who’s been sent to stay with relatives in the house while he waits to have heart surgery, becomes aware almost at once of Arrietty’s existence, & thus of her family’s. The ensuing tale hinges on the guarded bond that develops between them.

The Secret World of Arrietty doesn’t have the epic, preternatural grandeur of Spirited Away or some of the other Ghibli stunners, but I think that for this very reason it may please Western audiences even more, in some ways, than those films. The scale of the story makes Arrietty less ambitious & more delicate, but also more direct & focused, & perhaps more conventionally charming (& also, for younger kids, less scary).

Still, Miyazaki & Yonebayashi fill the movie with dazzling touches—the enormity of the teardrops that form in Borrower eyes, or the tea drops that fill their miniscule cups, the insects that routinely cross Arrietty’s path or the pillbug that rolls up when she idly picks it up, the way the sound of a rustling shirt is used to give a sense of Shawn’s colossal size—that leave us wide-eyed. Arrietty is richly imagined, funny, high-spirited, exciting, suspenseful & touching, yet also blessedly quiet. It’s pure fantasy, yet intensely in tune with the natural world. It’s deeply refreshing.

RIP to dancer & actress Zina Bethune, killed at 66 in a horrifying traffic accident in Los Angeles (possibly a hit-&-run; the initial police reports are uncertain), & to Mets & Expos great Gary Carter, departed at just 57.

Cancel your Saturday night plans—Your Humble Narrator is slated to be a guest at 7 p.m. tomorrow on 9.23 KTAR's The Jay Lawrence Show, along with my pal & Phoenix Film Critics Society colleague David Ramsey, to talk movies with the redoubtable Jay.