Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, Some Observations on Life

How do you make sense of a life? The Wind Rises is Hayao Miyazaki’s most recent animated feature film and, since he has once again announced his retirement, it may be the last feature film that he makes. It was released in July of 2013, when Miyazake would have been 72.

While not an autobiographical film, it does have autobiographical threads. Miyazaki’s father and uncle owned and ran an airplane parts manufacturing company and that company manufactured parts for the A6M Zero, which was designed by Jiro Horikoshi, the central character of the film. The Wind Rises is only one of several Miyazaki films centered on flight, most notably Porco Rosso, a film that resonates through this one.

The most specific resonance is a bit of imagery, a procession of planes high in the sky, but there are others. While the protagonist in Porco Rosso is a bounty-hunting pilot whose plane was damaged in aerial combat and must be rebuilt. He takes it to his trusted Milanese mechanic and engineer who rebuilds the plane. The handwork is done by female family members – the men are at war  the men had gone to other cities to look for work – and the redesign was done by a young female aeronautical engineer named Fio. That engineer in effect becomes Miyazaki’s protagonist for The Wind Rises, while the family firm becomes the firm of Gianni Caproni, an Italian engineer who mentors young Jiro in mutually shared dreams. There are shots of Horikoshi talking with Caproni that are reminiscent of shots from Porco Rosso. Most generally, the two films resonate through the interweaving of air flight, family, and Italy.

The other autobiographical thread goes through Miyazaki’s mother, who was tubercular. This showed up as a central feature of My Neighbor Totoro, where two young girls were separated from their mother who was in a tuberculosis sanatorium. In The Wind Rises Miyazaki has Horikoshi fall in love with and marry a young woman, Naoko Satomi, who has tuberculosis – something that did not happen to the real-life Horikoshi. He’d met her when he was a college student traveling to college and she was a young girl traveling with her maid. Their train is derailed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923; he helped them return home and then they separated. They meet again, by chance, a decade later; they fall in love and get married.

This is a common theme in manga and anime. A couple will meet in childhood, become separated, and then meet again as adults. Sometimes the childhood meeting is a marital arrangement engineered by parents and sometimes it is, as in this film, by happenstance. At their initial meeting in adulthood they don’t recognize one another; that comes later. In this case, the recognition comes very soon after the re-meeting. As does falling in love; marriage comes a decade after that. By the end of the film – which is episodic in character – Japan has lost the war, despite the brilliance of Horikoshi’s fighter planes, and Naoko has died. Horikoshi must live on.

And that, as far as I can tell, is what the film is about: the necessity of loving and living. Miyazaki is a pacifist, the real Horikoshi was opposed to the war despite his job as a designer of military aircraft, and the people we love will die, as we will too. Yet we must live.

* * * * *

Two Odd Men Out, and Their Women

Two years ago I wrote three posts (see links at the end of the post) around and about the fact that the protagonist in Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (that’s him in the white suit above) is a man with the head of a pig. The general idea was to account for that fact without laying it off on symbolism. I still think avoiding a symbolic account is a good idea.

It’s time to take another look, this time with a comparison from a very different film, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (GITS2: Innocence).

Spirited Away

But let’s not go there yet. Let’s meander a bit. Here’s a frame from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away:

The girl with her back to us is the protagonist, Chihiro, while the seated creatures are her parents. Just moments ago they were humans. Now they’re all but pigs. The next time we see them they’ll be naked, on the ground, and looking pretty much like the other pigs in the pen with them. As far as anyone can tell, they have become pigs.

How did this happen? Well, the family happened up what appeared to be an abandoned theme park. In the course of exploring it Chihiro’s parents smelled some food. So they followed their noses, saw the food, made an attempt to find out who was offering it for sale and, when that failed, they started to eat.

It turns out that this wasn’t an abandoned theme park at all. It was something else, a bathhouse for spirits. But Chihiro and her parents didn’t know that and by the time Chihiro had learned, her parents had become pigs.

Now, we could, I suppose, argue that becoming pigs symbolized something about her parents. But is such symbolizing doing anything above and beyond what we can actually see in their actions? No, it’s not. Those actions speak louder than any words.

Why then the transformation? (1) Well, we could moralize and say its punishment for being greedy. And it IS something like that I suppose. But there’s something else: It gives Chihiro a problem. (2) Now she’s got to try to get her parents back while freeing herself from this world as well.

Not only are those two different explanations, but they’re different KINDS of explanation. The first is pitched within the logic governing actions within the story world. If you take food meant for the spirits and you get turned into a pig. If you ask the old witch for a job, she’ll give you one, but she’ll also take your name from you. THAT’s how that world works.

The second explanation is pitched at the level of story craft. The protagonist has to have challenging tasks to perform if the story is to be at all interesting. That is, whatever the story-world logic is, the story, in order to be interesting, must exploiting it in a compelling way. Restoring her parents to human form is one of Chihiro’s tasks.

Getting back to Porco Rosso, about two-thirds of the way through the film we learn of the incident during which Marco Pagot acquired the head of a pig. It was during the war and he was the loan survivor of a vicious air fight that took the life of his best friend. But the story’s vague on just how or why that incident gave him a pig’s head. It just did. The connection is not so clear and as the connection between Chihiro’s parents’ actions—eating food not theirs—and the consequence—becoming pigs.

As for the second level, that of story craft, that’s really where my question lies. It’s a device. It allows Miyazaki to do something. But what?

Well, it allows him to tell THIS story. That’s what I think. But I’m not sure why.

Five Animated Features: A Book?

Edited from a note to Tim Perper.

Once I'd finished my Dumbo project I decided that “Hey, I've got a book here, Fantasia and Dumbo.” The book wouldn't be a general market coffee table book, of course, but a serious analytic study of those two films for a sophisticated (and heavily academic) audience. I've already got THAT one well-mapped out so I know more or less where this thing would be going.

But I'm considering extending my coverage beyond those two films to include several others:

Porco Rosso
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Ratatouille

That gives me five feature-length films. I'd want to devote considerable time to each film, so I'd have to cut back on the Disney material. Which is OK, because I've got all this stuff online for anyone who's interested. The addition of the three other films broadens the scope of the book, which should broaden its appeal.

And it also helps one of my methodological points, which is comparative analysis. As you know, I'm big on description. And, as you also know, description is not at all a straight-forward business. Not at all. It's tricky stuff. Because these things we're describing are complex. Just WHAT do you describe, and why, and when do you stop?

Well, one way to focus the descriptive effort is to look at several examples—you know, “comparison and contrast” from composition 101. You focus on what's similar across your examples and what's different. Depending on what you're looking at, you've still got a tricky job, but at least this gives you some direction.

The addition of the other three films opens up the analytic/descriptive space considerably. Obviously I'm not aiming for a comprehensive study of feature-length animation. I just want to explore some things, both thematic and methodological, and, above all, make the point that: This is serious art worth careful and serious consideration.

Some Animals and Animal/Humans in Miyazaki

In private email Tim Perper suggested that it would be interesting to compare Marco/Porco, pig-man, with the animals and “hybrids” in other Miyazaki films. Interesting, yes. But also exhausting.

Still, I decided to at least map out the “space.” In this post I list each Miyazaki feature, listing them in the order in which he created them. I then make some brief remarks about animals and hybrids in those films. At the end I conclude that Howl and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle provides the most interesting comparison with Marco/Porco and Gina/Fio in Porco Rosso. Thematically, Ponyo makes an interesting comparison with Porco Rosso, though that takes a little explaining. I do not even attempt to formulate an overall statement about Miyazaki's use of animals and animal-human hybrids. That's way beyond the scope of these informal notes.

Note: You might want to view this post as a complement to the earlier post in which I sketched out the different worlds in many of Miyazaki’s features.

* * * * *

Castle of the Cagliostro (1979): This is a naturalistic film, albeit one with a great deal of physically implausible action. There is one significant animal in the film, a dog that is the beloved pet of Princess Clarisse and that remembers Lupin. This dog is just a dog.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984): This is a strange world, filled with strange creatures. In particular it is filled with insects that are large, horse-size, to very large, whale-size. The ohmu appear to have telepathic powers and are able to communicate with Nausicaä. While these insects are strange, they are not ambiguous within their world. They are what they are.

The world also has one living Giant Warrior, which seems to be an organic creature constructed by humans as a super-weapon. Again, strange, but within its world, it is not ambiguous.

Castle in the Sky (1986): No animals play a significant role in this film. There are two very large robots which, as such, have been artificially constructed. And there is a mineral, etherium, which has some kind of bond with Sheeta, legitimate successor to the throne of Laputa. As for the few animals, I recall some birds and some ancient fish on Laputa, but that’s it.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988): This film has some very interesting creatures. There are dust gremlins, several totoro, and the cat bus. Though the adults seem to know of such creatures (Granny especially) they are visible only to the two young girls, Mei and Satsuki. They are ambiguous in that it is not clear whether these are simply creatures of the girls’ imagination or whether they are real enough, but simply invisible to adults. As far as I know all of these are creatures that Miyazaki has made up, though the cat bus owes a debt to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.

While the movie is named after the Totoro, they are not the protagonists; Mei and Satsuki are. Within their world there is nothing particularly problematic about the Totoro.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989): Kiki, the title character, is a witch. She can fly; other witches, such as her mother, apparently have other powers in addition to flight. Kiki has a cat, Gigi, who appears to be able to talk. However, midway through the film Kiki looses her witches powers and can no longer fly. Nor can she understand what Gigi is saying. When Gigi “talks” she, and we, hear only ordinary meowing.

This seems similar to the moment in Porco Rosso where the sleeping Fio awakens to see, not Porco Rosso, but Marco Pagot. And we see him too. This is a ‘deviation’ from the ‘baseline’ state of the movie, which is that everyone in the film sees him as Porco, including us. So, in Kiki, the baseline is that Kiki can understand Gigi, and so can we. When the baseline fails for Kiki, it fails for us.

Porco Rosso 3: In the Minds of Women

In the previous post I argued that, while it may be natural to see Pagot’s porcine appearance as a symbol or metaphor for his nature, such a reading is implausible. He’s not fundamentally piggish. He’s alienated, but that’s not, in any ordinary sense, piggish. Pagot’s appearance seems more an index of his relationship to society (e.g. the warlike regime) and to others than an index of his character.

Now I want to consider, at one and the same time, a thematic issue and a technical one. The thematic issue concerns Pagot’s relationship with women. The technical one is about how Miyazaki deploys his virtual camera.

Consider this shot, which is roughly two-thirds of the way through the film:

We’re on Porco’s island hide-out. The woman in the sleeping bag is Fio, the young engineer who redesigned Porco’s plane and who has accompanied him to the island so that she can make adjustments as needed. Who is that man?

That’s Marco Pagot appearing, not as an overweight middle-aged pigman, but as a handsome and slim middle-aged man. The camera moves in for a close-up and, in the process, assumes Fio’s point of view:

She speaks to him: “Porco…” He replies: “Hmmm? You can’t sleep?” As he replies he looks at her:

He’s now Porco. The camera moves back behind Fio and thus out of her point of view:

And they continue talking. Porco tells her how he came to be a pig.

Porco Rosso 2: What's a Pig?

What then do we make of the fact that the protagonist in Porco Rosso is an anthropomorphic pig? We might say that, well, it’s symbolic, it’s a metaphor.

Of what?

Let’s review the opening scene, which I discussed in my opening post. Even before we see the protagonist’s head, before we know he’s a pig, Miyazaki leads us to believe that his protagonist is lazy – sleeping on the beach in mid-day – and slovenly – cigarette butts, etc, lying around. In short, that he’s piggish, as that notion is understood. When we see that, yes, he IS a pig, well . . . just what are we being told? We’ve already seen that he’s piggish. We don’t need to see a pig’s head in order to know that. We know it from his attitude and actions. But perhaps the appearance provides an account of that behavior: he’s piggish because he’s a pig. It betrays the protagonist's essence.

Later on in the film he’s chatting with Curtis in the bar of the Hotel Adriano. Here’s a bit of that conversation:

Porco Rosso: That's the plane that beat an Italian boat at the Schneider cup, two years running.

Curtis: It's not only fast, it's good in aerial combat. I hear that a pig named Porco Rosso has quite a reputation around here.

Porco Rosso: If you make a deal with the air pirates, watch your tail, young'un. They're a bunch of penniless cheapskates. They stink 'cause they don't bathe.

Curtis: Yea... that's for sure.*

Now we have Pigman criticizing others for a failure to bathe. Given the conventional implications of piggishness, that would seem to be a bit hypocritical, no? Yet, while the pirates overhear the remark and bridle at it, there’s no suggestion that Pigman stinks. He appears to be well-groomed, and even a bit of a dandy, with a white scarf around over his flight suit. Maybe he isn’t such a pig after all.

The fact is, as Tim Perper pointed out to me in private discussion some years ago, Pagot does not, in fact, act like a pig in this film. Yes, as Patrick Drazen has explored in “Sex and the Single Pig: Desire and Flight in Porco Rosso” (Mechademia 2, pp. 189-199, 2007), Pagot has a reputation as a rake, and there’s no reason to believe that he doesn’t deserve that reputation. But we don’t see him womanizing in this film. In particular, he refuses to respond to Fio’s overtures, however tentative they might have been. The Pagot we see in this film is a brave, resourceful, and courteous man. Not a pig at all.

Porco Rosso 1 Meta: conventions, worlds, roles

I’ve got two comments that are ‘meta’ to yesterday’s post on Porco Rosso.

Funny Animals, NOT

Somewhere near the middle of that post I observed that, while talking animals are a convention often used in cartoons, the fact that Marco Pagot appears to be a talking pig cannot be attributed to that particular convention. Miyazaki is doing something else in Porco Rosso and is not calling on that convention. He’s just calling on the normal license of story tellers to include fantasy elements in their stories.

That seemed obvious to me when I drafted it and it remains obvious in retrospect. I note here that that observation didn’t occur to me until I drafted it yesterday, and that despite the fact that I’ve been thinking about this film off and on over several years and had written perhaps 20 or 30 pages of notes and correspondence prior to writing that post.

Why’d it take me so much time and effort to arrive at something so obvious? Perhaps it’s because I simply don’t think of Miyazaki in the context of thinking about “Three Little Pigs” or Porky the Pig. They’re different worlds. As such it simply didn’t occur to me to deny the convention of one world (funny animal cartoons) in the course of thinking about a film in a different world (Miyazaki features). Whatever the reason, I do think it useful to have made the connection and thus to have pointed out that different conventions apply to Porco Rosso.

Imaginative Worlds

My other comment is a bit obscure. It has to do with thinking about fictive worlds, which is common enough. That is to say, it’s common to think about the characteristics of the world invoked in this or that narrative. In doing so we separate the world from the particular narrative and ask: What kinds of things exist in this world? What kinds of actions and events can take place? I’ve done a post doing just that kind of thing for the worlds in most of Miyazaki’s feature-length anime.

I think that can be misleading. In the case of Porco Rosso it led me to ask whether or not it would be possible to have other pigmen in this world, or perhaps donkeymen or foxwomen. Yes, the story we’ve got has only one such creature; but could the imaginative world in fact admit of others? To be sure, I didn’t mention such questions in that post, but I asked them of myself as I was thinking about this film. And I had the sense that somehow they’re beside the point.

This anomalous person, this Marco Pagot slash Porco Rosso, exists not simply as a character in some imaginative world floating around in the imaginative ether, waiting for us to tell tales about it. That person exists specifically as a creature of the tale Miyazaki has crafted about him. As I emphasized in yesterday’s post, that person is THE PROTAGONIST in this story and his anomalous nature is as much a function of that role as it is of the imaginative world. Though the two things can be teased apart analytically – the world, the role – one cannot understand the creature (Marco Pagot slash Porco Rosso) except in the conjunction of the world AND the narrative.

Just why that is so I attribute to the mostly invisible and unknown machinery through which we tell and understand such stories.

Porco Rosso 1: Pig as Protagonist

Recently I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about the films of Hayao Miyazaki, re-watching them too, time and again. In the large I’ve been thinking how each film involves its own assemblage of naturalistic and fantasy elements. In some films the naturalistic seems to be a pendant on the fantastic, think of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. In others it’s the reverse, Kiki’s Delivery Service or the film I want to examine now, Porco Rosso, that is to say, The Crimson Pig.

The film’s central conceit is that the protagonist, Marco Pagot, is a man who, at some point in his life, became a pig. That is how he appears in the film. That, and a closely associated aerial parade of dead fighter-pilots in their planes are the only fantastic elements in the film. There are no elixirs and potions, no spells, no semi-divine and / or supernatural creatures, nor giant insects, no dream worlds, no flying about on brooms, none of that. Just a man who looks like a pig, and his memory of those dead pilots, their planes streaming upward. The memory takes but a minute or two on screen, but the porcine visage, that’s constant, from beginning to end.

Given any of Miyazaki’s films one might wonder what would happen if the fantasy elements were eliminated. Do that to Spirited Away and the film all but disappears. Eliminate the fantasy from Porco Rosso and most of the film remains, so much so that one might wonder whether those those two fantasy elements serve any compelling purpose.

I assume they do, but nonetheless find myself compelled to ask: Why a pig? What does Miyazaki accomplish through that conceit that he could not otherwise accomplish? While I find the film compelling in immediate experience, I don’t know how, upon reflection, to rationalize the protagonist’s porcine head.

Isn’t it symbolic?

Isn’t everything?

This is the first of two or three posts in which I examine how Miyazaki deploys this central device. In this post I will examine something that is so obvious that it hardly seems worthy of notice, much less analytic commentary, namely the fact the pig is in the protagonist role.

The Protagonist is a Pig

The pig in this film, Marco Pagot, is the protagonist. He’s not a secondary or tertiary character. The other characters exist to fill-out his story, not he to fill theirs.

By way of examining the obviousness of this fact, imagine the same film, but with Pagot appearing human at all times. Instead, some minor character shows up with a pig head, a donkey head, or a chicken head, choose your animal. Imagine that it’s the bank teller, or the boy who pumps the gasoline when Pagot refuels on the way back to his island. We see this minor character with an animal head. No fuss is made about it, and it’s the only animal-headed character.

How would that go over? It seems to me we’d be forced to think of it as a DUMBASS MISTAKE. What else could it possibly be? We have some being acting the role of a human. All of the creatures acting in such roles are ordinary humans, all of them except this one. If that’s not a mistake, then it requires an explanation.

What kind of explanation could possibly work? Perhaps the person really is just a person, but is wearing an deceptively convincing mask. If that’s the case, then the film has to show us that it is a mask, and must somehow account for that mask. Or perhaps the person really is a donkeyman, or maybe even an extraterrestrial donkeyman. That too must be somehow explained. However this anomalous creature is rationalized, the rationalization will threaten to enlarge the character out of minor status into major status or even . . . even the protagonist slot.

All of which is to make the obvious point: If there’s going to be one, and only one, anomalous character in the story, the implicit logic of story construction demands that that character be the protagonist. Further, the story must account for how the protagonist became anomalous.

Cartoons with talking anthropomorphic animals are ubiquitous. No one wonders why the taking creatures are animals. But those cartoons are pervaded by such animals. They are understood as conventions of the imaginative world in those cartoons. As such, they require no account. Porco Rosso is not one of those cartoons. Pagot’s porcine nature thus does not follow from that convention. It requires a different justification.