The Wind Rises

The nature of documentation changes dramatically when discussing works intending for or including an audience of children. The rules of documentary do not necessarily apply when involving children, as we explored during our unit on inquiry. There is a malleability to reality that a young viewer can latch onto even when an older person cannot. The works of Hayao Miyazaki all explore a sort of magic in their worlds, but most are grounded in a sort of documentation of a young person’s experiences. The same is not necessarily true of his final film, The Wind Rises (2013), a historical story about Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese engineer who helped design the fighter planes which would be used in World War II.

            This story does not immediately seem applicable or relevant to an audience of children, as it is an impressionistic look at prewar Japan that romanticizes the era, not to mention a movie that emphasizes romance in its characters. But Miyazaki’s childlike voice still comes through in his fetishization of flight — during scenes of Jiro’s childhood, Miyazaki frames airplanes as a literal childhood dream, something imagined as fantasy. This is not simply because of the early 1900s setting, when flight was only available to a select few, but also because it reflects the experience even modern children have with airplanes. A child does not inherently understand that flight is a possibility — they learn to crawl, stand, and walk, but to fly is something outside of their understanding. The magical mystery of simply soaring in the air is tantamount to finding a forest of magical creatures or climbing aboard a moving castle.

            In fact, Miyazaki explored that same kind of childhood adrenaline rush in Kiki’s Delivery Service. But The Wind Rises aspires to be more of a document than that movie; it never hides its nature as a biopic of sorts, aiming not to tell a small fantastical story but rather a grand story about the decline of an empire (through the lens of one man). This seems more inaccessible for a child than Miyazaki’s other films, but he makes more efforts to engage childlike ideas than simply depicting things that kids think are cool. The best example of this is the sound design of the movie — rather than use authentic engine and propeller noises, every sound coming from an airplane is manmade. The onomatopoeia includes “brrrrrrroooms,” p-p-p-p-p-p-ts” and “whoooooooshes,” and it is never treated as an aberration from reality. It is reality, a document of which filters the events through a perspective and mode that children can not only understand, but also engage with and feel on a profound level.