Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-twqc4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-09T00:10:54.126Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Miyazaki Hayao's Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Matthew Penney
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Miyazaki Hayao's new film Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) premiered on July 20 and is on pace to become one of the most successful, if not the most successful, Japanese films of 2013. Miyazaki tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, the designer of the “Zero Fighter”, which was a terrifyingly effective weapon deployed against China, the United States, and its allies in the early war years, but was soon doomed to become the antique target of “turkey shoots” and the funeral pyre of kamikaze pilots as Japan's empire crumbled and its cities burned.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 30 , August 2013 , e1
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

Notes

1 Miyazaki often draws himself as a pig, especially when he presents an image of himself as a selfish taskmaster berating employees. Porco Rosso would famously “rather be a pig than a fascist” in interwar Italy, but his response to the rise of fascism is to withdraw from society, not to resist.

2 In Germany at the sprawling, high modern Junkers factory, Horikoshi and his fellow designers wax nostalgic about their tiny factory, surrounded by endless rice paddies and with ox-drawn carts to move the test planes to the airstrip.

3 In written works, Miyazaki expresses an awareness that Japan's “nature” is, in many ways, an environment shaped by human society. His ideal seems to be found more in the rice paddies and carefully pruned hinterlands of the Edo period than the untouched old growth woods of prehistory.

4 This film was directed by Miyazaki's close Studio Ghibli collaborator Takahata Isao but Miyazaki is said to have played a leading role in both the animation and the development of the plot and setting.