The Wind Rises

First of all, let me start by telling "Woah, What a great movie". Hayao Miyazaki's latest movie The Wind Rises is one of his best movies till date though the story line and plot is completely different from all his other movies which had a magical and fantasy feeling to it. It's nowhere near Spirited Away his best work till date but it ranks 3rd in my ghibli list after Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. The story, partly non-fiction, evolves around a young mechanical designer whose dream was to build beautiful airplanes. He ultimately succeeds in building fully up-to-date planes, but which went to war, and none came back. His personal life is set in Japan when people were facing great uncertainty after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Great Depression, and preparation for the war with China, then America, and Britain, and Netherlands, and the Soviets ... He and his colleagues do what they do best and what they are supposed to do under those circumstances: make planes. Just do it. His life enters into a new stage when he meets again accidentally with the girl whose life he saved during the earthquake. Their beautiful romance and eventual marriage is however overshadowed by her disease (tuberculosis, which was incurable at that time), and war. The ending completely pays off and blew me away in every term. The Movie is what we wanted from Miyazaki though intended for Mature Audiences only, I suggest everyone to watch this movie and I am sure that you will receive 1 ounce more pleasure than I did. 10/10 For this Masterpiece.

Miyazaki's swan song, most likely. It's an animated biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aircraft engineer who developed the Zero, the plane which would eventually bomb Pearl Harbor and do kamikaze attacks in WWII. The man himself was a pacifist (at least according to this film). Most of the film just deals with the man's love for flight, which obviously makes the story very dear to Miyazaki. In fact, a good portion of the film takes place in Horikoshi's dreams, where he can invent any crazy contraption. First and foremost, the film is gorgeous. Though it mostly deals with the real world, it finds the beauty in it. As good as the film is, it isn't one of Miyazaki's best. It's a little long-winded and slow (definitely don't take your kids to it, even if they're big Ghibli fans). Miyazaki kind of neuters the militaristic history of Japan at that time. You can feel some terrible stuff going on in the background, but, outside of the Germans, whom our hero visits at one point, all the characters whom we meet are perfectly nice people. I would have liked a more detailed picture of history at the time. Also, the romance that is depicted in the film, which is entirely invented, is a tad too maudlin (though it is quite nice up front). And, though I won't hold it against the film itself, the English language dub is awful. This may be due to the film's specific, Japanese setting, but I really felt the voice actors were just dull as Hell. I hate to say it, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead role is the worst. The least offensive performances come from Martin Short and Mae Whitman (the latter is a professional voice actress who is great on Avatar: The Last Airbender, though she is best known for her role as Michael Cera's dull girlfriend Ann on Arrested Development). I wish I had just seen the subtitled version instead (it was playing here, but at an inconvenient theater). I might like the film better seeing it subtitled. All those criticisms don't amount to too much, though. It's a wonderful film.