Wick's Review

Summary - OK 2.5

Hard not to think of The Wind Rises as The Zero Movie, as it’s about the engineer who designed Imperial Japan’s lethal fighter – the dreaded Japanese Zero. Instead, Jirô Horikoshi gets painted in hagiographic terms in a movie nominated this year for an Oscar and a Golden Globe: Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Language Film respectively. Both nominations are worthy, even if the overall movie is just OK.

This blockbuster is Japan right now, in ways both big and awkward. How big? The Wind Rises was 2013 Japan’s biggest movie of the year. Every country needs heroes and Jirô is clearly heroic, but come on now. He’s pledged to a perverted cause still held in infamy, per FDR. The movie sympathizes with him and it.

Such jingoism doesn’t travel well, especially in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We Yanks see a willing victim of the Imperial Militarists around and above him, even if that was Jirô’s only choice.

The movie scorns the Thought Police, but that’s not enough. Japanese cinema has yet to deliver anything comparable to The White Ribbon or even The Reader. It’s a country that hasn’t come clean with itself.

Now that it’s no longer the strongman in the neighborhood, that’s a suboptimal situation.

Gorgeously imagined, animated and orchestrated, The Wind Rises beautifully romanticizes bucolic Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. No wonder it’s popular there now. Here? Not so much.

Acting - Good 3.0

IMDb says there’s an American version with voices dubbed in from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short, Stanley Tucci, Mandy Patinkin, Werner Herzog, Jennifer Grey and William H. Macy. Man!! That’d be great. Unfortunately the version I saw at Camera 7 in Silicon Valley on Saturday night had the original Japanese voices and fast-moving subtitles. #Awkward

In fairness, they sounded natural and were no doubt very good, even great in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Film - OK 2.5

Treacly when not maudlin, The Wind Rises unselfconsciously juxtaposes harmonious Japanese culture with the fundamentally fascist government of Imperial Japan. #ToneDeaf

Indeed, it romantically celebrates the rise of the Axis War Machine, mostly Imperial Japan, but also Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

That said, the great animation filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has a legitimate career capper with his final creation. Legitimate in Japan, anyway.

Even a flying freak like me, a guy who grew up on Richard Bach, can’t get past its propagandistic nature. Assuming that wasn’t the case, I’d be able to give its celebration of engineering, life and flight its due.

Edge - Tame 1.4

G Rated Whitewash

Reality - Glib 1.5

Imagine if Disney Animation made a fictionalized biopic of Charles Lindbergh, where the gauzy depiction of his childhood and personal life had only tenuous connection to his real life. That’s this movie, albeit about a Japanese national hero.

About the Japanese Zero that Jirô Horikoshi created:

• They were used in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
• They dominated the skies of the War in the Pacific for several years.
• They were used for Kamikaze attacks in the latter years of the war.

That evil legacy isn’t fully attributable to Jirô Horikoshi, but then neither is the content of The Wind Rises or its tremendous popularity.

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