Miyazaki's last film

Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese film director, animator, manga artist, illustrator, producer and screenwriter whose career has spanned six decades. He is best known here for his films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, which I consider a masterpiece.

His latest film, and apparently his last, is The Wind Rises, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature. It is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi (1903–1982), designer of the Mitsubishi A5M and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero; both aircraft were used by the Empire of Japan during World War II.

Unlike most of his other films, which employ elements of fantasy and draw on Japanese mythology, The Wind Rises is a straightforward, realistic story, though he uses dreamscape at several points in which Jiro meets Caproni, an Italian plane designer.

Jiro grows up wanting to fly, but because his eyesight is poor, he cannot, so he turns to designing planes. He is drawn to the beauty of flight and how to make machines fly in the most efficient way possible.

During his time at university, where he’s studying engineering, Jiro meets a young girl named Naoko while traveling back to Tokyo from a holiday. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 hits, which stops the train and causes Naoko’s maid to break her leg. Jiro helps Naoko and her maid get to Naoko's family, then walks away without giving his name.

Jiro later works for an airplane manufacturer and is sent to Germany to do technical research. Later, at a summer resort in Japan, he runs into Naoko, and they fall in love. However, she has tuberculosis, and they postpone getting married.

Although the story in the film follows the historical account of Horikoshi's aircraft development chronologically, the depiction of his private life is entirely fictional. Without this fictional content, however, the film would be boring.

Miyazaki includes detail about the development of the planes, but he also develops various characters, giving them interesting personalities, such as Jiro’s excitable boss, Kurokawa, or his best friend, Honjo. There is also suspense, as the Japanese secret police are hunting Jiro. And Miyazaki is able to evoke strong emotions, as in his other films.

He also includes references to other works. At the resort is a German named Castorp, which is a character from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, which takes place at a sanatorium on a mountainside. The film also quotes a poem by Christina Rossetti.

The film was controversial in Japan, receiving criticism from both the political left and right. Miyazaki has criticized Japan’s conservative party for wanting to change the constitution, but he also defended making a film about a war-plane designer.

A clear theme of the film is the tension between an artist who wants to make something beautiful and those who use his talent to make machines used in war. This conflict between art and pragmatism is one Mennonites, especially Mennonite artists, can relate to.

While The Wind Rises is not of the caliber of Miyazaki’s best works, it is a beautiful film that will capture your interest and emotion. See it, and look for his other films, particularly Spirited Away. 

An old antiwar film from Japan

We tend to pay attention to recent films, but it’s good to recognize that many good films have been made over the years that offer much to enrich our perspectives. Netflix is one source for viewing older films, and I regularly venture into these past treasures to explore what they offer.

This week I watched a Japanese film from 1956, The Burmese Harp, directed by Kon Ichikawa. It won several prizes and was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film. While any film from another country and another period of history offers particular insights into other worlds and other lives, The Burmese Harp is especially moving in its antiwar themes.

One way the film startles American viewers is that it is told from the perspective of Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma at the end of World War II. These soldiers are not the inhuman monsters American propaganda portrayed them as. In fact, this group of soldiers is led by a captain who is trained in choral singing and has his soldiers sing to raise their morale. One soldier, Mizushima, is designated to play the harp for the group.

The war ends, but one group of soldiers continues to fight. Mizushima volunteers to go to them to deliver news that the war is over and Japan has surrendered. A British captain gives Mizushima 30 minutes to convince these soldiers to surrender before he orders them shelled. The soldiers refuse to surrender, and all of them are killed in the ensuing shelling. Mizushima, however, survives and is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk.

He dresses in a monk’s robes and wanders the countryside, begging for food. He returns to where the soldiers were killed and goes about burying them.

His own company, meanwhile, believe he is dead, until one day they see a monk on a bridge who looks like Mizushima. But the monk says nothing to them. The film portrays these men’s care for one another and strong desire for Mizushima to rejoin them when they eventually receive permission to return to Japan.

However, he stays in Burma to live as a monk, but he sends them a letter that includes this beautiful sentence: “Our work is simply to ease the great suffering of the world, to have the courage to face suffering, senselessness and irrationality without fear, to find the strength to create peace by one’s own example.”

The film is shot in black and white and includes some stunning shots. It shows the horrors of war without overdoing it, as in today’s films. But it also shows the humanity of the Japanese soldiers. Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) does this as well.

There are many excellent antiwar films, such as Grand Illusion (1937) and Paths of Glory (1957), that are worth watching. The Burmese Harp is one more to add to that esteemed list.