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by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright March 2014
The Wind Rises was a refreshing breath of change from the formula story telling that is so pervasive in movies and computer entertainment these days. It tells its story in a different way, and while it talks about a well known period of history it completely dodges the icons of that period. It is an impressive movie for its originality!
The story centers around Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who designed Japanese fighter and bomber planes used in World War II. But the story is about living in Japan in the inter war years, and conquering new plane designing technologies.
One of the most interesting parts for me was how different the character relations were in this portrayal. The most obvious difference is there is no antagonist -- there is no one pushing against Jiro. Instead the characters are all very cooperative. The "antagonist" is getting these new planes they are designing to work. This kind of highly cooperative relation between many people reminded me of my years working at Novell. It brought back warm fuzzies for me, and reminded me that this kind of highly cooperative sea of relations is one of the virtues of working on some kind of frontier -- physical, technical or whatever.
Another interesting element is that the politics and crises of this era are only hinted at. Hitler gets mentioned just once in passing, and while the Japanese political police are mentioned, and Jiro has to dodge them, we never see them.
Yet another is how people are drawn in this movie. (It is an animation) The settings look Japanese, but the people don't. The animators have done a real good job of making them look like... people, ordinary people.
There is a love story, and it is a warm and fuzzy one mixed with tragedy, but it also is told in an original way.
And finally, this movie does a good job of showing us how engineering and designing new technology work. Jiro has to research and he has to experiment, and lots of those experiments don't work. When they don't, he does more research and experimenting. I like seeing this kind of process well portrayed.
This is a fine example of an original movie being shown in 2014. I'm real happy to see it in the theaters, and I hope it is an inspiration to break out of the smash-and-crash, by-the-book formula that has become so dominant in US film making. Time for the pendulum to swing the other way.
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