Il Faut Tenter le Vivre
Le vente se levé,
Il faut tenter le vivre.
The wind is rising
So we must try to live
Winds are the forces that took the first planes into the sky, and those that left them broken, so is the rising storm our best chance to fly, or the sign that we must hide away? To Hayao Miyazaki’s most grounded protagonist, the only one to be based on a real person, there is no choice at all, for the wind is rising, so we must try to live.
The Wind Rises is a unique Ghibli experience that takes that fantastical surrealism that defines the studio, and brings it into the real world through the story of Jiro Horikoshi, whose passion for aviation led him to create warplanes used during WWII. For all his technical ingenuity, though, Jiro is defined most by his apparent lack of agency, his life both happily and tragically shaped by the tempest that gives him the chance to fulfill his dreams and leads him to the love of his life, only to take them both away. Jiro’s dilemma is one of the fundamental experiences of humanity — trying to find a purpose in a life that we cannot truly control.
The complexity of the story is due in part to the ways Jiro reflects Miyazaki himself — behind the seemingly pristine narratives and animations, family issues plague the artist. In particular, his discord with his children regarding the time he has dedicated to his work instead of them is not unlike Jiro’s internal conflict between his dreams of building planes, and his short time to spend with his beloved wife Nahoko, who is dying of tuberculosis. This meta understanding of the film is vital in seeing how Jiro's story, like the planes of his dreams, rises beyond its most basic perceptions of meaning.
Jiro’s moral ambiguity is a significant part of the film that has drawn controversy. Despite the extreme creative liberties taken, The Wind Rises ultimately is a story that seeks to humanize and in some ways idealize the people of a nation that committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in history. However, this criticism misses the point of the story because Jiro’s choice is never one of conflict. The winds are already rising, and the horrors of the war that the film’s imagery portrays would have come to pass with or without Jiro. Similarly, Nahoko was going to die of tuberculosis even if Jiro had never met her. What matters is the choice Jiro makes to metaphorically ride the wind.
The idea that planes and their metaphorical significance of dreams are ultimately doomed is constantly referenced in the film. The question the film seeks to explore is not whether or not we should dream, but why we do it anyway. The answer is because the winds of the world both give and take. The wind literally rises each time Jiro meets Nahoko, and a hat blowing away is the start of a love that defines their lives. Then, when Nahoko passes, it is a gust of wind that seems to bring the realization to Jiro. In the same way, the winds of war bring Jiro the opportunity to craft the planes of his dreams, and the winds of war leave them broken on the battlefields.
In the end, Jiro’s meaningful choices are not those of broad societal significance because, in truth, those realities are defined only by the wind. In life it often seems that no one really has control over how things are going to change. However we, like Jiro, have agency in what matters, in the choice to build something destined to be destroyed, to love someone destined to die, and to live a life destined to be lost in the wind, knowing that it means something all the same.