Now playing at Silver City Polo Park

After much critical adoration and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, The Wind Rises has finally hit Winnipeg theatres. The picture has been making the festival rounds since September, but it is only now seeing Canadian wide release. It was well worth the wait. The Wind Rises is a deeply affecting and inspiring animated feature.

The director, legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, has claimed that this is his last film. Since I’m mostly a Miyazaki neophyte, I worried that perhaps the significance of this film would be lost on me. But you don’t have to be a die-hard to appreciate The Wind Rises.

The film is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aircraft engineer who designed many of the Japanese planes that flew against the Allies during WWII. The movie can be lumped into many genres: biopic, historical drama or animated fantasy. But it transcends all of them by simply being a unique and moving work of animation. Miyazaki’s backgrounds are composed of lush, impressionistic brushstrokes, and his simply drawn characters house an emotional complexity that most modern animated films don’t bother attempting.

Jiro’s complacency in the war effort is explored somewhat, but the movie is interested in other things. Through Jiro’s eyes, the eyes of an engineer, the world is a completely different place. Not just airplanes, but bicycles, streetcars, and umbrellas all become brilliant machines that tell you through their nuts and bolts how they work. Miyazaki knows how to show an audience why a creative mind like Jiro’s is a treasure, and why it’s such a crime that such minds are often exploited for war.

There’s an unexpected love story at the film’s center that is its most moving feature. But, at the end, the whole movie had me in the palm of its hand. I laughed and cried and learned. What more can you ask for?

Published in Volume 68, Number 22 of The Uniter (March 5, 2014)