The Wind Rises: A Study

“Be careful, this may be a dream, but you can still lose your head!”

How impossibly complex and beautiful the human brain is. This film really is something else! The first few sequences of the film where Jiro drifts away from reality into his lucid dreams is the focal point. It amazes me how he was never really delusional between the transitions like Jay Gatsby who has a facade of himself that is the complete opposite of who he is in the illusions that he had created. I was surprised how Jiro, on the other hand, is always in congruence with his dreams and reality. He’s just a young man oblivious to the fact that he’d go on becoming a real hero!

There isn’t any ideology or propaganda attached to him. He’s just a simple man who wants to make his dreams tangible. After I graduated with a degree in Psychology, I really did want to go ahead with my Master’s too, but I was too afraid it might put Photography in the backseat. I was practically alone in making that decision, my brother always had my back but I was technically flouting my parents’ convention and putting everything at risk. Jiro, despite of his shortcoming of being nearsighted took a chance at taking flight through a career in aeronautical engineering. That for me as well was a moment of epiphany- to pursue visual communication for my Master’s.

In his dreams, he meets Giovanni Caproni, an Italian aeronautical engineer and his idol since childhood. In Caproni’s soliloquy about his dreams presents a terrifying reality of their fate and the work that they are doing. That’s the whole catch about the message of the film. Of how simple, innocent people are weighed down by corruption. He realizes this in his interaction with a German man whom he meets at the hotel. “Make the world your enemy.” He says, Germany and Japan will make the world their enemy and they will be destroyed because of it.

But that’s not what the film is about. It’s about dreams and human’ ability to create. Not about war or about the false interpretations of the man created by the world. Not just Japan, the world itself is struggling to find a balance and equanimity with the nature of innovation which either becomes a creative destruction or probably a destructive creation. Never thought I’d end up enjoying historical drama to this extent. I could make a list of all the scenes I loved and yet fail to wrap my head around the concepts discussed in one film.

I think at the end of the day, like Naoko says, “Life is wonderful, isn’t it?”