Porco Rosso · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man in an open cockpit looks up and the sky above him fills with aeroplanes. They climb in silence, wing to wing, a whole river of them going up into the cloud — everyone who went down in 1918 and kept going. He pulls back on the stick to follow. His engine won't take him that high. He comes back down alone.

Miyazaki stages this without one line of dialogue explaining what we are seeing. Marco Pagot is telling the story, but the telling and the seeing come apart. What he narrates is a war anecdote. What we get is weather that is also an afterlife.

Deleuze has a name for the ordinary movie flashback: the recollection-image. Something in the present stalls, the character reaches back, a dated piece of the past comes up to explain him. I was there, this happened, that is why I am like this. The cloud sequence starts in that grammar and then quietly stops obeying it. Nothing is dated. Nobody is retrieved. The formation doesn't stop climbing when the anecdote ends. This is closer to what Deleuze calls sheets of past: the past not as a file you open but as a region you can fly into, still there, coexisting with the afternoon. It changes what Porco's condition is. He isn't a man who remembers 1918 too vividly. 1918 is a place, at an altitude over the Adriatic his engine cannot reach, and he has spent more than a decade flying beneath it.

The frame in most films opens onto somewhere you could walk to — offscreen left, the next room, the road out of town. Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field. Occasionally a film opens onto something that can't be put anywhere at all. That upper sky is real altitude and real cloud, painted with the same brushes as the rest of the picture, and it is nowhere. Miyazaki gets the absolute out-of-field with a vertical camera move and a change in the traffic.

Notice what Porco was doing while it happened. He was flying. He had a machine, a gun and the best hands in the squadron, and the event of his life was one he could only watch. Deleuze's word for the modern protagonist is the seer — someone who has stopped being an agent and become a witness. Porco is a bounty hunter, which sounds like the opposite. But everything he does afterward is done by a man who has already had his one unrepeatable experience of being unable to act.

Now the flying itself, which is where the film's joy lives. Bergson's complaint about cinema, which Deleuze takes over and turns around, is that film builds movement out of equidistant ordinary instants — the any-instant-whatever — instead of the posed, significant attitudes classical art picked out. A photograph gets those ordinary instants for free; the camera samples whatever is in front of it. Animation has to manufacture every one. Miyazaki's staff drew each attitude of each aircraft in perspective, through barrel rolls and banking turns, holding the fuselage geometry of the Savoia and of Curtis's Curtiss-derived racer across hundreds of frames. The achievement is the consistency, not any single image. Cel animation is the one cinema where the ordinary instant is a deliberate act, and this is close to the last full flowering of it at Ghibli: no digital ink, no computer compositing, the analogue craft at its ceiling.

What that labour buys is a particular sensation. The layouts keep Porco stable in the composition and let the horizon rotate around him. The sea swings up into frame, the cloud bank tilts, he sits still. Deleuze noticed this reversal in dance and in dreams and called it the movement of world: the character stops moving and the world moves instead, carrying them. In a musical the dancer gets absorbed by the dance. In a cockpit it isn't a figure of speech, it's aerodynamics, and Miyazaki understood better than anyone where the pleasure of flight on screen actually comes from. Then the extreme long shots reduce the plane to a speck and hand the altitude back.

Then there is the pig. The film never explains the curse, and the refusal is the point. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, uses the word gest for a posture that makes a social relation visible in a body — not a gesture that means something, an attitude that shows where you stand. Italy is consolidating into Fascism just outside the frame. Marco has chosen the shame of being an animal over the shame of being a nationalist, and he wears that choice on his face, permanently, at the bar, in front of Gina. It's an argument he can only make by looking like that.

Which is also why the politics never turn into a speech. Deleuze's account of modern political cinema begins from the sentence "the people are missing": the political stops arriving as a people rising and arrives instead as the absence of any "we" worth joining. Porco's squadron is dead. His nation has become something he won't salute. What's left is a hotel.

The Hotel Adriano is shot the way Hawks shot a cantina — eye level, long takes, middle distance, Gina's relationship to her own room kept legible rather than chopped into expressive fragments. Miyazaki lets these scenes sit. That's temps mort, dead time: stretches that advance nothing and are not waste. Gina sings and the plot stops.

The plot was never going to get anywhere anyway. The action-image is Deleuze's name for the engine of classical cinema: a situation bears down, someone acts, the situation changes. Porco has the finest sensory-motor equipment in movies and none of it converts. He can out-fly Curtis and Fascism consolidates regardless. He can collect every bounty and stay a pig. The rematch is arranged rather than necessitated, a duel fought for its own sake — the same structure as The Great Waldo Pepper, whose barnstormer keeps replaying 1918 until he meets his German counterpart for no cause at all. That is the crisis of the action-image, reached inside a picture that is having a wonderful time.

Miyazaki is precise about what he owes. Hughes's multi-camera photography in Hell's Angels established that a dogfight must stay legible — cloud bank, sun position and horizon working as landmarks so you always know which plane is behind which — and Miyazaki, having neither cameras nor sky, has to draw those landmarks in. Only Angels Have Wings supplies the code: the dead are never discussed, competence is the only ethic, the bar rather than the cockpit is the real set. Casablanca supplies the bar's architecture, down to the resident singer whose number halts the scene and sorts the room, which is exactly what "Le Temps des cerises" does. Night Flight, the first Saint-Exupéry on screen, made flying a scheduled job with weather and engine reliability as the antagonists. And Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis is the model for the solo passages, where Hisaishi drops out and each aircraft is identified by its own motor note.

What the film left behind is less a style than a permission. Animation at this level of ambition had gone to children or to epic. Porco Rosso is about fatigue — Miyazaki said he made it for tired middle-aged men — and it carries romantic irresolution, survivor's grief and a war happening offscreen while they drew it, inside a comedy about a pig with a seaplane. It showed the medium could hold an adult's interior weather without an alibi.

Watch it again for what stays still. Porco in the cockpit while the sea comes up. Porco at the table while the song goes on. Porco under a formation he can't join. The film is generous with motion and very careful about who gets to move.