The Wind Rises · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hat leaves a head. A parasol tips over and goes. Hair blows flat across a face on a green hillside, paper lifts off a drafting table, grass combs itself in long waves. Nobody in the frame decided any of that. In The Wind Rises, almost nothing that moves is moved by a person.

Hold that against how films usually work. Someone wants something, moves toward it, and the movement carries their will; you read the motion and you read the character. Deleuze called that arrangement the movement-image, and it runs on a circuit: perceive a situation, act, change the situation. Miyazaki cuts the circuit at the first joint. His people stand still and the world does the moving. Deleuze had a name for this, the movement of world, and found it in musicals, where the dance seems to take hold of the dancer rather than the reverse. Miyazaki's version is weather. The wind moves hats, hair, paper, a paper plane on a breeze, and eventually an entire country, and the title tells you so in advance.

Now Jiro. He is voiced by Hideaki Anno, who is not an actor but an animator and a fellow obsessive about aircraft, and Miyazaki directed him to deliver everything flat. The performance drew arguments at the time and it should. Anno's Jiro sounds like a man half-asleep in his own life, most present when he is drawing or dreaming. Deleuze's word for a character like this is voyant, a seer: someone who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher, taking in more than he can answer.

The obvious objection is that Jiro is the least passive man in the film. He calculates, drafts, builds. He produces an aircraft that flies beautifully. All true, and it is exactly why this lens is worth the trouble. His action is real, competent, and resolves nothing. It does not stop the country's drift, does not cure Naoko, does not touch the use the aircraft will be put to. The old link between seeing the world and changing it has come apart, and not because Jiro is weak. It has come apart because the thing he makes gets taken away from what he made it for.

Which is where Caproni comes in. Again and again the film slips out of whatever year it is in and into a meeting with Giovanni Battista Caproni, the Italian pioneer. It matters that this is not a flashback. A flashback is dated, points back to a former present, and delivers you home; Deleuze calls it a recollection-image. Jiro never met Caproni. There is no past to go back to. An image that circulates like this, unmoored from any memory, is what Deleuze called a dream-image, and here it is structural rather than decorative: the dreams are where the film's actual question gets asked.

Miyazaki then does something only animation can do easily. He declines to mark the dream. In live action you change the lens, drain the colour, soften the focus. Caproni's impossible machines are drawn with the same weight as Mitsubishi's real ones, hung against the same watercolour sky, given the same hand-made imperfection. Nothing tells you which side you are on. Deleuze's term for that indiscernibility, where the actual and its virtual double swap places and you cannot say which came first, is the crystal-image. Animation has always been quietly crystalline, since everything in the frame is equally made. Miyazaki's invention is to build a serious adult film on that fact instead of using it as an effect.

The drawing itself carries an argument. Deleuze opens the Cinema books by separating two ways of holding motion. The old way picks the privileged instant, the pose at the top of the leap. Cinema does the other thing: it samples any instant whatever, the ordinary ones nobody would pose for, and rebuilds movement out of them. He noted that animation belongs entirely to the second, because a drawing never gives you a figure at a moment, it gives you the movement that describes the figure. This film is the case that proves it. Ghibli drew the flex of a fabric-and-metal skin and the churn of a slipstream by hand rather than simulating them, which means a person chose every intermediate instant of that flex. The aircraft never gets a hero shot. It is a shape known only through what it does in air. So is a life.

Listen, too. Miyazaki had the engines, the steam, and the deep rumble before the Kanto earthquake produced by human voices. You hear a propeller and something in it is a person, but you cannot say where that person is. Deleuze separates the out-of-field you could walk into, the room next door, from the absolute kind that is present to the image and has no location in space at all. Throats inside every engine is the absolute kind. The film's real subject has the same status: the camera stays on drafting tables and test flights, and the killing hangs somewhere off the edge of every frame.

Caproni asks whether it is worth building beautiful things that will be used to kill. The film poses it, re-poses it, and never answers. Not answered ambiguously. Not answered. Deleuze treated this as a category rather than a failure, the place where a film meets what thought cannot settle: the undecidable. The Human Condition had already framed a decent Japanese man's complicity as tragedy without a verdict, and Miyazaki goes further by refusing even the consolation of guilt.

The rest of the craft debt is legible. From Ozu, through Late Spring, comes the practice of putting the decisive events in the cuts, a death or a parting gone by offscreen, and with it the patience for stretches where nothing advances at all: trains crossing the frame, wind in grass. Deleuze built much of his account of the time-image out of Ozu's dead time, so that borrowing is theoretical as well as formal. From Bresson's Pickpocket comes the model, the non-actor kept flat on purpose so you read the situation instead of the emoting. Porco Rosso supplies the fetish for interwar aircraft as drawn objects, banking geometry and prop-wash and wing flex. Only Yesterday supplies the associative cross-cutting between a life and its interior. Grave of the Fireflies proved that drawn animation could hold adult wartime grief through omission, which is the register Naoko's illness is given.

One more layer. The film began as a manga Miyazaki drew for a model-hobby magazine out of his own private aviation obsession, and he then cast another aviation-obsessed animator to speak for the engineer. Three men who love the same shapes, stacked into one figure. Deleuze called this free indirect discourse, where the author's vision and the character's fuse so completely you cannot get a blade between them. The moral problem in this film is not Jiro's. It is Miyazaki's, asked in Jiro's voice, by a man who spent his life making beautiful machines fly for other people's purposes.

What it did to the form: it took the biopic, which normally runs on decisions, and rebuilt it on weather and rhyme, so that a career and a marriage arrive by drift. And it moved animation somewhere the commercial logic of family fantasy had never let it go, into unresolved historical complicity, then filled Japanese theatres anyway and went to Venice. The forward lineage is still short in titles; the most direct consequence so far is that Miyazaki un-retired to make The Boy and the Heron. What it seeded is better named as permission.

Watch it again and just track what is moving in each shot, and who decided. Almost never the man. Almost always the air.