Story (Spoilers!)
This film centers on Jiro Horikoshi, who has long aspired to fly or design airplanes. As he is nearsighted, he is unable to do the former and is inspired by an engineer in his dreams, Giovanni Caproni, to do the latter. His desire to make beautiful planes brings him to college five years later, on the way meeting a wealthy woman named Naoko Satomi as the Great Kanto Earthquake halts their train. Four years after that, Jiro has graduated college and begins work as an aeronautical engineer for Mitsubishi, designing an airplane that fails during testing. Disillusioned, Jiro and his friend are sent to Germany to study Hugo Junkers’ work. Three years later, Jiro is promoted to chief designer where he designs a plane that also fails testing. He takes a mental vacation where he encounters Naoko, now an artist, again and becomes engaged to her. He also meets a secretly anti-Nazi German man named Castorp, who is wanted by the secret police, and Jiro by extension. He hides out while working on a new project, and Naoko suffers a lung hemorrhage due to her tuberculosis and has to in a sanatorium. She leaves to marry Jiro despite her health, and Jiro’s sister advises him that tuberculosis is incurable and their marriage will end in her death. Jiro has to leave her side to attend the test flight of his newest design, causing her to return to the sanatorium and leave letters for him. During the successful test, he has a feeling that Naoko has died, shown through a sudden silence. After the war has ended, he sees the devastation around him and feels immense regret that his designs were used for war rather than beauty. He sees his planes fly by, saluting him, and Caproni comforts him by saying that even though they were used for violence, his dream of making beautiful planes was realized. Naoko’s spirit also comes to him asking him that he live a full life.
My Review (Spoilers)
Lamenting over the corruption of beauty is the essence of this film, embodied both by Jiro’s work on Zeroes and Naoko’s health decline. Jiro is a prodigy in airplane design, in one scene looking over the blueprints and instantly finding a way to make his plane a pound lighter. Jiro sees Naoko for the first time as an adult as she is atop a hill painting a nearly abstract vision of her landscape. When she has a lung hemorrhage as a result of her TB, she violently coughs blood onto her work in progress. As Jiro looks over the devastation after the war, this is his moment of realizing his soiled art. Both Naoko and Jiro’s masterpieces were stained by blood, ruining them. While Naoko isn’t shown lamenting over her loss, Jiro’s pain is palpable, echoing a deep regret for the losses that he has indirectly caused.
Similarly to our discussion of Castle in the Sky, flying is obviously quite important to this film symbolically. The former, as with most Ghibli films, uses gliders to simulate humans and nature coexisting to push humanity higher, both metaphysically and literally. In that film, the two main characters affix themselves to a glider atop their plane and release it, flying higher into the air, symbolic of humanity bettering itself by combining technology and nature rather than only using technology at the expense or ignorance of nature. In this film, however, flying is shown as a means of escape for Jiro, and as an allegory for his dreams. Jiro is virtually blind without his inch-thick glasses, so his dreams of flying are exchanged for vicariously living through those that fly his creations. In his dreams, he meets a visionary who builds planes for purely aesthetic reasons rather than any semblance of logic or reason, as they crash and burn upon takeoff every time. Jiro sees himself and his work through this lens as well, with his own planes in his dreams ascending high into the air and breaking due to some minor flaw. Fueled by a childhood obsession with the ability to fly and stunted by his inability to do so himself, he becomes wholly fixated on making a perfect flying machine. This makes him a perfectionist visionary, a combination that can do literally nothing but cause degenerative mental illness, echoed by Naoko’s degenerative physical illness. And while Naoko succumbs to her illness, Jiro uses his to make one of the most perfect flying machines in history. This makes its fall from grace all the more poignant for the audience, as we have seen him spend his entire life in a search for beauty, and then to succeed and have this beauty soiled by blood. In this sense, the lovers’ stories mirror each other, and concludes with Naoko’s spirit urging Jiro to do what she couldn’t: beat his illness and continue to make art.
Structurally, this film is virtually flawless. At times the pacing fell flat, it introduced some under-developed characters, but as a pseudo-biopic it would be foolish of me to expect anything else. Not all humans have developed personalities, you know. The only gripes that I have with this thing are minor inconveniences with plot development, but that’s nothing that cripples the movie. It’s relatively light thematically, but the themes that it does attempt at are pulled off quite well. I would’ve liked to have seen more depth to it, but it didn’t need to be deep. As a movie, this is great. Undeniably one of the best Ghibli movies out, though not nearly my favorite.
I hate giving so many good scores for this class, as I generally don’t give good scores, but Ghibli has proven itself to never really disappoint (I will not be watching Tales from Earthsea anytime soon out of fear). This film is a masterclass in how to make a biopic. It sticks to reality and uses expressionism to flesh out internal emotions, while dramatizing just enough to further those emotions and the themes it presents. And on top of that, these themes are handled better than most films I have seen. It takes a little more than a surface-level viewing to get them, but they aren’t terribly difficult to suss out.
9/10
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