Review of The Wind Rises (2013) by Frend — 11 Nov 2013

I was really disappointed with the film not because I expected a more magical Miyazaki but because his storytelling prowess is lost here. Though every single shot is so beautifully designed it's plagued by repetition and overly long sequences. It covers plenty of historical ground in 172 minutes but not much.

Emotional ground. Besides his narrative being problematic, the whole ideology is immoral. The film explicitly makes a case for beauty and design being more important than preventing war and being with your wife in her dying days. Beauty is in fact, very ugly when it is used for destructive purposes, but the film doesn't do much to make this statement. And the man behind the design isn't very interesting. He lacks personality, and even his imaginative and inspired dreams become repetitive and don't inform much. Miyazaki doesn't make a very good case for the genius of this man. I applaud Miyazaki for not being pigeonholed into making the same movie again and again, and he proves to be adventurous even to the end. But the beauty of the rendered images cannot overshadow very obvious flaws.