The real Ghibli effect: Revisiting The Wind Rises, a hypnotic tale where nature is alive with a soul and heart

The wind is rising. We must try to live.

And so they must.

These words by Paul Valéry, quoted during the first conversation between soon-to-be lovers, echo throughout Hayao Miyazaki'sThe Wind Rises. The wind is present everywhere in the film—both literally and metaphorically. There are the winds of war, as the story unfolds during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s, a time when the world was bracing for war. There are the unseen winds, the quiet and wistful currents of change that quietly breezes through the lives of the main characters and the fierce and turbulent ones, that decide the fate of Japan itself.

Japan is on the cusp of transformation, and our protagonist, Jiro, plays a part in it, all while falling in love with the beautiful yet frail Naoko. The winds of romance here are not tempestuous or overwhelming but gently nudge Jiro and Naoko towards each other. A flying hat and an umbrella, is all it takes.

And finally, the winds of loss and grief blow softly at the end of the film. Just as Jiro reaches the peak of his success, or rather what he believes, a quiet gust lets him know that his wife is no more. It is subtle, almost imperceptible, yet enough to shatter him with shock: His face goes particularly blank, and he barely notices who is shaking his hand.

The wind is sentient, almost. It’s alive, just like the lush greenery, the sunflowers, and the little spring where Naoko finally finds Jiro. It brings calm, it can bring the storm, and our characters can only just keep waiting for it pass.

The beauty about The Wind Rises that there is no main storyline. Such words seem clinical and off-colour for a film of such vivid imagery and symbolism. The film is a tapestry of deeply nuanced, intertwined stories, each exploring different themes, all carefully threaded by chronology. It’s a fictionalised account of Jiro Horikoshi, Japan’s World War II airplane designer, who dreams of flying airplanes.  He can’t become a pilot due to his near-sightedness, so he decides to help others with their dreams of flying. And through this process, the Italian aircraft pioneer Count Caproni keeps visiting him in dreams as a kind of muse, advising him on the magic of dreams. Sometimes, the dream needs to be vivid, clear and all-encompassing. Perhaps, only then, can the reality of it all be achieved.

But sometimes, there’s something terrible about these beautiful dreams, when they come true. The dreams slowly turn from fanciful portraits of planes in the sky, into living nightmares, dropping bombs, causing death and destruction for people. The idealism is stripped away, as Jiro realises later, as he stands amid ruins and debris of fragmented dreams.

It’s this poetry and gentle, yet heavy magic that can never be replicated. The film has soul, just like the other creations of Ghibli studios---a soul that exists in each flower that almost appear hand-painted, each conversation between Naoko and Jiro. You hear the wind; it blows softly with the music. So, while AI creations continue to flood social media, it will never capture even a smudge of the real, rawness of the originals—not the painstaking effort of scenes that took a year or more to create.

The winds of technology will keep rising. We should enjoy the breeze and not lose ourselves in a storm.