If you’ve considered seeing The Wind Rises, please do. Support Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, and then go on and watch as many of his other movies as you can find.
Miyazaki helped redefine the mainstream experience of Japanese animation, and his final work, The Wind Rises, is the perfect combination of what made his stories captivating for years. It is a uniquely Japanese story, animated beautifully with his signature style, and presented to the large audience in the grandest sendoff possible. There is nothing which is not beautiful about The Wind Rises, and there are certainly some things which are extraordinary: the coloring, lighting, and motion in certain scenes help explain why some previous reviewers called this his best work yet. (If you were voluntarily leaving your work, wouldn’t you end it with a bang?)
Seeing the American dubbed version of The Wind Rises obviously leaves a bit lost in translation, though the voice talents of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and Jon Krasinski are familiar to the ear yet retain the pacing and inflection of the original script - sometimes to the comedic relief of the American audience.
This is probably a movie-snob movie, but it really shouldn’t be. Instead, The Wind Rises should be considered the perfect introduction to a beautiful career catalog by a man who brought this style of art to the biggest screens in the U.S. That right there is commendable, and definitely worth seeing.
In many years...
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