The Grand Budapest Hotel

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL         B-                           
USA  Germany  (99 mi)  2014  d:  Wes Anderson       Official site

Despite a coming attractions trailer to die for, where the sheer tone of subversive humor looks like mandatory viewing, and despite all the accolades this film has been receiving, it is not one of the better Wes Anderson films.  While the film espouses to be a rollicking thrill ride through the behind-the-scenes, Kafkaesque inner workings of the Eastern Bloc, rivaling the plot twists and cherished thrills of any Agatha Christie novel, what’s lacking, unfortunately, is a connection to any of the characters, generating a dull thud in the viewer’s heads suggesting none of the sheer daffiness of the story makes any difference in our lives whatsoever, but instead feels like an over-caffeinated, completely invented, cartoonish world of lunacy and adolescent silliness on display.   Yet we’re led to believe this film is so clever, as the rambling narrative offers a continual diversion into another dreamlike world, where we feel immersed into an Arabian Nights fantasy set behind the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War, where the film features a gala of stars where all of this offers such amazing potential that the film never comes to realize, as so much of it lies flat on the screen.  While it’s a well decorated screen, given an overly sweet, confectionary sugar look where an attraction to baking goods is essential to appreciating the film’s many side plots, but it just gets too carried away with its own indulgent excess, as if this is a whimsical, lighthearted delight, but so many of the comic bits feel overly contrived and repetitive in tone, where it’s so caught up in a dry parody of sophisticated wit that it forgets the magic of whimsical fun.  Some will have a good time with this film, but it’s an acquired taste and not for everyone.  Unlike 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, arguably Anderson’s most delightful and thoroughly enjoyable film, one that reaches artistic heights because the essential story being told actually matters, where two highly intelligent pre-teen kids in love make a run for it, escaping the hum drum conformity that waits for them at home, where the kids lead a more charming life, feeling highly autobiographical and supremely tender, using the sophisticated interplay of the music of Benjamin Britten to add a theatrical flourish.  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a return to the smart-assed, mocking tone of Anderson where he remains aloof from the audience. 

It’s not for lack of trying, as the effort given by Ralph Fiennes as hotel manager Gustave H. is exemplary, one of his finer performances, as is the previously unheralded Tony Revolori as Zero, his Lobby Boy, where the mischief these two get themselves into comprises the heart of the story.  Many of the secondary characters, however, barely generate a pulse, despite the exaggerated, over-the-top nature of their creation.  Even the opening falls flat, as there’s a slowly developing, somewhat boring modern era prelude that leads to a flashback sequence that generates all the interest, becoming a story (the present) within a story (the near past) within a story (the far past), where Fiennes immediately finds the right tone, becoming the center of attention, but so many of the rest feel like stock characters.  The meticulously designed sets feel like zany fun, but the execution of much of the material leaves something to be desired.  A tribute to troubled Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a pacifist and anti-nationalist during the rise of Hitler, Anderson draws upon his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday that he wrote escaping the Nazi’s in exile during the war shortly before his suicide, a practically unknown writer in America today, yet in the 20’s and 30’s he was the most translated European writer. 

The hospital train in which I was returning arrived in Budapest in the early morning hours. I drove at once to a hotel to get some sleep; my only seat in the train had been my bag. Tired as I was, I slept until about eleven and then quickly got up to get my breakfast. I had gone only a few paces when I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and carefree as ever before. Women in white dresses walked arm in arm with officers who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of quite a different army than that I had seen only yesterday and the day before yesterday…. I saw how they bought bunches of violets and gallantly tendered them to their ladies, saw spotless automobiles with smoothly shaved and spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through the streets. And all this but eight or nine hours away from the front by express train. But by what right could one judge these people? Was it not the most natural thing that, living, they sought to enjoy their lives?—that because of the very feeling that everything was being threatened, that they had gathered together all that was to be gathered, the few fine clothes, the last good hours!

Here it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of the war! No, it was not the promenaders, the careless, the carefree, who were to blame, but those alone who drove the war on with their words. But we too were guilty if we did not do our part against them.

Transporting us to the illustrious era of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the most glorious vacation spot in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, the film attempts to recreate the luxurious aristocratic splendor on display before that polite, civilized world was destroyed by war, even as the building still stands today nestled among the mountainous beauty of the peaks dotting the landscape, quiet and empty now, completely harmless, an old decaying structure that is a wondrous relic of the past that stands as a metaphor for a society on the verge of collapse.  In the era when Gustave H. runs the hotel, he represents the essence of civilized manner and high level service, where everyone’s needs are catered to and taken care of, where his job is to make it as smooth and effortless as possible.  His Lobby Boy is an apprentice still learning the trade from the master, teaching him to understand what a guest wants, and then getting it to them before they can even think of it themselves.  His secret is wearing a scent called Eau de Panache cologne, turning him into a ladykiller, where female guests of all ages are his specialty, offering the most intimately personalized services of the house.  When one of his wealthiest guests dies unexpectedly, Tilda Swinton as Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis, her extraordinarily wealthy and extended family is shocked to see she left her most prized painting to none other than Gustave H, causing a scandalous outrage, where her maliciously foul-minded son (Adrien Brody) and his heinously depraved hit man (Willem Dafoe) are determined to get the painting back, using a series of threats and intimidation tactics, which include detestable passport challenges of his precious Lobby Boy, a man in exile who unfortunately travels with flimsy travel documents, where Gustave H. is even thrown into prison.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Gustave H. adapts miraculously to prison life, where he’s at his best while serving the needs of others, but all that matters now is making an escape.  Borrowing liberally from all the prison escape movies, this has to be the most difficult and convoluted escape route ever devised, turning what should be a suspenseful event into a tedious exercise of extending a joke far too long, as whatever original cleverness there was is eventually overwritten to the point of exhaustion.  The rest of the film is basically a chase movie filled with murders and double crosses, remaining out of reach from Dafoe’s deadly assassin who is a miraculous master of disguises, where the sinister threat of fascism on the rise is expressed as a Zubrowkan political movement involving black jackboots and leather trench coats, where they may as well be Blue Meanies out to destroy the candy-colored beauty of Gustave H’s pastel dreamscape.  Much of this does recall Guy Madden’s hypnotic use of surrealism and color, also a kind of slapstick hit-or-miss the way the story develops, but mostly the film deals with a superficial world of illusion, where all the eloquent manner and artificial extravagance simply disappears, where the war saps the life blood out of the hotel and everything it stands for.  After a slow start, it’s eventually told in a frantic pace with a zest for enthusiasm and crazy screwball antics, where what’s perhaps most surprising is on the surface, the movie is all comedy and light, lost in a chaotic confusion of narrative overkill, but under the surface the film just isn’t that funny, instead feeling surprisingly somber and dull, where there’s no emotional connection to any of the characters, where the sheer dependence on such extreme artificiality suggests little of this will even matter afterwards.  Had there been no dedication to Stefan Zweig, the underlying tale of tragedy and doom about the destruction of what was once a genteel and civilized Europe might have loomed even further under the surface, but as is, it’s a confusing mix of nostalgia, comic farce, overdecorated production design, and a strange and peculiar fascination with the past, where memory can be a bewildering embellishment.   

The Gardener

THE GARDENER                   B              
Iran  Israel  Great Britain  South Korea  (87 mi)  2012  d:  Mohsen Makhmalbaf           Official site

His first feature in three years, and the first time in over three decades that an Iranian filmmaker has shot a movie in Israel, Mohsen Makhmalbaf was once a staple of the great Iranian filmmakers along with Abbas Kiarostami, both of whom created film schools to encourage the creative development of younger filmmakers in Iran, where it’s interesting that these New Wave Iranian masters enjoyed their greatest success following the 1979 revolution, but since 2005 with the return of extreme censorship and fascism in his country when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came into power, neither one lives or works in Iran any more.  Makhmalbaf left Iran as a protest against the Iranian dictatorship and at present lives in exile with his family, having lived in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and India, but mostly Paris and London since the disputed and likely rigged 2009 Iranian presidential election, where the Makhmalbaf family has collectively won over 100 international awards at various film festivals, all kept in the Museum of Iranian Cinema in Tehran where their works are banned in Iran from being shown.  Both the Bahá’í faith and travel to Israel have long been banned by the Iranian government, so when Makhmalbaf traveled to the Jerusalem Film Festival with his movie, the head of Iran’s official cinema organization denounced him for falling “into the arms of the occupier, the murderous Zionist regime” and called on the state cinema museum to remove his awards.  Other Iranian filmmakers have been arrested and forbidden from making films, including Jafar Panahi, a former assistant who worked for Kiarostami before becoming an acclaimed director, who received a six-year prison term and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, writing screenplays, talking to the press, and traveling abroad, but also Mohammad Rasoulof, Mehdi Pourmoussa, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Katayoun Shahabi, Hadi Afarideh, Nasser Saffarian, Shahnama Bazdar and Mohsen Shahrnazdar, not to mention human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and others.  Makhmalbaf himself is familiar with arrest, having spent four and a half years in prison as an Islamic militant in 1974 for stabbing one of the Shah’s Revolutionary Guard bodyguards, where he took a bullet to the stomach as well, restaging this event as a filmmaker in A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (1996), perhaps his greatest film where in a moment of reconciliation he is reunited with the policeman he stabbed.  Embracing that same spirit of generosity and transcendence through art, Makhmalbaf and his son Maysam, a filmmaker in his mid-20’s, combine their efforts to explore the Bahá’í faith, a mid 19th century religion that began in Iran where 130,000 believers remain under relentless attack from arrest and persecution.

The setting for this film is the gorgeous and palatial Bahá’í gardens at the Bahá’í religion's world center in Haifa, Israel, the site of the Shrine of the Báb which is surrounded by beautifully sculpted, terraced gardens where the camera follows a gardener painstakingly take individual care of each flower in bloom throughout the entire grounds.  Makhmalbaf got special permission to roam the grounds, which is limited to Bahá’í members, each bringing their own video cameras filming whatever they want, while a third film crew films them.  Rather than a typical talking heads documentary, this one starts first and foremost with the radiant beauty on display, as the magnificent colors are striking, balanced beautifully with the everpresent sound of birds, whose presence flying through the trees is a living part of the landscape, suggesting a liberating spirit soaring high above.  Makhmalbaf’s narration suggests he has no religious affiliation, that he considers himself an agnostic filmmaker, so his purpose is to find an internal connection to the spirit of Bahá’í, a pacifist religion that in its 170 years of existence has never fought a war, believing land belongs not to nations, but to humanity, to all people, removing any reason or motivation to go to war for territorial ambitions.  A collection of all the world’s religions, violating no human rights principles, in Bahá’í, believers of Mohammad worship side by side with Jesus or Buddha, where the sum total of the world’s knowledge is utilized in combating differences.  Their beliefs suggest that hatred and war must be opposed by a stronger force for peace.  While they are filming, making the most of so little, the father and son engage in polite debate, where Maysam is against all forms of religion, believing they are the root cause of all wars, as people can get caught up in the frenzy of passion where al Qaeda can use bombings and murder as a pretext for Islam, or the Taliban can use religion to enslave women.  Mohsen takes a more spiritual approach and believes religion can actually promote peace and harmony among all of the world’s citizens, providing intellectual discipline and thought for guiding one’s behavior, where treating everyone with equal respect is paramount, “Love people not for themselves but for God.” 

While their discussions throughout do not feel forced or artificial, but genuine and heartfelt, as both represent different sides of many debates, where Maysam finds a young girl explaining her love of the Bahá’í faith as empowering and liberating, claiming “The Bahá’í faith is Hope actualized,” recalling the moment when she removed her veil in Islamist controlled Iran and finally felt free, where living there her emancipation was considered threatening and could not be tolerated.  Mohsen takes more interest in the quiet dedication and rhythmic perfection of a volunteer gardener from Papua, New Guinea, as he recounts how there are about 30,000 Bahá’í believers there while affirming his views for why he retains his Bahá’í faith.  While Maysam questions whether his father may be making a religious movie, he instead takes a break from the tranquility of the gardens and visits old Jerusalem, finding it incredulous that the most sacred piece of land to the Jews, the Western Wall where worshippers are seen devoutly praying or kissing the wall, is right around the corner from the Islamist Al-Aqsa Mosque, while the Chapel of the Ascension, a Christian holy site marking the place where Jesus ascended to heaven, is only a few feet away down a tiny alleyway from the Dome of the Rock, the spot where Muhammad ascended to heaven, all within a few hundred feet from one another, where literally for centuries, Moslems, Christians, and Jews have been squabbling over this same tiny piece of land, pointing out that if one group tried to bomb one of the other’s religious shrines, it would inevitably destroy their own in the process.  While there is an unusual serenity in the garden, reflecting an absence of animosity, one tends to philosophize with phrases like “We are all flowers of one garden, the leaves of one tree,” suggesting the gardener “is not only gardening, in a way he is praying.  It is a kind of meditation.”  But Makhmalbaf also makes an interesting choice to use a flight-cam, suggesting a bird’s eye view to reflect the birds flying overhead, but these are shot in Black and White and have a dreary, slightly out of focus look about them, in utter contrast to the bright and luminous world of the gardens below.  These shots are interspersed throughout the film, reflecting a world without beauty and color, perhaps without the presence of God, where according to the curious thoughts of a friend Arno, they have the distinct look of military surveillance footage, like the view from drones flying high above, resembling those shots that show incoming missiles before they hit an exploding target.  While the question remains unanswered as to why pacifist Bahá’í followers are persecuted throughout the world and viewed as such a threat, this film demonstrates through the simplicity of a father quietly talking to his son how art transcends all conflicting religious doctrine.   

Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta)

PORCO ROSSO (Kurenai no buta)                 B+            
aka:  Crimson Pig

Japan  (93 mi)  1992  d:  Hayao Miyazaki 

I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.                   —Marco Rosso  

Perhaps the film that best expresses Miyazaki’s love for airplanes, as we venture right into the cockpit in this one, which features dazzling WWI style aeronautical loops, climbs, chases, and fighting techniques, a bit like the dazzling in-air camera angles in Howard Hughes fabled HELL’S ANGELS (1930), where the ace fighter pilot is a somewhat hefty, trench coat wearing pig in dark glasses and a moustache known as Marco Rosso.  We are introduced to him as he’s sitting in a lounge chair sipping a beverage with a straw under the shade of an umbrella next to the lapping of the waves on an isolated beach retreat listening to the radio while reading a Cinema magazine.  When the phone rings, this perfect harmony comes to a sudden halt, as he is called into action to save a group of young girls after being hijacked from a cruise liner along with a large payroll by air pirates.  Of interest, the girls couldn’t be more fascinated at the thought of being kidnapped.  This kind of humor goes all the way back to PANDA! GO PANDA! (1972-73) when a young girl is left home alone in the woods, and rather than be scared, she’s positively delighted at the thought that a burglar might come around so they could become fast friends.  These girls immediately have the run of the airplane, and without anyone harmed, Rosso negotiates a deal where they release the girls and keep half the loot, which is all done by flashing messages to one another using reflecting light off a small hand mirror. 

Already, this is not what we expect, though it has a similar humorous tone from the air hijackings at the beginning of CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986).  While that earlier film beautifully blends fantasy with reality, this one is grounded in an American created Hollywood reality, where Rosso has a laid back, world weary Humphrey Bogart feel to him, a constant cigarette dangling from his lips, where he sits alone at a bar and sips a cocktail while a glamorous chanteuse (Jina) sings a sad Marlene Dietrich-style song (in French, no less!).  We could just as easily be sitting at Rick’s bar in CASABLANCA (1942), but it more likely resembles Gary Cooper’s entrance to the exotic night club in MOROCCO (1930), where his American “look” feels so out of place, as immediately in this film there’s a handsome, adventurous, wide-shouldered American named Donald Curtis who’s besmitten with Jina and wants to marry her, a proposal she simply laughs off.  This is the first identifiable American character in a Miyazaki film, an arrogant, opportunistic man who turns out to be another flying ace who was hired by other air pirates to take out Rosso, as he’s cutting into their profits.  But Rosso’s plane is so beat up that it leaks oil and the engine routinely stalls in mid-air, leaving him at a distinct disadvantage, so he declines the offer, but Curtis shoots him out of the sky anyway leaving him for dead.  This bold, post-war depiction of a reckless American cowboy mentality is stunning in its accuracy even now. 

With the help of Jina, Rosso’s long distance friend, she helps get him and what’s left of his plane to Milan where his grandfather’s factory can make repairs.  Using an engine appropriately named Ghibli, a bright young female engineer named Fio draws up new plans to redesign his plane, insisting that she accompany him on his initial flights to test its worthiness in the air, where she turns into what amounts to his sidekick, providing renewed energy and enthusiasm to burn, quite a contrast to his quiet, resigned isolation.  Eventually they all meet in a duel in the sky, winner take all, where the other sky pirates are busy taking bets on the ground, which again takes on the feel of several American Hollywood movies, like the infamous fight between Eastern city slicker Gregory Peck against the rough and tumble Western ranch hand of Charlton Heston in William Wyler’s THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), where each become ants dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape, or John Wayne’s reticence at being goaded into that infamous fight sequence in John Ford’s THE QUIET MAN (1952).  The best scene of this film is a flashback sequence the night before the battle which reveals a bit of the mystery into Rosso’s past, as he was once human, an ace fighter pilot for the Italian Air Force in WWI where he describes an exhausting epic battle in the sky sequence where everyone except himself was eventually lost, where he envisions himself flying just above a cloud seeing his friends again floating high above him to a heavenly sky that is jam packed with the dead along with their planes.  Rejecting fascism, claiming he wanted a will of his own, he quit the Air Force and was mysteriously turned into a pig, ("Thanks for the offer, but I'd rather be a pig than a fascist."), escaping from humans who constantly belittle his pig status, retreating to his own remote island in the Adriatic Sea.  While never revealed in the film, one gets the feeling Miyazaki, through Rosso, is battling his own personal pacifism and questioning his own loss of faith in humanity by depicting an inner Beauty and the Beast struggle within himself that remains conflicted after losing so much from war. 

One of the film’s more unusual characteristics is its refusal to wrap things up in the end, as mysteries remain unexplained, while also providing beautiful art designs that can be seen at the sides of the end credits (all in Japanese), which continue to add a breathtaking look at Miyazaki’s love for flying machines, including their intricate original pencil sketches.  A man who would be a pig, perhaps a comment on men and chauvinism in general, Rosso declares at one point “all middle-aged men are pigs!”  This was originally conceived as a 45-minute film designed to entertain weary businessmen flying on Japanese airlines, expanding to feature length, giving it a much more open ended feel where it admittedly sags in spots but it refuses commercial sentiment, feeling highly autobiographical, making it one of the more unusual and least seen films in the Miyazaki repertoire. 

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu)

THE WIND RISES (Kaze Tachinu)           B+     
Japan  (126 mi)  2014  d:  Hayao Miyazaki       Official site [United States]

Le vent se lève!                       The wind is rising!
il faut tenter de vivre!             We must try to live!

—Le cimetière marin (The Graveyard By The Sea), excerpt by Paul Valéry, 1920

While much has been written about how this is Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, his swan song, the last of the hand-drawn animators who painstakingly draws each shot in a world otherwise filled with CGI computer effects, it should also be mentioned that the Studio Ghibli creator, now age 73, has previously announced his retirement seven times, Miyazaki “Not Retiring After All Again”, only to return with an idea for another film.  Through a career that has spanned six decades, enjoying huge commercial and critical success in Japan, PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997) was the highest grossing film in Japanese history until it was eclipsed by TITANIC (1997) that same year, while SPIRITED AWAY (2001) then became the all-time Japanese box office winner while also, along with MONONOKE, winning Best Picture at the Japanese Academy Awards, and was the first film to win an American Academy Award for Best Animated Film.  Part of Miyazaki’s appeal is the personal warmth of his characters, where his protagonists are often strong-willed and independent girls or young women possessing an intelligent curiosity about the world around them, advocating pro-feminist themes, while young male characters may be explorers who are ahead of their time, often showing an intricate relationship with nature and technology.  What’s unique about this film is that the lead character is for the first time an adult, where it doesn’t feature a magical, child fantasy world, but instead is one of the most fiercely provocative, real life dramas to come out of Studio Ghibli, a film set during the prelude to war, yet contains no villains and no bloodshed, where Miyazaki has written a biopic that resembles the life of Jiro Hirokoshi, the Mitsubishi engineer who designed the prototype for the Zero fighter planes, recognizable to World War II veterans as the planes used at Pearl Harbor, but eventually became negatively associated with kamikaze missions.  Like his delightful earlier films CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986) or Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta) (1992), this film is obsessed with aeronautics, one of Miyazaki’s favorite recurring themes, a constant that reappears throughout his work much like Ozu’s attraction to trains.  This film is constantly expressing various modes of travel, including multiple train sequences, ships seen off in the distance at sea, or airplanes decorating the sky. 

The story begins with Jiro as a young boy who dreams of flying airplanes, who fantasizes having a life interacting with great Italian plane designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who persuades him to become a designer, not a flyer, becoming close imaginary friends, another recurring theme that continues throughout adulthood, where these dream sequences offer a more playful change of pace.  But the scenic beauty of his imagination turns tragic when the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake causes a firestorm, with much of the city seen ominously burning to the ground, but also causing train derailments, creating mass chaos on the streets of Tokyo, where Jiro heroically saves a young woman (Nahoko) who breaks her leg, making quite an impression on her by carrying her to the safety of her family’s home, but loses contact afterwards when he discovers her entire burnt out neighborhood has been turned to little more than ash and rubble.  This incident parallels the 2011 disaster from Japan’s March 11 Tōhoku earthquake, the most powerful earthquake to ever hit Japan, causing a massive tsunami with 130 foot waves that dangerously wiped out the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in a meltdown in three of the six nuclear reactors, causing radioactive spillage throughout the region.  The crisis was so humanly devastating, causing nearly 16,000 deaths, more if you include the missing, with structural damage to over a million buildings, that in the aftermath, Miyazaki publicly announced that Studio Ghibli would no longer make fantasy films, but would only consider more realistic stories reflective of our modern times.  This emphasis on realism within a fictional setting allows Miyazaki to develop many of his overriding themes, as Jiro becomes a talented aeronautical engineer, something of a whiz kid, showing the most promise of anyone in his graduating class, where he is welcomed as a budding genius at his new job where the focus is on designing planes that are lighter and stronger.  In this endeavor, which is largely trial and error, he is sent to Germany to examine their metal planes, which are seen as technologically advanced marvels of engineering that are literally light years ahead of the wooden Japanese planes that still fall apart in high winds or high speeds.  The film adds a sinister racial element where Japanese engineers, though paid to visit the aeronautical plant in Germany, are continually forbidden from viewing the latest designs, which are seen as exclusively for Germans only. 

There is an interesting cast of secondary characters, none more eccentric than a strange German man visiting Japan played by the legendary voice of Werner Herzog in the American dubbed version, who among other things confides to Jiro that “Nazi’s are hoodlums,” appropriately named Castorp from Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, while also singing a German cabaret song, “This happens only once, it doesn’t come again,” Das gibts nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder - YouTube (3:31) from the film THE CONGRESS DANCES (1931) Der Kongreß tanzt produced by the Weimer Ufa Studios, before eventually being chased out of the country at the end by the Japanese secret service.  What strikes one about Jiro is the way he passionately throws himself into his work, offering quite a bit of mechanical detail about rivets and aircraft design, where he’s almost always seen with slide rule in hand, off to the side somewhere crunching the numbers, where his meticulous obsession with work mirrors Miyazaki’s own rigorous work ethic at Studio Ghibli, and where the aircraft designers are portrayed more as serious artists than mere engineers.  The autobiographical nature of the work is perhaps its most endearing attribute (Miyazaki’s father owned an airplane factory), becoming a modernist aeronautical tale of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The sheer number of different airplane designs on display in this film is like a joyful trip through an aviation fantasyland, often elevated with uplifting Vivaldi-like classical music from Joe Hisaishi as they soar across the skies, where it feels like being in the presence of Da Vinci’s art studio.  Perhaps the most memorable flying sequence is Jiro’s playful fun with a simple paper airplane that he throws through the air to connect with the rediscovered love of his life, Nahoko, who is seriously afflicted with tuberculosis, so remains confined to her room and out of reach. While this developing romance is an essential part of the film, wonderfully established early on with a windblown parasol, culminating with an impromptu wedding sequence late in the film that is beautifully conceived in its utter simplicity, yet it also sets the stage for tragic loss to come, perhaps foreshadowed earlier during Jiro’s trip to Germany when he hears the sad and achingly sorrowful sounds of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey) coming from an apartment window.  

One of the major conflicts expressed throughout is how the innocence of creation and the marvel of invention are often at odds with how these inventions are used.  Jiro is driven by a deep love for flying, where throughout his life he’s driven to create the most brilliantly designed flying machine that is utter grace and beauty in the sky, but there’s also a tragic element attached to it when the Japanese Imperial Army uses his invention to bomb Pearl Harbor.  In one of the most poignantly disturbing images of the film, after experiencing such joy at his successful creation, he’s also forced to react in horror and anguish when he sees a sky filled with literally hundreds of airplanes, “Not a single plane came back.  That’s what it means to lose a war.”  The eloquence of this complex moral quandary is not lost on the viewer, as it’s a chilling reminder of the inevitable intersection between the inspired passion of creative art and the heartless nature of exploitive commercialism, where it’s not the product, but the crass corporate use of a product that often leads to regret and personal tragedy.  Hirokoshi’s passion for flight was abducted by the megalomaniacal forces of militarism, where this beautifully realized and thought-provoking picture of an unspoiled, prewar Japan places front and center the difficulty and enormous sadness associated with maintaining Miyazaki’s own pacifist beliefs, where the Edenesque utopian beauty expressed in his glorious creations can be shattered in an instant by chaos and annihilation, including natural disasters, where there is an impermanence in all things, and a deeply felt understanding that behind every life lies death.

Miyazaki’s view of this significant era in Japanese history has apparently aroused the attention of the left for Miyazaki’s apparent whitewash of history, claiming the director ignores the impact of Hirokoshi’s creation which was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, while also drawing the wrath of conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an ultra nationalist whose avowed intentions include revisionist history, expanding the role of the military for the first time since WWII, and even rewriting the Japanese Constitution, from J. Dana Stuster in a July 23, 2013 article from Foreign Policy magazine, Japanese Nationalists Attack Animation Master's New Film - Passport:

[Since] earlier this year, Abe has tried to reframe Japan’s role in World War II: He’s questioned “whether it is proper to say that Japan ‘invaded’ its neighbors” and questioned the 1995 official apology to “comfort women,” the conscription prostitutes provided to Japanese troops during the war. Abe is currently pushing for a revision of the Japanese constitution that would not only ease the country’s prohibition on military aggression, but would also enshrine the Emperor as the head of state and compel “respect” for symbols of Japan’s pre-war heyday.

In interviews for the release of the film, Miyazaki sought to explain why this isn’t a nationalistic piece of flag waving along the lines favored by Abe’s supporters, some of whom favor banning the film and have called Miyazaki “unpatriotic” and “anti-Japanese,” and has instead shifted the focus of Studio Ghibli from producing fantasies to a new direction where animé has an opportunity to challenge existing policies of social change:

“If I had been born a bit earlier, I would have been a gunkoku shonen (Militarist Youth),” Miyazaki writes… But instead, he grew up in a family in which his father went from building airplane components during the war to opening a jazz club to cater to American soldiers during the postwar occupation. Removed from the “hysteria” of the war years, Miyazaki writes, he “had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war’.”

Growing up in the shadow of Japan’s defeat, Miyazaki strongly opposes Abe’s plans to rewrite the Japanese Constitution in order to revive a drumbeat for militarism and a devotion to the Emperor, claiming:

It goes without saying that I am opposed to revising the Constitution. That is something that should never be done.