Children and even teens won't love this movie, and that's exactly what I experienced tonight at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Half of the people present were adults who brought their children to watch the movie. After watching the movie, I heard these children say "this movie sucks". This movie is too delicate. It takes a certain life experience and a certain background knowledge to appreciate its benefits. For children, this kind of delicacy is boring.
In fact, compared to other Miyazaki films, this one is very different. Although the style of painting is consistent and still highly recognizable, the story is deeper than previous films, and the topics explored are more serious.
Of course, this movie still has heart-warming parts as always, such as persistent dreams and deep love, but all of these are always wandering on the edge of reality, and sometimes reality even jumps out to show claws.
Hayao Miyazaki's favorite flying theme is placed in the context of World War II, so the difficulties encountered by the protagonist Jiro are politics, military, war and even human nature. The engineer who built the plane, he was against war, but he dreamed of making planes, and had to make planes, because there was no organization to protect him when he had no use value. In the end he did get his dream, but the plane was used for killing and war against his will, and the last plane he was so proud of never returned. Reality, or history, is so complicated and helpless that it is difficult to make a black-and-white value judgment, and there are almost no better choices. People in it are like vermicelli in a hot pot, but with the boiling soup, it is just where the hands of reality push you.
And the love here is not the romance of flying together, but the details of daily life. The most touching thing is that Jiro goes home to work overtime at night. The girl needs a rest because of illness, so she asks Jiro to move the work table closer, and then the two hold hands together, so she can sleep peacefully, and he draws the design with one hand. So real and so moving. Details like these make me think this is one of the best love stories I've ever seen.
As a farewell work, Hayao Miyazaki expressed a lot in this film, the above is only part, it is far more complicated than it seems.
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