February
25, 2005
Whenever
I want to show a Hayao Miyazaki movie to someone who has never heard
of Studio Ghibli, I'll almost always go for Porco Rosso.
Of all their great movies, it's this one that best embodies all
the great traits and characterists of the great film studio. It
has adventure, imagination, and great humor; but it's also quiet
and often reflective, a nostalgic romanticism.
Porco
Rosso is a story set in the Adriatic in 1929, during the early
days of the Great Depression and the rise of Italian fascism. The
main character is a pilot named Marco, who was a legendary fighter
pilot in the Great War and now works as a bounty hunter and lives
alone on an island. Marco also happens to be a pig.
By
that, I mean he's crude and lazy. He's put on pounds in middle-age.
He can be rather blunt and he carries some sexist attitudes towards
women. In other words, he's a damned pig.
You
can always tell you're dealing with an unimaginative soul when he
or she can't figure out, good glavin, why does this guy look
like a pig? It's as if they never discovered the novel concept
of the metaphor. The icon, as Scott McCloud calls it. As
his great polemic Understanding Comics puts it, all visual
art is abstract and symbolic. Icons are merely the symbols, the
language, that we have commonly agreed upon. This is not an
airplane. This is not a pig.
One
of the great joys of watching a Miyazaki film is seeing how he brings
a painter's instinct to movies. If Porco Rosso were a live-action
movie, Marco would be played by some middle-aged actor channelling
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But animation doesn't deal
in reality; it deals in abstraction and symbolism. Marco as a pig
is a great touch of cariciture.
In
a Disney picture, this point would be literalised and drowned in
cliches like magic spells and fairy godmothers. Miyazaki wisely
prefers to play it straight, depending on his emotional honesty.
This also has the benefit of setting up the best line in the picture:
"Id rather be a pig than a fascist."
This
isn't a movie about Italian airplanes and firefights, but about
people and relationships. Its focus on Marco as disillusioned and
cynical is a personal self-portrait by Miyazaki. Of all the characters
he has created over the years, it's Marco that he most closely identifies
with. As My Neighbor Totoro was
a personal film about his childhood, Porco Rosso is Miyazaki's
self-portrait of midlife.
Those
of us in the West, when discovering Miyazaki, draw upon his sweeping
romanticism and sense of kindness. But if you invest enough time
with his work, particularly his Nausicaa
graphic novel, you discover an artist always in conflict. On one
side, we have his love of nature, his idealism. On the other side,
we see the doubt and cynicism, his world-weariness and realism.
Very
often, these traits are embodied in the two female leads, what I'd
call Miyazaki's "two sisters." The younger "sister"
is the idealist, the older "sister" the realist. There
are minor variations from film to film, but the same pattern is
always present.
I
think this is why girls and women are so strongly developed in his
movies, so fully portrayed and emotionally honest. In Porco Rosso,
the "older sister" is a woman named Gina who owns a restaurant
and has known Marco since childhood. She's a wonderfully self-assured,
independant person, but also wise to the ways of the world, and
maybe a little sad.
The
"younger sister" is a 17-year-old redhead named Fio, the
granddaughter of a mechanic Marco turns to when his plane is damaged
in an ambush. True to form, she is a firebrand, and also a skilled
mechanic who rebuilds the plane while withstanding Marco's wisecracks.
Eventually, she leaves with Marco, and the two develop a special
bond together.
I
think the greatest strength of Porco Rosso lies in how
gradually, how casually, the extent of Gina and Marco's relationship
is revealed. Most people will say the picture's best scene is Marco's
story of what happened to him in the war (revealing, in a sense,
why he lost faith in humanity), which is taken from a Roald Dahl
short story called They Shall Not Grow Old. It's a great
moment, there's a better scene.
In
this scene, Gina is sitting in her garden, weathering marriage proposals
from Donald Curtis, a bumbling Errol Flynn-ish rival to Marco. She's
discreetly cutting him off at the knees, in that way old Hollywood
starlets could do. She reveals, in so many words, that she's in
love with the fat pig, and is waiting for him to show up and do
something about it. At that moment, she hears a sound, and rushes
out to see Marco in his familiar red plane. As he performs a series
of loops, Gina suddenly recalls an old memory from childhood: the
first time she flew in a plane with Marco.
It's
all so wonderful, one of the great romantic moments in the movies.
If you're not moved to tears, then you should probably go to a doctor.
There's something seriously wrong with you.
I
don't think Porco Rosso could be made in America. The temptation
would be too strong to merely pile on one chase scene after another,
at the expense of the characters; we see the wreckage at the multiplexes
nearly every week. Miyazaki certainly is a master of action comparable
to Eisenstein, Ford, and Kurosawa, but he also has little patience
for simple melodrama and often depicts boys' violence as childish
and silly. The odd collection of air pirates are more rivals than
villans, and their screwball antics are played for comedy.
The
reason the climactic air duel between Marco and Curtis is so good
is because it's the only major action set-piece in the entire movie.
The whole story is building up to this moment, and it's a terrific
payoff. Then Miyazaki does something no American director would
dare: he takes all the air out of the tires and turns the whole
thing into a farce. These two pilots are reduced to hurling wrenches
in mid-air and throwing punches.
The
movie's final exclamation mark is another touching moment of affection,
this time between Marco and Fio. It's a farewell romantic gesture
for a passing era, of a world sliding towards fascism and the hell
it will unleash. The world as we know it may be ending, but
at least we have one another. It's the grand theme of one of
cinema's great masters. |
