The first issue with the structure I have is the scope of his life that is depicted. We see our main character, Jirou, through three stages of his life – his childhood, university, and his subsequent career, building planes for Mitsubishi. But when it comes down to it, only the last one is needed, as the first two of these provide a singular purpose that could have been provided far more efficiently by other means.
During his childhood, his appreciation of planes is established, as is the fact he has recurring dreams with Count Italian-bloke, used to provide insight into Jirou’s beliefs regarding his line of work. But they could have just provided narration, which is a perfectly common technique, and it works perfectly well, nothing the Count says is particularly insightful, it’s all very surface level stuff that you’d probably be insulting Jirou’s intelligence if you assumed he hadn’t considered it himself. There is nothing stopping them from getting Jirou to monologue about his own beliefs, especially when he hardly speaks in these interactions. If you’re going to make the conversation so one-sided, why not remove the one side that is never present elsewhere, and is thereby of no value?
Next, his university life doesn’t matter particularly, it shows him as a workaholic who’s considered a bit strange by his colleagues, but it doesn’t matter because that’s all reverted immediately afterwards, and it’s not a major detail by any means. It’s not like there’s any emotional development or anything, again, they could have remove this detail, to no detriment. The real reason it’s shown is to show a singular event, in which during a train ride, a woman saves his hat from falling, and later, an earthquake happens and he helps her out. Doesn’t exactly save her life or anything, and he would have helped her more if he just gave her the money for a taxi. At this point in time, his university life is narratively pointless, but for the wrong reasons, I’ll explain why when the time comes.
And, the worst part is, they don’t even show the important parts of his life. This is a story about a person who produced planes for Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. What, then, would be the most important years of his life to document? 1937-1945, the years that the war actually took place, but that doesn’t happen, more screentime is spent in the fucking Taisho era. Eventually, after several failures because apparently Japanese planes were just so bad they couldn’t stop exploding, he produces his magnum opus, the A6M Zero. So, you would think this is the paradigm shfit for the film, the point where it gets good, and there are many philosophical and thematic angles to take here, especially with his heavily foreshadowed pacifistic stance, but no, the film just ends, which is disappointing to say the least. Speaking of foreshadowing, they foreshadow the war a lot, everyone keeps talking about how Japan can’t possibly win a war, it’s a poor and technologically backwards country, they are going to lose, “they will blow up.” Anachronistic writing aside, they never show it happen, we don’t see them blow up, there is no war, people talk about how a war is going to happen, and then we see the very end of it, with no explanation of what lead to that moment.
In the film’s last act, which is where in a better one the wartime impact of Jirou’s inventions would actually be shown, they instead devote it to a pointless romance that just makes no sense. Remember that one woman who saved Jirou’s hat? Apparently, he’s been in love with her for as long as he’s known her, despite the fact that he’s spoken to her about 3 times in his entire life, and wants to marry her, which comes out of fucking nowhere, makes no sense, but he does, he actually marries a woman he’s never talked to for more than a consecutive 5 minutes. Also there’s some subplot about her having TB. She gets a hemorrhage and starts bleeding out her eyes, which you would think is pretty serious and probably means it’s going to kill her, but no, she runs away from a hospital and goes back to Jirou and lives without any actual health problems. That is, until she leaves again because she knows she’s about to die and doesn’t want to make him sad, or something.
As a furtherance of this, there is just a general presence of plot elements that are unresolved, unexplored, or just not properly explained. At one point, it’s said that the Kempeitai are looking for Jirou, and so he hides. And then it’s never mentioned again, if the Kempeitai want to talk to you, they’ll talk to you, and not going to give up after one try, it’s not like he’s fucking subtle about it, they could very easily barge into his workplace, but they never do.
More than anything else, the process of developing the plane just isn’t there. I don’t know what it’s like, or how he felt. They go through a bunch of models so bad they can’t do a single flight without exploding, and then, it’s done, no explanation of the inbetween. In the beginning, there seem to be arguments about one specific part of the plane, but after this issue is resolved, it becomes extremely vague, they build it for a bunch of years and it doesn’t work, and then it does. Nobody even asks Jirou if they think he did a good job with the Zero, and it’s not like he’d tell anyone himself, this Where’s Wally looking motherfucker apparently can’t express anything unless some Italian in his dreams tells him to.
Another point that seems to not make much sense is Jirou’s character. He’s an aeronautical engineer from some part of Japan that’s not exactly urban, but regardless, he apparently has an excellent grasp on the German and Italian language, even as a child, French and German poetry, German opera, and that’s just the stuff I remember. It just doesn’t make sense, I get it, you want to make your main character seem intelligent, but there are better ways of doing that. I would suggest demonstrating his creativity and technical skill when it comes to designing planes, which just so happens to be his fucking job.
In short, Kaze Tachinu has no focus, it has a bunch of vague ideas that are never realised, as they decided to substitute the actual life and work of the main character in place of some stupid romance. It is a biopic with a main character who is entirely uninteresting, and whose achievements are depicted in such a way you can’t even care about them. The Zero was actually a well made fighter, very advanced for the time, with a huge number of technological innovations. But Kaze Tachinu wouldn’t tell you that, the only thing it’s taught me about Jirou and the Zero is that he designed it in a ‘romantic’ moment where he was holding his wife’s hand.
