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Old 2014-04-06, 14:24   Link #31
Aquifina
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Quote:
Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf View Post
Sure enough, I've found that a number of people have criticised the apparent glossing over of the war and the celebration of Japanese nationalism, the drive to strengthen the country through a furious ambition to catch up with the more technologically advanced West. A good friend of mine felt let down by the movie's political correctness. To be sure, I myself had raised such concerns earlier.
A recurring theme of the movie is the problem of Japan's backwardness, but the sequence involving the impoverished young children who refuse the cake from Jiro was a pretty harsh testimony on misplaced national resources. I think it's Jiro's colleague who comments on the vast amounts of money being used by them to build military aircraft, when so many ordinary Japanese are living in relative poverty.

I think it's a profound misinterpretation to see the film as even remotely nationalist--the film is obviously anti-war and pacifist in its inclinations. Japan's war effort is portrayed as incomprehensibly pointless, its secret police as both stupid and malicious (they nearly detain the country's most talented aviation engineer), and Jiro indicates at multiple times his preference that aircraft be unarmed. And in the end, the war causes everything to "fall apart."

If there's a moral problem in the film, it may be that it focuses so closely on Jiro as an isolated individual that it overly isolates him from the larger military machine he's working for. It's certainly open to question as to whether or not Jiro's dreams as art thus have an inherent value that transcend even the destructive (or even evil) purposes to which his art was put to use, and which made his art even possible. I personally think the movie's portrayal works, but that reflects my own assumptions about individual moral agency in an authoritarian society, and my own comfort level around the associated panoply of devices and tools associated with war--but I can certainly understand why some would see Jiro as far more complicit in his nightmare than Miyazaki wants us to believe.

But as a endorsement of any kind of militarism? I think that's a pretty profound misunderstanding of the film. Indeed, I would argue that the film doesn't even have a neutral and realistic portrayal of military organization and innovation, although that was hardly a problem for me, since it wasn't the film's goal.
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