Miyazakis DARKEST Film Was About Building Death Machines

➡ The Occult Disney Podcast discusses Disney films and their hidden meanings. In this episode, they talk about “The Wind Rises,” the last film by Hayao Miyazaki. They discuss the unique choice of using a non-actor for the lead role and how this decision impacted the film. They also touch on the film’s connection to the Neon Genesis Evangelion universe and its box office success.
➡ The text is a conversation about a movie involving a boy who loves aeronautical engineering. He gets to design planes, but only for war purposes, which he accepts despite the irony. The boy also has a love interest who appears halfway through the movie and dies later. The text also discusses the movie’s poster, the boy’s love at first sight, and a proposal. The conversation also touches on topics like paper airplanes, ancient technologies, and different types of planes used in different eras.
➡ The text discusses the historical context of Japan’s involvement in World War II, focusing on their alliance with Germany. It explains that Japan allied with Germany not due to shared ideologies, but to gain more power and influence on the world stage. The text also touches on Japan’s internal political instability in the 1930s and the controversial human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 during the war. Lastly, it discusses ongoing xenophobia and racism among Asian countries, particularly between Japan, China, and Korea.
➡ The text discusses the creation of a movie by Miyazaki, who was initially reluctant to make it. The movie, based on a manga he created, was about a character who creates whimsical things that are used for warfare, reflecting Miyazaki’s own feelings about his work being commercialized. Despite his initial reluctance, the movie was successful, especially in Japan. The text also discusses the cultural differences between Japan and the US, and how these might affect the reception of the movie.
➡ The text discusses the life and work of Miyazaki, a renowned animator known for his hand-drawn animations. It highlights his dedication to his work, his strict routines, and his unique approach to animation. The text also explores the challenges faced by the animators working under him, as they strive to meet his high standards. Finally, it questions the future of Ghibli, Miyazaki’s animation studio, after his retirement.
➡ The text discusses the difficulty in distinguishing between different ethnicities in anime, suggesting that more stereotypical characters could help. It also mentions the work dynamics between the creators of Studio Ghibli, highlighting their fatigue after working together for 30 years. The text ends with a discussion about the possibility of a sequel to the anime film “Ponyo”.
➡ A man designs airplanes, falls in love with a sick woman who later dies, and continues to build planes. The story explores themes of pacifism, cultural differences, and the ethics of engineering. It also delves into the protagonist’s dream encounters with a real-life Italian aeronautic engineer, from whom he gains insights. The narrative also touches on the protagonist’s struggle with the potential misuse of his creations for war.
➡ The text discusses the life and work of a man who, despite not being a musician, designs iconic guitars. It also talks about the irony of using old technology to transport new technology, like using oxen to move planes. The text further explores the idea of creating things that can be used for harm, like warplanes, and the moral dilemma it presents. Lastly, it mentions a movie that uses suspense and drama to keep the audience engaged.
➡ The text discusses a movie where a man’s wife falls ill and dies, symbolized by a gust of wind. The man, Jiro, is an engineer who designs planes, but dislikes their use in war. The movie explores different engineering approaches and the consequences of their flaws. Despite Jiro’s peaceful intentions, his planes are used in war, leading to a graveyard of destroyed planes and a reflection on the destructive power of his creations.
➡ The text is a conversation about animated movies, specifically comparing Goro Miyazaki’s work to Bible tale animations. The speakers also discuss their podcasts, one about the Twilight Zone and another reviewing documentaries. They also mention a product, Paranoid American sticker sheets, and end with a rap verse.

Who knows what goes on in the house of Satan? You know, Ask about Illuminati sister Charting the upbeat Is it Disney mind control? Is this MK Ultra Deluxe? I go Disney we go from wheel to meal I go Disney snare Hear me moving no more feel Cook is there ask about to move man I say a cook business teacher call to everybody A co business A wish upon a star A co business to no God to justify oh, a co Disney A new grand Pinocchio die A co Disney yeah. Hello. Welcome to the Occult Disney Podcast, where we go through all the theatrically released Disney films and Disney distributed films to figure out what’s going on inside that zero airplane.

This is Matt here. Over there, it’s a paranoid American. We’re back over to my side of the pond. And it all came through too. I know. I notice these, you know, these call things. Sometimes if you sing a song, it’ll. It’ll make it sound like it’ll try and take out half the tones and just sounds weird, you know? Well, hopefully it didn’t sound weird, but man, I’m excited about some of the sound effects in this movie. Oh, yeah, and fun fact, I started using a different browser and currently everything I’m looking at on the screen is in Japanese.

All the streamyard is now in Japanese. I’ll have to deal with that. I mean, you’re in the right spot for it. Well, yeah, that’s why it’s doing it, isn’t it? So today’s film, the Wind Rises, the final film by Hayao Miyazaki, because he retired after this and then made another film later. So he’s a. He’s a chronic retirer. Like a Michael Jordan of anime. Yeah, but he never tried to do the baseball, you know, because Michael Jordan went off and did baseball for a while and it didn’t quite take. Yeah, but you can ignore that part.

But he did come back to basketball again afterwards. He did. What I cannot ignore is that mustache he grew. It looks weird on him. Okay, well, not the gambling addiction, just the mustache. Right, right. Oh, yeah, the gambling addiction. People get addicted to gambling. It’s a mustache. Yeah. Don’t you have more control over the mustache? Because you continuously decide to do it over and over? Sometimes during a holiday, I won’t shave for like a week. Right. Because I don’t have to go to work. And then the day before I go to work, I’ll shave in like a Tony Stark goatee and do it for like one day and the next day be like, oh, I look, I I look like an idiot and then get rid of it.

I can’t stick to the facial hair. They got filters now. You can just show. Show yourself what you would look like with the filter before and after, before you do anything drastic. Yeah, but you only get to do it three times. Then you have to pay, right? Because my daughter is trying to do with her hair and it was like, oh, no. My wife’s like, oh, I’ll try it on you first. And then she ended up using all the free tries on me, like with like an afro or something. I was like, well, you wasted that.

We’re not paying for that. It’s funny how apps work like drug dealers now, right? Like the first one or two are free and then once you get hooked, then they start raising the rates on you. Yeah, right. When the AI stuff started, like showing up, I. I think I made some pay dirt because I got a one week on one of those, made all my podcast artworks and. And then did not pay for the full version. So I got, you know, I don’t think they let you do that anymore because they realize people like me will get what they need and run away.

There’s always a way. Just trust me on that. So anyway, the wind rises. I. This actually is my first time watching this. Like I said, well, this film in particular I’m not seeing in theaters in Japan. It’s in, you know, full on Japanese and with a lot of intricate dialogue. So that’s. That’s. I need at least subtitles. How did you go about this one? I know sometimes you usually go English. This one I’m very. I couldn’t find. For just whatever random reason I couldn’t find a great English copy. I found a French copy and then I was like, what am I doing? I’ll just watch it in Japanese since Matt’s going to say that there’s like kids screaming at some point and I have to hear him in Japanese screaming.

So I listened to the whole thing in Japanese. I read the English subtitles. Except for the last, I want to say five to ten minutes of the movie. The subtitles just gave out, so I had to sort of assume what they were saying until maybe the last five lines of the movie. So me. So I’m going to. I’m going to tell you what I think they said towards the end and we’ll see how close I am. Okay, this is one. No, actually, there aren’t so many kids in this. It has a few in the beginning and it’s got a little bit of that going on, but in a weird kind of like, you know, the simulation is real sort of thing.

The. They hired a non actor for the lead role for Jiro. They had a bunch of actors. And I also watched the Kingdom of Dreams of Madness, the documentary about this, where they’re like, all the actors are, like, trying to think of the other person and then emoting as themselves. It’s too much ego. So he went about finding a non actor to take on the role. And it’s fun. You see a meeting in the movie where someone brings it up almost as a joke. He’s like, that’s an idiotic idea. And then two minutes later, like, actually, let’s call him.

And then he comes and does the, the audition. But the, the simulation thing is they hired Hideki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, to do the lead voice, even though he’s not a voice actor. Okay. Is that who ends up being the Jiro? Yeah, yeah. That’s why I was really curious because. And it’s considered to be one of the best voice acting roles ever. The, And I, I, you know, obviously you can understand the Japanese. I guess the point is he’s like, terse, but without, like, acting baggage. He’s. And he has kind of a weird voice.

Like his voice in Japanese. And I, I, I run across people at this where they, maybe they have a very explaining voice. I don’t know. Think of like Scooter from the Muppets and then switch it to Japanese. I think that’s kind of that vibe. Okay. I got Shinji vibes from him, so I don’t know. I guess that makes a hell of a lot of sense. Then that might be, you know, kind of like they act hired him and he’s coming in. Why are you having me audition and stuff? He’s like, well, I’m not gonna say no if Miyazaki’s offering me a job, you know.

Right. And, and plus, Miyazaki also gets to add a little bit more marketing attraction. Right. Because technically, this is in the Neon Genesis Evangelion universe through that connection. Oh, yeah. This, this. Yeah. Yeah. You could, it could be like the Tarantino, where all of his movies are on, like, an alternate, more violent history, where this one actually, this is the same as our World War II. Well, is it? We’ll talk about that. But yeah, you could, you could run that to the Second Impact, the disaster that kicks off the Evangelion universe, I guess, but very. It is weird.

I mean, I’m trying to think of American equivalent where there’s someone put into a movie that is known, but absolutely not an actor. Anton Lavey. In the 1970s, there was a lot of, like, Kenneth Anger movies where they would just throw a well known Satanist in just so that it had extra credentials. Yeah, but Kenneth Anger movies did not make. How much did this make? Yeah, $136 million. I guess they make a little on DVD. I have maybe on the black market. You don’t know how much he made on the black market. Oh, oh, come on.

I’m talking about just box office here. Who knows what. Who knows what goes on in the house of Satan? You know, I don’t think it’s as profitable as Studio Ghibli. Yeah. So I’m still racking my brain from when we got a very prominent person who is definitely not an actor doing a major role. Yeah. It is a weird move. So you have the inverse of that one. Like, I remember a. A fairly famous one was in South Park. Big Gay Al. They had a dog that was starring George Clooney. It was like a really well known actor at the time, but all he did was made dog noises.

And it was. A lot of people were wondering, like, why would you get this huge name and they just make dog noises? And that was kind of the point. Which is sort of the opposite of what we’re talking about. Yeah, no, that becomes kind of a joke later with like Robot Chicken where they do the same thing. Bring on a prominent actor to make, like, dumb noises. Yeah. You know what? You go back to the 60s on the beach Boys song Vegetables. They’re like, that’s Paul McCartney eating vegetables in the background. The song. That’s Paul McCartney’s yes spot.

They were actually asking him not to, but he was just being very loud in the lunchroom. Yeah. It’s like how with. With podcasting, some people, like, can’t stand it when you’re eating on Mike. Which I don’t think I might have done it back on the days when I recorded on Temple Steps, but yeah, I wouldn’t be able to handle it if I heard that one time. It would be such a quick unsub for me. Okay, you’re one of those. Because I. I’m one of those few podcasts I listen to where they have something where food is included.

And it was like, here’s the version with the eating. Here’s the version. We edited out all the eating. So you’d be the. The no bite guy. In that case, I guess I’d be the no bite guy. Yeah. But honestly, I would just be. I would be gone. I wouldn’t be able to, because it creates a certain feeling in me that’s unpleasant. It’s. It’s on the verge of anger sometimes when I can hear somebody chewing really closely. Yeah. So I might have poisoned my brain a little bit talking about this movie by watching the documentary, because this is.

Maybe it’s good you didn’t see the documentary because I’m coming and just thinking mostly of the documentary now, despite the movie being extremely good, seeing, you know, at least seeing them try to show us the creative process or whatever filter they did, you know, filmmaking, the document, making the documentary. Right. I’m sure I’m not seeing actual reality, but it definitely, you know, was very interesting. So how’d you feel about this movie, by the way? I thought it was good. I mean, it was. It was on the longer side, but didn’t meander too long. Like, it was, well, moving.

And even the parts that were slow, they introduce a little bit of danger and drama. Like, for example, for a long portion of just like, people talking and throwing airplanes, but then they also almost fall off of the top of a building just, like, randomly. And it’s. And the elements that they do it. It kind of like helps move the story along, even if not a lot is happening at that time. What’s the largest paper airplane you’ve made? I don’t. Just a full sheet, maybe 11 by 17. Nothing. Nothing crazier than that. Okay. Because I. I haven’t done it recently, but when the months change, I would often rip off the.

The last month and make a giant paper airplane out of a large calendar. You know, like a large, like, on the wall calendar, not just like a kitchen size. So that was always fun. At a certain point, it. It stops working just because the integrity is not there. But an interesting point when I was looking up on this movie is that paper airplanes predate real airplanes by at least 2,000 years or so. So people technically knew how airplanes could work. It’s just that no one ever was able to make one until the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Yeah. Also, I mean, there’s like, lost technologies. I mean, what. The first vending machine is Hero in Alexandria, Right. Where he builds the one that, like, dispenses holy water and we don’t get another vending machine for 1500 years or whatever. I didn’t do the math at all, by the way, saying that. Yeah. I mean, I’m not gonna discount that airplanes could be ancient technology, but that doesn’t necessarily come up in this movie at any point? No, it has no bearing on this movie. But, yeah, if there’s, you know, there’s an ancient technology, there’s, like, residual memory and people have paper airplanes, or it’s just like, that’s a dumb kid’s toy that has no proper use until someone’s inspired enough to realize, hey, that’s not just a dumb kid’s toy.

I. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s. It’s harder to look back because it seems so obvious now, but I have to assume that over 2,000 years, people throwing paper airplanes probably thought, man, if I made a bigger version of that, I could ride on it. It seems like a natural thought. You’d have. Would have been a papyrus airplane at that point. I mean, the Japanese airplanes they describe are made out of wood and canvas, which now in 2025, that does seem kind of insane. It seems like, very outdated. And I know the Spruce Goose was also that.

But he only flew it one time and then. And then landed it and was like, all right, I’m done. Yeah, I guess, you know, because my flying’s been on passenger jets where everything is, you know, steel and solid. So the idea that wasn’t until the 40s or the 30s. I guess it’s 40s that steel construction comes in. It’s like, that is crazy. So what’s Indiana Jones flying around in? In Raiders of the Lost Ark? I assume that that was a World War I plane. Yeah, possibly it was an older one. Right. Like, it wasn’t. It wasn’t like a World War II plane, because that would have been too current for him.

So it was probably a decommissioned World War I. Oh, you’re thinking. Oh, you mean at the beginning of the movie? So I’m thinking of when they’re showing the map and he’s traveling in a passenger plane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the opening, that for sure would be a World War I vintage thing and. Or more recent creation with the same technology. Right. But yeah, I think it was just Japan at this point, at least in the timeframe of this movie. It was Japan that was stuck using wood frames and canvas, and Germany in the US Were both using steel at that point.

Right. And there’s all that talk in this movie about how Japan is so poor at the time and that, as I said, I’m going to keep talking about a documentary. You got Miyazaki sitting there. Apparently he’s been keeping notes since the financial collapse of 2008. He’s like, this is a new depression. The 21st century is here and I don’t like it, you know, and then he’s like the Tohoku quake and Fukushima disaster proves my point. So he is extremely grinchy, mercurial and you know, like quirky is in fun in some ways, but also, you know, he’s a total grinch, which is interesting.

Well, to me, that’s the entire premise of this movie. I mean, I don’t think you can really. It’s not a spoiler alert kind of movie. But to summarize it, it’s about a boy that is in love with aeronautical engineering. He just wants to design airplanes. However he needs to do that, like that is his ultimate dream. And he thinks they’re beautiful like these big birds, right. So he does that. But the only opportunity that he has to actually engineer planes is for the war effort. So everything he does has to have a gun on it and it has to kill people and it has to blow up and cause destruction.

So there’s. It’s. And it’s not even like he struggles with it. It’s just this accepted irony that’s part of what he has to do. And then towards the end of the movie he gets to design some planes. And then the end, that’s. That’s sort of the movie, right? Like, I didn’t miss any huge. And he’s got a wife that dies, right? Oh, yeah, that, that’s. It is interesting. You know, I’m looking at the time code and I’m like, oh, it’s more than halfway through the. She shows up, of course, after the big. The great Kanto quake, right.

He saves her, blah, blah. And then she didn’t show up again until like more than halfway into the movie. I was like, that’s an. That’s interesting narrative structure there. Yeah, I mean it was almost halfway. Exactly. And almost exactly kind of balance each other out. But it was, I think an hour and five minutes into this two hour and five minute movie with credits. So I mean, if you, if you put a spot on the timeline, it would be damn near the very middle of it. And then that’s when we see. And it’s the main reason I even noticed that is because as soon as we see that scene when he sees her for the first time, I guess the second time.

That’s the poster. That’s the COVID of this movie. Exactly. As I’ll say, that’s the main image. Yeah, it is. And as soon as you see that, then just because it was the poster, I knew that this was supposed to Be an important scene. And I guess soon after that, to talk about the wife. Soon after that, he says something like, oh, I loved you since the moment I saw you. And she did, too. Love at first sight, blah, blah, blah. He proposes to her, and she’s like, yeah, but not until I get well. And the second she said that, I was like, oh, she’s dying.

Like, dying at the end of this movie. So, yeah, that got a little spelled out on there. Another inversion on the plot that you just put out, though. Apparently, Miyazaki’s father sold airplane parts. And Miyazaki has been, through his life, been kind of obsessed with airplanes himself. Not to the point where he started wanting to begin engineer. I mean, this movie makes being an aeronautical engineer look like a. Didn’t look like a job I want. But, yeah, he’s talking about, like, oh, when I was younger, I would argue with my dad. I’d be like, you sold airplane parts? So, like, you supported the war and people at Ghibli with this movie being like, is this movie any war? And him just screaming, of course it is.

You know, so kind of an interest. Is it, though? That’s. That’s one of the weird pins to put in this movie. Well, so here’s something even more. Let’s go on a small tangent, I guess, for historical context. And this movie is about designing airplanes in World War II for Germany and for Japan. Right? So why. Why was Japan even linked up with the Nazis in World War II? Like, the main reason is it’s, like, to oversimplify it, but the main reason is because they had been trying to. To attack China, and they wanted to take control over some parts of Asia for the longest time, and they just weren’t being very successful at it.

And the basically European and American powers, they were the ones that were saying, like, stop doing that. Maybe, like, imposing embargoes, and they weren’t being conducive. And what they saw was Germany dismantling the exact same power structure that was preventing them from expanding, or so they thought. And they kind of just saw Germany as, like, this racehorse taking the lead. And they figured, hey, like, we should put. We should bet it all on black right now. Like, this. This new country, Germany, man, it looks like they got something going for him. If we can, like, ride their coattails and help them out after they take over Europe and after everyone else gets dismantled, we can reap some of the benefits of that and expand more.

And. And it just didn’t work out for them. But it was interesting because it’s not like there was any ideological reason that Japan was in World War II and teamed up with the Axis. It was. It was really just because they wanted a bigger foot on the world stage. They wanted like a seat at the table in a way that they didn’t have it yet. And they saw this as like a stepping stone in order to get there. That’s my over simplistic understanding. So everything that happens to Japan in World War II and everything they get involved in, it’s sort of just like them chasing more clout, I guess.

Is that some accurate at all to what you understand? That’s def. I mean. Yeah, that works. Another part of the puzzle, why this was happening in the 30s is in the early 30s, several prime ministers and are like assassinated. So the political system’s a little shaky and the military just kind of steps in at that point. So I, I talk about now how whoever the Japanese prime minister is there, there’s a guy in his 80s who’s actually like pulling the strings. I mean, I mean Japan, that’s like we, you know, we. You. When you see the, the new Prime Minister, it’s like everyone kind of knows that.

Oh yeah. But she’s this guy’s, you know, prodigy or whatever. So he’s the Sith Lord, he, she’s the apprentice, but she’s the Prime Minister. So those OG Son though the old men in power were turned out to be the military in the 30s, you know. Okay. And yeah, and they were in a severe depression at this time, so they weren’t able to. Was it. I mean it was the best. The best depression. But. But I always thought it was interesting is that Japan and Germany didn’t have any sort of shared ideology in the war. It was like they were just in it for opportunistic reasons and really nothing beyond that.

Yeah, Japan’s thing is basically like we want to be powerful. It’s you know, sable saber rattling. That’s where we get the ninth. I think it’ Amendment and the Japanese constitution after the war, which is we only have a peacekeeping force which continues to this day. The, the new prime minister is quite hawkish. So she’s kind of, you know, let’s, let’s get rid of it. Abe was the same way. And this movie actually got some controversy in Japan because when it came out, Miyazaki was going on like, no, we have to keep this amendment at a time when it was like a very hot button issue.

It is again now, but it was 10 years ago as well. So the right wing really took a dump on this movie. Speaking of right wing and controversial issues, here’s another thing just about Japan and World War II. Have you ever heard of unit 731? Is this the Manchuria thing? Well, I wouldn’t know. I mean maybe, I don’t know. Maybe. Go on. I feel like I heard this far more expansive, but essentially what usually you get conjured up in, in the, the Nazi horror movies and like this, the darkest of documentaries, it usually brings up like Joseph Mengele, right.

And all of the crazy experiments that he was doing, like inject and die into people’s eyes and like the twin experiments, all that. Right. That was maybe hundreds and in the, in the low end, thousands of people. But a lot of those experiments, we’re not condoning that on this show, by the way, any of Mingla’s experiments, but they were, they were very much targeted at like specific individuals and small numbers of them, like larger than there should have been, but small numbers. Unit 731 was Japan’s version of this, but they ramped it all the way up.

The estimates are like, like 3,000 on the low end and 12,000 on the high end. And over 200,000 civilians killed through field tests and all sorts of like bio, biochemical warfare tests. A lot of the, the early chemicals that we got from World War II actually came from Japan. A lot of the testing came from Japan. And just like there was Project Paperclip that dismissed a whole bunch of Nazi scientists after the war was over so that we could like import them into the country that. There’s also a version of that for all the Japanese war criminal scientists.

And it all came from this thing called Unit 731. It’s a, it’s a wild, wild rabbit hole. And it almost, it almost blew my mind because I hadn’t heard of it until I started looking into this movie just to see. Oh really? Okay. I have, I have read a book on. That’s why I was bringing up Manchuria, because one of the ways they tried to keep their conscience clean. Although if you’re just fooling yourself in that case. But was we don’t do it in Japan. We’ll do, we do all of this like mostly in Manchuria. It’s like what Disney does.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like we don’t do it here, so it’s fine, you know. Yeah, we don’t, we don’t declare that body dead here. We drive them off property and then we do it. Right. Well also most of the, those numbers you were Saying were, you know, Chinese and Koreans, they weren’t experimenting. They weren’t experimenting on actual Japanese. Right. But. But anyway, regardless, it is wild that while Germany had their own human experimentation stuff going on, Japan also did. And Japan’s was on in numbers. Theirs was higher than Germany’s. I mean, there is still weird racism disconnects between different, you know, Asian countries.

Like Japan and China do not like each other. You know, there’s a lot of, like, xenophobia about Chinese and Japan and vice versa, you know. So, like, right now, what’s going. Oh, yeah, yeah, There. There’s a lot of things about, you know, I guess he’s talking about, like, oh, they’re kicking deer and nara, and, you know, the foreigners here. And, you know, most of the foreign visitors are. Are from Southeast Asia, China and Korea. So there’s a lot of weird xenophobia. Like, even today, you know, let me ask you maybe a horribly racist question, but let’s say that you.

You dressed up a Japanese, a Korean, and a Chinese guy in the exact same suit, and they’re all mute. Can you point them? Can you pick them out from a lineup? Like, there’s the Korean, there’s the Chinese, there’s the Japanese. No. Me? No. No way. Now, if they start moving around a little, if they’re still mute but moving around a little, I might detect something just in the way they move. Really. Okay, I want to know more. How does a Chinese, Korean, and a Japanese person move different? I couldn’t explain it, and I might get wrong.

So, I mean, the point I’m making about the weird xenophobia and slight racism now is there isn’t much of a difference. It’s the Dr. Seuss thing with the. What is it? The Sneetches? You know, that’s basically, we’re looking at sneetches racism here. Isn’t that what. Yeah. Is. No. Dr. Seuss canceled. Yeah, probably. But it actually. Talk about Miyazaki. He does have a very Susan feel to him where it’s this grumpy guy that makes very whimsical stuff, you know? Well, and that’s what. The point I was making earlier was that the whole premise of this movie is about someone that wants to make whimsical things that are ultimately being used for warfare.

And I. I assume you can stretch it in Miyazaki’s case here. It’s almost like I’m doing this out of love, but it’s being commercialized and it’s making all this money, and I’m seeing industries pop up around this. And while it’s great, also, I feel bad about it because somehow this is going to funnel itself into war. Like, if you make a movie that makes $130 million, I. I feel like at least 10 bucks goes to a war effort somehow. I don’t know how, but it goes to war. Like, it ends up funding some petrochemical processing plant that made a chachki toy that gets resold somewhere else, but because they got that contract now they got to make an extra warhead or something.

Well, there is also the weird wrinkle that Miyazaki didn’t particularly want to make this movie. When we did Ponyo, I was saying, oh, he really wanted to make Ponyo 2, his first sequel, for whatever reason. This. This is Ponyo 2, isn’t it? You’re gonna tell you, too. No, it’s not all. Not at all. He. He had also made a manga, right? Because I guess Miyazaki, when he was not making movies, would still do mangas here, and he made this as a manga, not at all considering making a movie. And basically his producers, like, don’t make Ponyo 2.

Make the manga. And he’s the money guy, so he kind of press, even though, you know, Ghibli is Miyazaki. The. You know, the producers, the money guy, they’d all been working together for 30 years, so he kind of got pressured into making this one, I guess. I don’t know. It’s like too big of a pressure be pushed around like that. If you had a good. It’s like if you had one of your comic books that you had made, right? Or with. With your collaborators or whatever, it’s like you had made it and you enjoyed making it, but now someone wants you to make a movie of, and you kind of want to make a movie of something else.

It’s that situation. It’s still kind of your thing, but it’s not the thing you really wanted to focus on. Boohoo. But where’s the someone put the gif up of, like, Woody Harrelson crying into his stacks of money? Yeah, sure. I mean, I guess he didn’t have to get convinced too hard because he did it. I mean, I assume he could have gotten in a bigger argument if he wanted to, you know, But, I mean, I’m sitting here like, Ponyo 2 is not a good idea, I’m pretty sure. So it does seem a case where maybe the producer was correct, at least about, like, don’t make Ponyo, too.

That’s a dumb idea. I Mean, I liked Ponyo one. I think Ponyo one can stay. I don’t need, I don’t think it needs a second one. This one’s interesting. This is not a movie that I would have expected to have done really well. I mean, done well in Japan. Did it do well in the us? It did pretty well in the us. It definitely was like the number one movie of the year in Japan. I don’t know if it has a lot of like, nostalgic and like historical elements for someone that’s Japanese, but for someone in the US in 2013, 2014, when this came out, I don’t know, it’s.

I find it interesting, but it doesn’t seem like it was necessarily had its thumb on the, the Zeitgeist. It did pretty well. Disney, over time, when they were distributing these, I think did kind of figure it out how to distribute them, you know, better, because Mononoke, very good movie. It just showed in some art house theaters. Spirited Away, it did a little better. Hal did a little better in that. I think this. So in Japan, very successful in the States. I, I’m only seeing Japanese box office numbers, weirdly enough. So I’m not quite. So it probably didn’t do that well.

Anime, you know, it’s like this year is like Demon Slayer is actually making real money in American box offices. I think the Boy and the Heron did okay. Which was Miyazaki’s most recent film. He says his last film, the, the movies that it was up against in 2014 was like extraterrestrial, Pawn, Sacrifice, Possessed. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess there could have been a market for it if you found the right one. I, I don’t know, man. I, I again, I didn’t even know this movie existed until it came up on our list. And I wouldn’t be able to pick a studio Ghibli movie out from a lineup until the actual title screen comes up and I can see it.

Okay. I very much knew this movie existed because the marketing in Japan was quite intense. So even if I knew I wasn’t going to go see in the theater, which I don’t know, actually, I’m like, should I be going to see something like this in a theater and just deal with the fact that it’s in pure Japanese? What was the marketing like? Like, like what would is it like, you know, a young man sits down and draws airplanes for his entire life? And then I just saw the poster everywhere. Just you see the poster everywhere. You know, that it, that’s the whole Marketing.

It’s just the poster. I mean, it was ad TV ads and stuff. I don’t watch much tv, so it’s all in Japanese. Yeah. Does Japan not have like a movie voice guy? They. They’ve got a movie voice guy. Yeah. Like when I go to the theater, like, and you know, like seeing this summer, how do you say, how do you, how do you say in Japanese this summer? Konoharu. That would be it. It’s deeper and smoother. Yeah. So the Japanese movie voice would be less gravelly. I think it would be darker, deeper and smoother. There we go.

There’s a difference. I think I, I do think my wife noticed this and I’m starting to notice as I learn my Japanese better. We speak English at a higher pitch and Japanese is spoken at a lower pitch in general, it seems because she was like, oh, when I speak in Japanese I have a deeper voice and when I speak in English I have a higher voice. So. And I’ve heard a few people mention that. So that, that’s kind of interesting that languages are kind of pitched differently. I mean, until you get to the children and then for some reason the Japanese kids go up about a thousand octaves.

Well, they haven’t had puberty yet, have they? Yeah, but I’m just saying, like, like a seven year old Japanese kid in a Japanese movie, it definitely has a higher pitched voice than a seven year old American kid. But at some point when they become adults, that inverts. Yeah. They beat the crap out of you in junior high school. I don’t mean necessarily physically, but mentally for sure. Yeah. Maybe just because people don’t care enough about school in the States. So our voices stay high. Then I mentioned before, there’s the Japanese proverb, the nail that sticks up must be hammered down.

Which I wondered if this movie was going to get into that at the beginning where Jiro has this genius talent for aerospace engineering. But everything kind of works out for him as a career wise. You know, we’re definitely going to talk about the fact that he ends up creating a warplane. But yeah, like he. Everyone’s just like, oh yeah, you’re sharp, you can do this. Here you go. Those are. Yeah, he doesn’t, he doesn’t run in to any major roadblocks. Everyone seems to acknowledge his genius. Everywhere he goes. He gets kind of commended for everything. There’s the only real conflict in this movie is just him struggling with the situations that he finds the world to be in.

Like people being poor around him, people struggling around him. But he himself is kind of benefiting for. From the war. Like, he’s not necessarily for the war, but because the war is happening. He can travel. He can go and talk to all these different engineers. He’s got, I’m not gonna say an unlimited budget, but he’s got a huge budget to actually enact these dreams that he’s got. And none of this is happening unless people are also dying. And I think that that’s. That’s the conflict. It doesn’t happen in one moment. It happens throughout the entire movie.

Yeah, and he’s not even particularly tortured. I mean, he. He’s about to get married, and his wife dies of tuberculosis. I mean, that sucks. But, I mean, he’s not. Like. You said he was a little Shinji, like, from Evangelion, but he’s not that socially awkward. You know, he’s, you know, just a little bit on the geeky side, but, you know, the geek that can play the game and talk to the cool kids. Yeah, no, he. He understands how the world works. And. And you see this earlier in the movie when he’s having some pretty serious discussions, and the.

The guy that he’s working with is telling him, like, that’s how it works. You get a job, and then you need, like. And then you need to get a family that you neglect, essentially. He’s like, it’s ironic. It’s the same way that it’s ironic that you just want to make these beautiful planes, but they have to be for war. And I think that we basically see Jiro accept that, like, right away. He just understands, oh, this is how the world works. And he plays along with it. And. Yeah, again, the documentary, it’s kind of interesting showing Miyazaki’s daily schedule.

He’s like, I don’t take holidays. I work on Saturdays. I take Sundays off. But in the mornings, I always go and clean the river. And he’s got, like, this scrapbook of every Sunday at the river since, like, 2008 or whatever, which is kind of weird, but it’s like, yeah, I walk by the school, I wave to the kids, I go to the shop, I buy this. You know, I have these insane routines. He’s like, this is how I perceive life. So I can. You know, when I go to work, I can take my base and then, you know, work from there and do the fanciful stuff, which I don’t know, as I get older, I find myself more like, yeah, I really want to stick to my routine so I can think about other things.

Yeah, just put the Rest of the world on autopilot. Screw living in the moment. Just like do my own stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s like, yeah, like work, even family life to a certain extent or whatever. It’s like I walk here at this time of day, you know, which is kind of true for me. I don’t do anything quite as creatively as impressive as Ghibli movies by any means. Also, he’s getting near the end of his life. You know, he’s saying, he’s like, yeah, I know Ghibli is not going to be a thing within 20 years. I’m going to be dead and it’s not going to hold together.

You know, he’s like not thinking of it being a legacy at all. He’s like, I guess because the, the guy that made a Princess Cayuga, the. I need to look up his name to remember it. But anyway, he has a weird disdain for his co creators in a certain way. Is Ghibli not living beyond Miyazaki? I’m sure they’ll try. I’m sure they’ll try. But I mean we’ve done the Goro Miyazaki movies, right, where they didn’t quite have the Z. Yeah, but that might just be nepotism, man. You know, it’s hard to really tell, right. And there’s an interesting scene where they’re trying to talk.

They’re. The producers are talking to Suzuki, the producers talking to Goro Miyazaki, right. And Goro’s saying they’re like, I made two movies but you know, I’ve never really wanted to be a director. But you know, I just kind of ended up here at Ghibli and I, I can do some things well, I can do not some things well. If I can find a reason to make it, I’ll do it. And, and I think they were trying to get him to do that TV show, the. Oh God, what was the name of it? Ronja. Rona, Something like that.

And, and he’s like, find a reason to do it. You know, your father and his. And, and is making a movie he doesn’t really want to make too. So you don’t necessarily have to want to make it. It was a really weird conversation, especially since it seems like they’d have the power to make anything that they damn well pleased. Yeah, but they’re, they’re Ghibli studio just like it’s this three story office building. They’re doing the morning exercises. You know, there’s bits of whimsy around here and There, but it is just basically an office. So it’s. It is a business.

If you want to. If you want whimsy, you need to go to the Ghibli Museum or the Ghibli theme park. Right. Okay. So. So even right now, Ghibli isn’t even necessarily as industrial scale as Walt had in the 1930s. No. And even knowing it was hand drawn, looking at this documentary, just seeing how many people just sitting there hand drawing things and painting things, I’m like, oh, okay. Because when you hear hand drawn now, you’re like, ah, yeah, but they must. Using a lot of computers. Right. And you didn’t really see many computers in that office.

I. I’ve seen a couple videos where he’s like scolding people for using software or. I don’t know if it was AI, but I think it was software. Yeah. There is a scene where one of the. One of the animators is talking to everyone else about how they’re going to animate the scene. And Miyazaki kind of bumps in and says, oh, no, we want to do it this way, because this is how people would bow and move in old Japan. And that, that scene to me did feel like a little weirdly staged. Like, oh, let’s have Miyazaki come and interrupt and you know, give one of his tips.

That one, that a lot of the scenes in the movie felt very, like, genuine, I guess. But that one scene I was like, this feels a little disingenuous, you know, I don’t know. Like, this one’s a bit staged. I feel like this movie might be autobiographical of Miyazaki. Right. Everywhere he goes, people recognize his genius, but he, he never like, acknowledges it necessarily. It’s just that, yeah, it’s a thing. And that around him, like his. His family suffers constantly. People are criticizing him about his family suffering, even if it’s not necessarily his fault. And again, he’s like putting all this energy into this beast that he kind of sees as evil.

I mean, all that seems like the, the vibe that you get from Miyazaki in general. Yeah. One of the animators, like, well, you come here and you work and, and if you’re good, he’ll ask more and more. And if you do that better, he’ll ask more and more. And it might not be what you want to do, it’s what he wants you to do. Making this amazing art and you have the talent buddies. Yeah, it’s like the, you know, the harder the work you work, the more you’re gonna work so. Which is why people leave that.

That whole entire chain is there too. Right. So here’s Miyazaki. Like, I don’t want to make that movie, but this guy makes me make the movie. And then Miyazaki is like, hey, animator, draw this. And the animators thinking, I don’t want to draw a frog for the next four months. I want to do something else. Right. One of. One of the anores is complaining. He’s like, well, Miyazaki couldn’t get the zero to look the way he wanted by himself. Not quite the way they look in real life. It’s how he wants them looking. He couldn’t do it, so he gave me the job.

So now I’m supposed to figure out how he wants them to look, which is not quite what the zeros actually look like. I’ll know it when I see it. I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it. Yeah. I hate. That’s the worst position you can ever be in when you’re designing something. Yeah. I mean, that’s. That was the Kubrick method too. Let’s do 100 takes. Not because I’ll know it when I see it. And Kubrick movies when I see it is when you’ve gotten so bored of doing this and, like, the lines are coming out weirdly hollow.

That’s kind of the Kubrick vibe. Right? I like. I like that, though. I mean, this. This movie definitely looked really. Are you saying the whole thing was an hand drawn? Hand animated. Even watching that, I’m like, man, there must. There must be some computers doing stuff. There are some shots. Yeah. When there’s. When there’s. When there’s like. I. Okay, we. We found the limit of. Of my research because everything I’ve seen suggests that they really did hand draw everything. But having watched a movie, maybe that’s why the guy’s a master. I’m just like, this can’t all be hand drawn.

How we know, use some. Some digital stuff. Had some CGI stuff. So let me just assume there was something digital. They can say that it was all hand drawn. And I. I believe that it was mostly hand drawn, but it’s. It looks too good to completely be all traditional hand drawn. Like, there’s got to be something. Yeah, that’s why. That’s why I’m saying I feel like I can’t do. Oh, yeah, it’s completely hand drawn. Like, man, I watched the documentary, but I’m sure there were some computers they weren’t showing me. You know, here’s another one too.

Maybe this is just because I’m still adjusting my eyes to anime in general and maybe Ghibli in specific, but I was struggling very hard to tell the difference between a German guy and an Italian guy and an American guy. And there were even some scenes when there were clearly supposed to be Japanese guys and lots of German guys. And I’m just. I’m. And I know it. And I’m rewinding scenes and I’m just like, I can’t tell who’s who. They all look Japanese to me. None of them look German whatsoever. And then there’s this one older dude that they make a point to give him like a, like a penguin nose.

And they give him large round eyes and like blue irises. But he’s the only one that’s like, okay, I guess he’s not Japanese, but I don’t necessarily know what ethnicity he was supposed to be the entire time. Yeah, I was about to say they did give the German guy, like super creepy eyes, you know. So that was a German guy? The old, the older guy? Yeah, yeah, that was a German guy. All the Germans should have just been blonde haired and blue eyed. It would have made so much more sense. Because. Because during those scenes I was struggling to understand the dynamic.

I was like, how come that Japanese guy is yelling at that other Japanese guy? And then it took me a minute, like, oh, they’re supposed to be German. And then I thought, that’s not how you draw a German, you silly Japanese. BNI for anime. Because I didn’t have that problem watching it. There was some kind of distinction. Like I said, we’re doing Evangelion where they have the German. I’m like, she doesn’t. I can’t tell the difference there. So Evangelion, definitely, she didn’t look German at all. But here I could kind of tell. But yeah, I don’t think there’s so much distinction between, say, Americans, Italians and Germans.

You know what the other part of it too is? Maybe I’ve just been conditioned because all early American cartoons that had to display different ethnicities went hard into offensive stereotypes, like all the way over. Hyperbole into things that now they have to show disclaimers to kids before it comes on. Like back in the 90s, people weren’t, weren’t as sensitive. So here’s how they depicted, you know, like an Asian person, but I guess anime. I haven’t seen any versions of that. Like a, like a, like a stereotypical European that has just like buck Teeth or something. But.

Well, okay, they’re saying. I was talking about. It’s so weird that, you know, Korea and China and. And Japan have so much xenophobia against each other. But, you know, think of Looney Tunes where you get these ridiculous. You know, this here’s the Spanish one, here’s the Italian one, here’s Pepe Le Pew, here’s Speedy Gonzalez. Right. Maybe from the Asian perspective you wouldn’t make so much distinction there, but in the west you’d be like, oh, yeah, Completely different things. I think Japan could improve by just making more stereotypical characters. I think they’ve probably done a lot of that, to be perfectly honest.

But. But not necessarily Looney Tunes style ones. We can. We can definitely give you that. Oh, that. Next up on the list for Cartoon Cabal, we’ll try and find some of, like, the most offensive anime and not. Not like sexually offensive. You. You. Oh, I think I. Yeah, like those Band Warner things, you know. Yeah, those are the. The early Betty. Yeah. There’s got to be an anime version of Fritz the Cat or something out there. Like heavy metal. Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m sure in the 60s you can find some weird stuff. That was another weird thing.

A couple more things I just want to mention from, from the. From the documentary too is when it shows Miyazaki going home, he. He has a bunch of goats, like fake goats that he keeps in the window. So he comes home, he’s like, yeah, I got the goats because they are part of a display from the 70s Heidi anime. And they closed that display. And I didn’t want the goats to go into storage. So he has a bunch of like, fake goats around his house, apparently. So that’s kind of weird. If it was a Heidi anime, how are there real goats? Like, there was a museum display based on the anime.

I just. A few months ago, we were at Mori Tower, the tallest building in Japan, and they had a little Heidi display. And I just got in and got a picture with. With Heidi. So. Because that. That is a very popular. Still a very popular anime in Japan, for whatever reason. Isn’t that. Isn’t that. That’s also a World War II German connection, isn’t it? Heidi? I guess so. I have to look more into that because I haven’t like, watched Heidi or anything. So I don’t know about the anime. No, I don’t. I’m just used to seeing the imagery.

There’s like insurance commercials, you know, instead of the Affleck duck, it’s like Heidi and her dad talking about something. And it’s a. You know. Okay, it’s interesting. Yeah. The other one. That. Here’s the thing that he said with this movie. So he’s doing the storyboards, which is like, I don’t write a script. I just storyboard. I don’t really know where it’s going until I get there. Right. And he’s saying there. Yeah. The only movie I didn’t. I made. I didn’t really like is Porco Rosso. Because I think my movie should be made for kids. Right. And Porco Rosso was not made for kids.

I’m like, the Wind Rises, like, the movie least made for kids he ever made. Yeah. I mean, the Wind Rises seems like it’s in the same theater as the Grave of the Fireflies. Like, if there were a double combo feature, this would make more sense. To see Wind Rises and Grave of Fireflies instead of. What was it? Totoro? Yeah, Fireflies. There’s a nice double feature. This was not done as a double feature, but it was supposed to come out the same day as the Tale of Princess Cayuga. But the director of that, the. The other big Ghibli guy, Takahata, who made Grave of the Fireflies, he couldn’t make it in time.

So this one came out that came out like four months after the Wind Rises. But, yeah, they had a press conference. They’re like, we’re gonna do a dual release. And. But that other one, the print, the princess one, is that on our Occult Disney list too? Did that get Disney distribution? I don’t think so, but now I’m gonna double check. I do know that my dad liked it a lot and sent us a DVD from America. And then maybe they watched it, but I never watched it. So your dad in the US watches an anime. Did he? Like so much he sends it to you and you don’t even bother watching it? Well, my.

My wife and daughter watched it, and then I just never got around to it. Wow. All right. Don’t send Matt anything from the stage. He won’t get around. He hasn’t seen all the Jubilees, but yeah. Yeah. Also, I don’t know where the DVD is at the moment, so. But that shouldn’t be a problem. But anyways, it’s the other Ghibli guy, but he. Yeah, there is weird, like, with him and the producer Suzuki or. So it’s like we’ve all been working for 30 years, and in certain ways we work well, but they also seem, like, extremely tired of each other.

Like, works have Gotten on each other’s nerves fully. Well, I guess if you’re all working in the same three story building the entire time, this like very high level of working, then it’s pretty much. Even if, even if it’s not the same concept of like an alpha personality, you still have high performing alpha personalities all in, in, you know, small vicinity. So it seems that. Yeah, good point. That can’t last forever. No. Then that’s why like the past four movies Miyazaki made has been like his retirement movie. You know, he just keeps retiring. When did he needs to be going around and just making new studios.

He needs like a, like a Ghibli east and a Ghibli west and a Ghibli in, you know, Europe and all those. Okay. Takahata died in 2018 and was that Cayugo is his last film. Okay. Now, now I have to look up Suzuki and see if he’s still around because that might mean like Miyazaki is the last man standing, you know, of his own studio. Yeah. So the, the other major director is definitely, he’s 2018. Suzuki is younger and still alive. Okay, so he’s, so two of them are still there. So Ponyo 2 still has a chance.

Ponyo 2 still has a chance. But we got the Boy in the Heron instead, which I think Disney, we’ll get to the Boy in the Heron. Well, you can’t really skip that. And we do the, the Princess too, if you really want to. I have nothing against that. I will save it. We’ll save it. We got plenty to get through. We got plenty to get through. That’s true. Well, I, I, I keep talking more about the documentary, but you want to pull on a few threads in the, the movie proper. I just got a lot of really good quotes from it because again, I mean the biggest things that happen here is a dude keeps designing airplanes and learning about how to design airplanes and then he finds a girl and then the girl says she’s sick and then they say they’re gonna get married and then she dies and then he builds an airplane and then the movie ends.

So everything in between that, I’ve got some like, I think some pretty good quotes. One of them is that it’s when he’s younger and someone tells him fighting is never justified. And I was just thinking that is counter to everything that I’ve ever learned growing up. Is this, is he a Buddhist? Is this like a Buddhist saying that fighting is never justified? Because it seems like fighting is always justified or for the most Part it can be. Okay, this. Now we’re going to hit one of those interesting language differences. I’ll do my best. Like, I’ll try my best.

Which people say a lot in this movie. When Japanese want to try and say that in English, they’ll say fight. So if you’re taking a test, they’ll be fight, right? So the term. There’s a more violent phrase. There are more violent words for fighting, but in English it doesn’t. There’s a difference, right? Because if it was violence is never justified. That would have made more sense than fighting is never justified. Because that might have, like, you know, punching and kicking is never justified. That would just be a bad translation. But that would probably be like, the most accurate one.

Whereas fighting, as far as, like, trying really hard, that’s like, considered like, like, like everyone, you know. Gambari, Gambate. People say it a lot in this movie. So they are in Japanese saying, I’m going to fight, but they don’t mean violently. There’s also he. Jiro’s, I guess, mentor is in this dream world, right? So he goes into these lucid dreams and he meets this real guy, Count Caproni, who was an Italian airline like, or aeronautic engineer as well. And he goes and he meets him in all these visions, I think it happens at least like three times, maybe more than that during the movie.

And he gets ideas from them. They, like, they trade tips on how they’re going to create their planes. And if you look that guy up, Giovanni Caproni, he’s also responsible for the earliest and largest historical airline crashes. Like, the deadliest. Not because he sucked, but just because he was one of the earlier plane engineers. So clearly, you know, he. He was like, just early to the game. So he got. He got in there first with some body counts. And he really wanted to put people on those planes. Not bombs, people and their man. Oh, is his name Tom Lehrer? He was the.

The comedian singer that has that song about Werner von Braun. And the whole gig is like, he doesn’t care, like, how the rocket’s down. He just cares about getting him up in the air. And after that, it’s like, not his department. Like, he just wants to shoot rockets however he can, you know, figure out how to shoot rockets into the sky, he’s gonna do that. That’s kind of how I see Jiro in this. He might not be, like, the exact same accent as Werner von Braun, but it’s like, I’m gonna take this horrible situation I’m in.

And I’m gonna make the best of it. There’s actually a quote in there that they saying, like, I’m gonna make. I plan to make the most of this opportunity. That was the exact quote. And they’re talking about how Germany is paying these Japanese engineers to go over to Germany and help them build their warplanes. And even though they don’t want to build warplanes, like, this is their way to do it. Something about the dream version of. Oh, geez, what was the name again? Mark Caproni. Yeah, so it’s like. It’s kind of like Ratatouille, where he keeps saying Gatro.

And I thought it’s interesting because through partway throughout movies like, oh, this isn’t the real good tro. This is dream Gatro, who’s different. He doesn’t know that real Goodreau is like, you know, sleeping around and stuff. Right. Whereas this movie, the Italian guy makes it clear, like, I am the person. We are having the same dream, you know, which can be your subconscious just tricking you. That happens in dreams. Dreams. But I just thought it was interesting that this movie made four years later or whatever, five years later, just very much made the distinction of, oh, no, no, no.

This. This is the person in the dream. It’s not just a weird construct. I also like that the entire course of the movie, whenever they meet in this dream world, it’s always Caproni. Right. But Jiro is just Japanese boy. Like, probably early in the subtitles, he never. When he’s in his 40s. Yeah. He’s still Japanese boy. Yeah. Which seemed a little weirdly condescending, I guess. He is older, though. He doesn’t age in the dreams, which now makes you think he’s a construct again and not the actual person. Zero ages in the dreams. He does have a little bit of like a.

A stereotypical Italian look to him, like a huge nose. And like he, like, he actually works out where. I’m not wondering, is this just another Japanese guy? But that’s also because I notice in a lot of these Ghibli movies in particular, just specific characters will be incredibly recognizable. And then everyone else will just kind of blend in together. And it’s almost luck of the draw. But this guy, he got a nice big schnoz. He got like a cool little bowler hat. And he basically, I think he states all of the beliefs that Jiro actually has. So he says.

He says, the airplanes are not for war. They’re not for making money. Their beautiful dreams. And again, think about Miyazaki saying this. Movies are not tools for war. They’re not for making money. They’re for beautiful dreams. It’s just. It’s the same autobiographical thing. And also in this statement, let me just say this. This is from the movie. Airplanes are not tools of war, and they’re not for making money, they’re beautiful dreams. I know that two of those out of those three statements are 100 objectively true, and only that third one might be subjectively true, but there are definitely weapons of war and they’re definitely for making money.

There’s almost no other purpose for airplanes to exist. Yeah, I mean, he’s kind of diluting himself. He just. He loves this engineering so much that he’s gonna have that, you know, cognitive dissonance where like, no, my work can’t possibly. It’s for good. It’s for the good of humanity. But people are taking and using it for the worst things possible, like, pretty instantly, you know, I mean, I. I feel for, like, I guess all of the. The micro and biochemists that are like, man, I just really want to play with bacteria. But the only thing that’s paying is going to be something that gets weaponized.

Right? Yeah. And a quote I wrote down on here, which seems to also be the. Maybe the Ghibli corporate philosophy is the company will protect you as long as you are useful. Which. Yeah, that’s one of the worst quotes. No, I like it, though, because it was, like, reassuring. Because. Because since everyone recognizes his genius, they will always see him as useful. So it. I’ve. Even though it came out weird, I think that that was like a tone of reassurance. And I think he got that reassurance when he heard it. Yeah. But if you’re the animator that gets stuck with having to figure out what Miyazaki wants for the zero, that’s got to be a stressful job, is if you don’t do it, you’re not useful anymore.

Right. And, you know, he’s got signs around the office, like, if you are not inspired, just quit. You know, things like that. A little Steve Jobs in him, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, that’s. That seems to be kind of the case. So. But yeah, it’s. It’s an interesting. You know, it’s like an office set on Simmer, which is the. What’s happening here too? I mean, yeah, it’s great for Jiro. He gets to go to the Germany and stuff, but if you’re two rungs down and have more of a schlub job, especially in 1930s and 40s Japan.

That’s gonna suck. And he was also originally concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get far because he was. He had to wear like these big Coke bottle glasses. Like so his, his vision’s not great. So he wouldn’t be able to be a pilot. That’s when Caproni is like, I’m not a pilot either. Like it’s. It’s actually easier to fly the planes than it is to engineer them. So the pilots are nothing. The pilots are just like these fly boys. So I’m also assume like you see this as the. They’re designing planes and the pilots jump in the plane and the plane just like falls right into the ocean.

After you see that enough times, you’re probably like, well, thank God I’m not a pilot. Like I’m glad I’m just a guy that designs the planes and not the one that has to fly the planes. Yeah, and he might not even enjoy flying planes. His thing, which I can understand because it’s not my thing, is the engineering of this stuff. Something I am obsessed with is guitars and you know, Fender guitars. Leo Fender, who designed these iconic guitars and amplifiers, could not play the guitar. You know, he was not a musician. He was a electrician and engineer and he just really liked making the things, but he couldn’t play them.

Yeah, it’s funny how that works. And it’s a good reminder too that, that you can be in an industry or directly affect an entire industry and still not really be in that industry. Right? Yeah. So yeah. I actually do probably recommend as it’s very interesting to pair this up with the documentary for anyone listening. It’s informs the film a lot and does make it seem a lot more autobiographical as you watch Miyazaki go about his business. You know, there’s another motif that they keep bringing up. I thought that was pretty interesting where he keeps com talking about this juxtaposition between they’re working on the late like the cutting edge technology in planes, but that the place where they’re manufacturing them and the airfield are so far away that they use oxen to drag the plane onto the airfield and just this how backwards it feels that they’re taking this, the latest engineering and then towing it with thousand year old technology in order to bring it from point A to point B.

And they use that image model times and that image. I think any Japanese person is going to recognize that being kind of a Hakusai wood. Hakusai is the artist being in his wood cut Style. Think of the great wave. He’s got, you know, like 50 images of Mount Fuji. And some of them have people, you know, pulling oxen in front of the mountain and stuff. And it’s, it looked very much like in that style just for, for that particular image. So that, that’s, you know, for us, that’s like when you just put a shot of Paul Bunyan in a movie, everyone’s gonna recognize it.

Even you don’t have to say it’s Paul Bunyan or anything. And he’s very critical of Japan constantly. Like Jiro is. He keeps saying that Japan is pouring backward. We can never build something like this. Only the Americans, only the Germans. So it’s, it’s very like self deprecating as well. And you had Miyazaki saying the same stuff like, you know, Japan, like, I’m a 20th century guy. This is the. Everything falls apart from here, you know. So I guess one of the other questions that he is maybe trying to balance out all his pessimism. But again, Caproni ends up being this weird ethereal like, like positivity source.

And then he’s the only one that gives like these positive messages to Jiro because everything else around Jiro is falling apart and. Right. That’s just like non stop tragedy. And another thing that in when they go back into this dream realm, Caproni is asking them, would you rather live in a world with pyramids or without? And when he asked, I was like, what kind of question is that? Who the hell out there is saying like, I don’t know, I don’t want pyramids. Get rid of them. Like, I, I assume that there’s probably some people that are like, yeah, screw that, I hate pyramids, but who the hell would.

Actually, would you, Matt, do you want to get rid of the, the Great Pyramid? Of course. Yeah. Maybe a world without pyramids is more efficient. I don’t know if we’re just. Especially if you go with the, the, the general idea that the pyramids are tombs, I don’t really go with that. But if the pyramids are tombs, that’s the most inefficient thing ever done. Yeah, everyone, everybody gets a pyramid as a tomb. Well, the pharaohs would in that case. Again, that’s not something we’re going to get into today. But yeah, I’m open to many other explanations of those things.

The point that he’s making though is that. And I guess in this case the pyramid is a warplane. But it’s like, hey, I would still rather live In a world where I get to design planes, than one where I don’t get the design planes, even though they’re being used as weapons of war. I’m still glad that it exists. I think that. That he was basically correlating a plane to a pyramid. It’s still. I don’t know. It still feels like a bit of cognitive dissonance, because you could be like, well, this war is happening. Even if I don’t do anything, people are going to die.

The war is not going to end. He can’t stop it. But he didn’t have to make such an efficient killing machine. Yeah, I mean, if you’re an engineer, that’s essentially what you’re after is efficiency. Right, Right. And that’s, you know, that’s. That’s why he’s got the Coke bottle glasses. His vision’s not good in that regard. His vision’s great as far as designing things. He’s a absolute genius. You know, his vision’s not great as far as, like, where, you know, it’s like the. The whole thing on Jurassic Park. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. You know, I do like a ver.

Like a Clockwork Orange version. Remember when Alex is reading the Bible and all prison guards are like, oh, this guy’s reformed. He’s reading the Bible now. But then it shows you what he’s thinking of as he’s reading the Bible. And he’s like, punches Pilate, and he’s the one that’s, like, whipping Jesus. So everyone’s like, oh, what a good boy. He’s getting into the Bible. But in his mind, he’s like, the worst part of the Bible. And I just imagine there’s a version of the Wind Rises where Jiro is designing these planes, and he’s just thinking about, like, mowing down just thousands of people in the most efficient way.

Right? Like, maybe he really does want to create weapons of war. And every time someone else brings it up, it’s like, yeah, I can’t. I just want to make planes, man. I can’t believe that they’re using this for war. And Jiro has to kind of play along like, oh, yeah, me either. I hate. Yeah, I don’t. I don’t like that people are dying. But really, that’s his main motivation. Pretty sure that would not be a Ghibli. But, yeah, that. I mean, this movie goes out of the way to make sure, you know, that’s not the case with him.

Right. So to the fact where he’s deluded in the opposite direction. Yeah, the lady doth protest too much, I think, maybe on this. And so him and his wife and even a couple other people in this movie have actual death wishes. And I was saying earlier that maybe that’s just because after you see a guy walking down a path and a woman painting and people sitting down at a table and having long discussions, it might feel like it’s dragging a little bit. So what they’ll do is they’ll have Jiro just throw an airplane out of like a fifth story balcony window.

And then he gets caught on a ledge and then it’s like he almost slips and falls and dies. And like wood breaks. And then his wife or his girlfriend at the time, then she throws the plane and she almost falls off a balcony. And I’m sitting here wondering, like, this guy is so smart, he’s about to die over a paper. It just. Just fold another piece of paper. My guy, like, don’t go crawling up and he’s like almost dying. And then I realize, oh, it’s because otherwise this movie would probably be lulling right now. But if you add a little, oh, you know, the protagonist almost just died.

I guess it kind of like now you’re allowed to be boring for another five minutes. And I’m not, I’m not saying the movie was born like it was actually masterfully done. It was just. It was so out of character. Why, why is this guy trying to kill himself? Why is his girlfriend trying to kill herself? Oh, because the movie needed some drama right here. And it’s the way it’s written that apparently the guy sits at his table and just does storyboards. What happens next? What happens next? So yeah, you’d be like, huh, this is gonna get boring if I don’t put something a little actiony in there.

So that’s where it ends up happening. And also just kind of out of nowhere. I mean, you know that his wife is gonna get sick and die because she. Because I mean, they plant such a seed right, where it’s like, we’ll get married right after I get back. The image of your lost love, you know? Right. Oh, is that what it says? Oh, no, it doesn’t say that. I’m just saying that’s what the image evokes. It’s like kind of this old timey image of a. Of a woman on painting on windswept mountain. It feels very nostalgic when you look at it, of something lost, you know.

What was the movie with the two girls and like one they think falls in A lake. And she goes running around. That’s Totoro. That’s Totoro. So it almost had, like, a Totoro feel to it, because I wasn’t sure. Okay, what’s. How was the wife sick? Is she just gonna be in the hospital? And they send her, like, a carrot or something on the windowsill, and she gets better. But no, like, it shows. You’re watching the movie. You’re watching the movie, and then all of a sudden it cuts to her and she’s just coughing up blood, and it’s like, hemorrhaged along.

I was like, holy crap. That was a pretty dramatic exit for. And I guess she doesn’t die at that exact moment. She just gets. She recovers a little bit and then decides she goes without telling anyone. She goes back to the sanitarium, apparently dies on the train. I think so. Yeah. And then we. We see when he goes back to the dream realm at the end, again with Caproni, the wife is there, and he’s like, your wife’s been waiting for you here. So this is another thing where, Again, talking about in Evangelion, where some of the plot points are kind of like, not bonk, bonk on the head.

They’re a little bit subtle. Right. When the plane finally takes off and everyone’s cheering and then there’s a gust of wind and Jiro looks in a different direction. That’s supposed to evoke his wife dying. That’s like the moment she passes when. Right over my head. Yeah, I, I. Well, if I hadn’t read that, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten that, you know, but that, that is literally what that is supposed to evoke. Like, you’re that supposed to feel the loss. And I think, I think that they do mention a scene or two later, like, but they don’t really, like, just write it out for you, you know, like in a Western movie would.

Well, and the movie’s called the Wind Rises, and plenty of times throughout the movie, they keep going back to these quotes about how the wind exists, even though you can’t see it, but it’s still this living thing that moves from one place to the other. So it does make sense that wind would be the. The symbol that represents her dying or, like, at least her life. Yeah. So. And I don’t know if that’s just something a little more, you know, culturally that people would pick up in Japan or what, but, you know. Yeah, it’s basically, it’s.

It’s Kaze Tachino in Japan. It’s Just, yeah, it’s like the wind has risen. So basically the same thing. I feel like the English title opens itself a little more to fart jokes that we have gone an hour and eight minutes without making nine minutes. So that’s good. But it’s. Yeah, it’s. If it feels like breaking wind, then, yeah, but just the wind rises. I don’t know if there’s a close enough connection there. It was late at night, I started thinking about a little bit getting petulant in my own mind. The other. The other thing that I noticed, too, I thought was just interesting was that they were showing how the different.

The different engineers were approaching the different things that they needed. So one, I think one of the cooler quotes that I remember from this movie that I was like, oh, it’s interesting concept, was when Jiro is talking about, man, this plane is perfect if we just get rid of the guns. Like, if we can get rid of the guns, then this plane will fly without any issue. And everyone. That’s why he’s delusional. Everyone’s like, what are you talking about? But he’s serious, isn’t he, people? But then. But then after it shows him talking about that, he’s showing like, well, here’s how another engineer tried to come up with this.

And they put the fuselages in the wings, but because of the weight issue, they didn’t protect the fuselages. They just put them there without any kind of shielding. And then as soon as the Americans realized this, then they would just go and shoot at the wings and the planes would just explode and fall down. And it was like, even if you had a whole bunch of these big, majestic planes, the second that your enemy finds out this Achilles heel, they take him down. And they also keep using this phrase of Achilles over and over, but in a.

In a way that I wasn’t used to. They keep saying, Achilles closes the gap. And that, like, one of his friends that’s an engineer with him, that when he finds this next level innovation, when he can figure out how to do, say, like, these seamless rivets to. To reduce air drag and, like, he keeps like, oh, my God, that’s your Achilles. You’re closing the gap. But I most usually. When you invoke Achilles, my understanding is that’s usually inciting his heel. Like, there’s, like, a very easy way to take down an otherwise big, powerful entity. Yeah, I didn’t think about as much as you did, but it did strike me weird because I was just sitting there thinking, oh, is the point to go to Germany and figure out what they’re doing wrong so we can do it.

Right. Because, yeah, he’s like, oh, they’ve done the steel plan, but they’ve done it kind of in the wrong way. I’ll try and fix it, you know. And then he makes his own mistake, which someone else capitalizes on and back and forth. But it is kind of weird how they used it. Yeah. Because what I’m saying, he goes to Germany because Germany was paying. Germany was the one that was actually funding them to even be engineers to begin with. Yeah, I guess. Let’s see if I got anything else. You have anything else you want to throw out on this one.

It ends in death and horror, kind of. Right. The very end of the movie. It shows that. Here’s his awesome planes that he designed. They’re working, you know, exactly as you’d expect. And then it kind of pans to a graveyard of just explosions in the background and all these plane. Like a big graveyard of planes, essentially. And he also makes this. This statement where he says, not a single plane returned. And I was just wondering if. If that was accurate. I have time to look this up. But if he’s the one that made that particular plane design, did none of them ever come back like that? Well, they did send a fair amount of kamikaze guys out, so those guys didn’t come back.

Oh, did he design the kamikaze plane? Oh, I think those are a cheaper version. Obviously. You want to have, like, you know, they didn’t even put land. Like, I don’t think the landing gear or something there was like. Like all the corners were cut on those. I. I don’t know how much he had to design with that. I’m just thinking that Japan had an awful lot of planes that didn’t come back, you know? Yeah, yeah, fair point. And again, it’s. It’s kind of ironic to the whole point of this movie being like, I just want to make these planes.

And I don’t agree with them being weapons of war, when that was literally the. The defining. That’s why he was there. Like, literally was there to do that. World War II was won through. I mean, if I believe Disney for victory through air. Air power. Yeah. World War II was won by air power. So it’s not just that they were for the war effort. That was the war. The war was planes. And this does do the Tokyo Disneyland, I think it was. Meet the World. Now it’s. Now it’s the Monsters, Inc. Ride. But it used to be kind of a carousel of progressing.

I think I mentioned before about Japanese history and as it turns the stages, you know, and it’s going from the Meiji period when Japan starts to industrialize to modern Japan. It’s just like, like. And there were a few bad years and then it goes to like the 60s. Like it just totally glosses over like the 1920s to the 1940s, you know. Yeah. Where’s the unit 731 portion of that ride? Yeah, that Disneyland attraction did not bring up unit 731. That is, that is correct. Do a little mist of cholera. A little miss the typhoid as you’re going through.

Really. But this movie kind of. This really shows you a little more, I guess, doesn’t it? Because it actually does show you the playing graveyard. But it is like what a 30 second sequence of actual war that goes on here. Yeah. I mean the, the movie has got. It’s so interesting just because it’s a dude in a train and in and sitting down and drawing these big blueprints and like going around and inspecting engines and stuff for a majority of the movie. Right. And then maybe like walking through a park and some ladies painting. It’s not like you’ve got how’s moving castle level of crazy things happening at all times, but yet it’s still so much more visually interesting and story wise than his son’s movie, which objectively had like more going on constantly, but still kind of felt flat.

I, I’m struggling to remember the name of it. The medieval one, Tales from Earthsea. We did that. Yeah. Which wasn’t a bad movie, but it did kind of drag a little bit and it lacked whatever the hell the magic is that this movie had is like that Ghibli magic. And the tales from Earthsea were like missing some of that ingredient. Well, I think you gave that the perfect review of saying it’s the, the, the much better version of like animated Bible tales, you know? Yeah, yeah. Which you would never say about one of Goro Miyazaki’s. Excuse me, Goro is the son.

You never say about Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, you know, that, that they never look like a Bible tale movie movie. Yeah. No. 100%. Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. Goro did put out the platonic ideal of a Bible tale movie, but still just had that look, you know, and it didn’t have the whimsy, which, which this has, which if this is autobiography, autobiographical. I said that the weirdest way possible. I mean, at least Miyazaki as far as I know, Ghibli has not been used to be weaponized to kill people in war. I think. I mean, yeah, we’ll save it for another episode.

I feel like there’s a discussion that could be made there. I left that. I did up speak at the end just to leave that out there for discussion. So. All right, next. Next episode, we’re going to talk about how Studio Ghibli is. Yeah. Causing genocide. I have my doubts, but, hey, you never know what’s going on. This crazy world of ours. I guess we’ll wrap this one up for today. Unless you got something else you want to go. No, let’s. Let’s go ahead and do plugs. You go first. Okay. What do I do? About to start doing a podcast on the 2019 Twilight Zone over at Time Enough Podcast.

If that sounds unappealing to you, you can go back and we’ve done the complete 60s show. And if you don’t like the. The 60s Twilight Zone, I. I don’t. I don’t know what’s up up, dude, we can’t be friends. We can’t be friends. Yeah, that’s a good enough plug for a day. Let’s do some Twilight Zone. This has some Twilight Zone vibes to it with the dream, you know, surreal dream worlds. All right, I’ll do another one of my other podcasts called under the Docs. You can just go to anywhere. You listen to podcasts, search for Paranoid American.

They come out on Mondays and Tuesdays. Mondays, we review mainstream documentaries, either ones that are trending or ones that. That have gotten all sorts of critical acclaim, but they still suck sometimes. And then on Tuesdays, we dig down into the trenches and we pull out old 70s, 80s, 90s conspiracy documentaries. So depending on what you’re into, come by and listen to both of them. But check out under the Docks and check out Paranoid American wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, I got one more for you. Spell the word mackerel, please, if you can. Mackerel. You put me on the spot here.

Okay, don’t. Okay, you don’t have to, because I wrote E K E R A L. Mackerel. Maybe. Okay, I. I’m just knowing because there’s a scene where Jiro and his co workers or classmates or whatever are having fish, and he keeps getting the mackerel, the saw, which is saba, which smells horrible. And I was like, oh, I write my notes. I’ll take the salmon over the mackerel. And literally spent five minutes like, like not being Able to spell mackerel. I was wrong and I was so wrong. P K E R E L M A C K E.

Yeah, I can’t spell it loud. That’s why it’s the first style spelling bees. Anyway, I was just like last and I was like, why can I not spell this for him? Like I’m not gonna look it up. I have to be able to do it myself. And I. I failed in, in my final notes. It’s M A K A R E L, which I know is wrong, but I was like, I gave up. American stickers, Cryptids, all your favorite conspiracies all sticker sheets. There are North American stickers they’ll make you smile and snicker False friends and secret society all of these and more.

My sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid American sticker sheets. Unearth tales of cryptids, cults and mysteries through each sticker. These won’t last last long. Get yours now@paranoid American.com. american stickers, cryptids, cults and killers. Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies all have ever been. More on our sticky sheets. Paranormal American stickers make you smile and snicker. Secret society all all of these and more on a sticker sheets. What the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid American sticker sheets. From cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find.

Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com. Yeah I scribbled my life away driven the right to page Will it enlight your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cost they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated Met is the apex execution of flame you out Nuclear bomb distributed at war Rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face.

You despising me for what? Though calculated and rather cutthroat Paranoid American must be all the blood spoke for real Lord give me your day your away vacate they wait around to hate Whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us. You’re welcome. For real you’re welcome. They ain’t never had a deal you’re welcome, man. They lacking a pill. You’re welcome. Yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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