Porco Rosso Review

Miyazaki made this one for himself. It started as a short to play in Japan Airlines cabins and grew into a feature about a man who would rather be a pig than a fascist, and the origin shows in how little it cares about plot. Marco Pagot flies a red Savoia seaplane, takes bounty work chasing air pirates over the Adriatic, drinks at Gina's hotel, and refuses to explain his curse to anybody. The flying is the reason to watch.

Miyazaki draws the engine cowling, the spray off a hull at takeoff, the way a wire braced machine bleeds speed in a climb, and he gets the physics right often enough that the one impossible sequence lands: Marco describing the war, a flat white cloud of aircraft rising over the battlefield, the dead climbing out of reach while he falls back alone. That is the whole film in ninety seconds and nothing else in it is asked to compete.

What surrounds it is loose. Curtis is a joke, the Italian police are kept mostly offscreen, and the ending declines to say who won Gina's bet. Fio Piccolo rescues the middle third: a seventeen year old engineer who rebuilds the Savoia in a Milan workshop staffed entirely by grandmothers, and who argues Marco out of his self pity more effectively than anyone else has managed. Joe Hisaishi's score is his lightest and his best use of an accordion. This is called minor Miyazaki only because he was not trying to move anybody. He manages it anyway.