I've been watching a bunch of anime, but there's only one thing that I need to talk about.
Kazetachinu
This was a really good movie. It didn't sweep me off my feet like Wolf Children, but it's a very unique movie. It's a really personal story about Jiro Hirokoshi, and though it follows his pursuit of his dream of building a fantastic, beautiful airplane, it carries a lot of other stuff along with it too. Trying to capture the full scope of a man's life and dreams is rare for an anime, and while that makes the movie a little inelegant, it's also pretty special.
A lot of what's here is kind of recognizable if you've seen any movie about a genius sort of character. There's plenty of Jiro working late, seeing things and finding inspiration, steadily progressing towards the plane of his dreams. What stands out are the scenes with flying planes (excellent mechanical animation), the scenes that take place in his dreams, talking with early Italian aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, and a lot of the scenes in nature. There are also some early busy crowd scenes that Ghibli handles with unusual energy and thoroughness. Every background character clearly has their own little story and purpose. It's amazing to watch.
The later part of the movie portrays the conflict between Jiro's work on the plane and his love for his wife. There are some touching moments in that romance, but it still felt a little limp to me. Anno's performance aside, there's a lot more heat coming from his love than from him, even though they clearly care for each other. Maybe it's just a little too Japanese of a relationship for me to really invest myself into. It feels most authentic in its quiet, domestic moments, scenes where he returns home late at night and she's already in bed.
The movie handles the war in a kind of interesting way that I'm not entirely comfortable with. It's always present, be it through the evil bombers attacking the towns of Jiro's dreams, or the constant wartime push that his friends remind him about, but its consequences are never an important part of his consciousness. At one point, his friend says something to the effect of, "The war isn't our concern; we should just focus on making a great plane." The consequences of that race for aesthetic perfection might exist in a very real way that the movie occasionally alludes to, but they don't matter to Jiro, which means they aren't made very obvious to the audience. He wanted to build beautiful planes, and he achieved that dream, so he did well, despite the costs. The movie seems sympathetic to his perspective, but also realistic about its limits. It's an odd balance.
As for the question on everyone's minds, Anno does about as well as he could have given his limits. When he first speaks, it's completely jarring, but I found myself pretty used to his voice by the end. During some relaxed moments, or when he's talking about planes, I think he sounds great, and sometimes he sounds realistic in a way that's only bad because of how incongruous it is with the other voice acting. At other times, he seems out of place either because he sounds like an old nerd or because he sounds like he's just reading words on a script instead of being in that moment. I'll never understand why Miyazaki was so insistent on casting him.
The airplane sound effects are generally great. The only time the voiced sound effects felt really off to me was in an early scene with a lot of destruction. Voices aren't quite adequate for making the sounds of a building collapsing, and the effect was almost more comical than fearsome.
I don't like it as much as some of Ghibli's most classic movies (maybe that's an impossible standard), but it's Miyazaki at his most adult and ambiguous, which makes it more interesting than anything they've put out in a decade. It's absolutely worth seeing.
