Porco Rosso – genius animator Hayao Miyazaki’s most personal film
Miyazaki is maybe better known for such beautiful films as Princess Mononoke, but Porco Rosso was his attempt to create an animated feature for adults – and it’s a marvellous work on all fronts
The only animation filmmaker to match the inventive genius of Disney, Hayao Miyazaki’s mysterious, beautiful works of cinema have become a cultural phenomenon among children and teenagers across Asia, while also being revered by critics for their gentle and sophisticated flights of the imagination.
Porco Rosso (1992), the writer-director’s most personal film, is an anomaly. The story of a 1930s fighter pilot who just happens to be a pig was conceived to be a film for adults that children could also watch, rather than the other way around.
Set around the Adriatic Sea, which lies between Italy and Croatia, the film features a first-world-war fighter ace whose disillusionment with humanity – and middle age – has turned him into a pig. Working as a bounty hunter, the forthright Porco manages to enrage a group of seaplane pirates and an arrogant American pilot, who join forces with the Italian fascist police to hunt him down. Porco reluctantly enlists the help of Fio, a young Italian girl with a genius for designing aircraft. In doing so, he gets Fio into a scrape of her own.