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.
Although it features an anthropomorphic character and dizzying flying sequences, the film is straightforward and worldly compared with Miyazaki’s other works. It’s a marvellous piece of filmmaking on all counts, with a ripping storyline, typically eccentric characters, a strong political subtext and delicately layered romances.
Porco Rosso started out as a 15-page manga series called Hikoutei Jidai that Miyazaki published in Model Graphix, a modeller’s magazine. The manga was created in watercolours, which is also Miyazaki’s preferred medium for animated films. Despite a diversion into CGI for his next film, Princess Mononoke (1997), Miyazaki has always preferred hand-drawn animation, saying that no computer can replicate the subtlety of the human hand.
Miyazaki, whose father owned a factory that manufactured rudders for Zero fighter planes, has said he feels very close to the characters in Porco Rosso. A sequel featuring an ageing pig was mooted, but 75-year-old Miyazaki’s latest retirement – his sixth – has led to the project being shelved.
Porco Rosso will be screened on August 14 at MCL Telford, in Kowloon Bay, as part of MCL Cinemas’ Studio Ghibli Animation Retrospective.
