Pig Fight over the Adriatic (Ghibli)

The finished model:

The scene:

While on his way to Milan for an engine overhaul and a bit of R&R, Porco is the victim of a sneak attack by Donald Chuck and his modified blue R3C-0. Chuck swoops in out of the sun and makes quick work of Porco’s Savoia S.21 and shoots him down over the Adriatic Sea.

Check out the original manga scene (and more) here:

The story:

Although most people are familiar with the dog fight scene from the Studio Ghibli animated film, the Hayao Miyazaki manga on which it’s based is largely unknown. The Age of the Flying Boat is a fifteen-page, all-watercolor manga published in three parts, in Model Graphix, a monthly magazine about scale models. Miyazaki’s love of old planes is well-known, and the story is filled with aircraft from the 1920s (heavily modified by Miyazaki) and their technical details, as well as with the men (good-hearted and silly) who love them.

Compared with the anime version, the manga is much more light-hearted. For the dogfight between Porco and Donald Chuck (the character was renamed Donald Curtiss in the anime), Miyazaki wrote; “If this were animation, I might be able to convey the grandeur of this life-or-death battle. But this is a comic. I have no choice but to rely on the imagination of you, good readers.” (At the time, the ‘Porco Rosso’ anime had not yet been announced.)

So, given its scale modelling roots, the scene form The Age of the Flying Boat was a no-brainer. The only problem was, where to get 1/144 scale kits of the two planes in question?

The kit(s):

Curtiss R3C-2 by Kirin Beverages
Macchi M.33 by F-Toys

The build:

This build was one were you start at the end, and then tear it down and start over. To solve the problem of the lack of actual 1/144 scale kits of the planes, I had to resort to gashapon – Japanese pre-painted and mostly assembled trading toys. They’re basically kits that someone else has already assembled. So it’s a little strange to start with a finished product and the destroy it and bring it back from the ground up.

The biggest issue was that the Savoia S.21 is a fictional plane, so modification were needed on the Macchi M.33. These included extending the forward section of the water hull, moving the cockpit back and thinning the support structures. It wasn’t extremely difficult, but the small size made getting a smooth transition between the cuts and add-ons a bit of a challenge.

The R3C-0 required less work because it’s much closer to the R3C-2 upon which it’s based. The only real work that needed to be done (other than stripping off the paint) was to thin out the vertical wing separators as well as the horizontal float supports.

While the planes themselves were actually pretty easy to modify, the main challenge of this build was how to get the props to spin. Usually I can just insert a tiny DC motor – as I’ve done in many of my Area 88 1/144 projects, but these planes are SO tiny that even a 4 x 8mm motor was too big. My solution? using an old laptop computer to create a miniature air blower. There’s lots of YouTube videos that explain the process, but basically you have to restrict and direct the airflow to give it enough pressure. What was tricky though, was getting the airflow to change direction so that I could hide the fan in the base, but still have the airflow blowing up rather than out. Luckily a bit of styrene plastic helped be create a scoop by which I could direct the air through a hole in the base. By placing the R3C-0 in JUST the right place, the wind is enough to keep the prop spinning.

I initially wanted to try and split the airflow in order the get both props spinning, but after a few trials I decided that wasn’t a fight I was prepared to do what was necessary to win. Luckily, Porco’s engine is shot out in the scene and the prop stops spinning, so it’s plausible that only the R3C-0’s prop would spin. I added a cotton fireball to accentuate that fact.

All in all though, I think it turned out all right, but feel free to tell me how you feel.