Jiro’s Dream Plane (The Wind Rises)
The Wind Rises (Japanese: 風立ちぬ Hepburn: Kaze Tachinu) is a 2013 Japanese animated historical drama film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, animated by Studio Ghibli for the Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, Walt Disney Japan, Mitsubishi, Toho and KDDI and distributed by Toho. It was released on 20 July 2013, in Japan, and was released in North America on 21 February 2014 under Disney’s adult movie brand Touchstone Pictures.
The Wind Rises is a fictionalized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi (1903–1982), designer of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, used by the Empire of Japan during World War II. The film is adapted from Miyazaki’s manga of the same name, which was in turn loosely based on both the 1937 novel The Wind Has Risen by Tatsuo Hori and the life of Jiro Horikoshi.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
The finished model:
The story:
The Wind Rises (2013) is a good film. It’s probably not one of Miyazaki’s greatest work, but that’s a bit of a relative term when talking about someone with his list of accomplishments and accolades, isn’t it? Regardless, a story about the man who designed the A6M Zero for Mitsubishi sounds pretty interesting right out of the box.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize though is that it’s not really a bio-pic per se. Sure, it’s based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, but it’s also a highly fictionalized account, with an extra helping of melodramatic bits for good measure.
Personally though, what I really love about it is that it’s a return to the beautiful skies for Miyazaki. Between Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and The Wind Rises (2013), there’s an almost decade long gap in the “beautiful flying machines” that Miyazaki’s films are so well-known for. That’s not to say that Tales from Earthsea (2006), Ponyo (2008), The Secret World of Arrietty (2010), and From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) aren’t good and interesting films in their own rights, but they don’t have that “soaring in the wild blue yonder” that so captured my imagination in his earlier films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Laputa – Castle in the Sky (1986) – although the case might be made for Fujimoto’s undersea flying boat in Ponyo.
So, when it came time to include The Wind Rises in my 1/72 Studio Ghibli project, I obviously intend to include the A5M – which is sort of the star of the show – but my my first choice was to tackle the amazing feather-winged plane that Jiro dreams of flying as a boy.
The build:
Now, I could’ve taken the easy way out of this and just copped out and got the 1/48 commercial kit available from Fine Molds. It does look beautiful, and if it was available in 1/72 scale, there’d be no question. But I want to remain as true to the scale of the project as possible, so I needed to find another way. So once again it was back to diving through my spares box.
It didn’t take me long to fish out another 1/72 scale fuselage from the Academy Spad XIII kit (the same kind I started the Laputa Flapter project with), and the wings… those lovely flowing wings… just like the sails from the 1/350 scale Cutty Sark kit leftover from my build of the aforementioned Fujimoto’s undersea flying boat from Ponyo. Oh, and I capped it off with the pointed end of a modified Academy MiG-21 nose cone.
Although Jiro’s plane is probably slightly smaller than the Spad XIII, I wasn’t going to quibble. A WWI bi-plane is about as close as you’re going to get, fuselage-wise, right? However, part of the magic of Jiro’s plane is how far back the cockpit is. So that meant a bit of chopping, glueing, putty and sanding to get the Spad’s cockpit repositioned. The sail wings just came together really nicely, with the pinion feathers cut out from some spare polystyrene sheets of appropriate (eye-ball) thickness.
What really did it for me though, was the cut little engine. I was able to modify some bits from one of the engines that comes with the Academy Allies and Axis vehicles of WWII kit and we were ready for action.
I have to admit, reshaping the fuselage with putty meant there was a lot of sanding, and I nearly sanded my self a hole in the fuselage for my troubles, but luckily I caught it in the nice of time and was able to shore up the weak spot with some well-placed CA glue. The only thing I was really disappointed with was my effort in painting the trip around the cockpit opening. I’m not sure what happened there, but I simply couldn’t get it done smoothly, and trying to fix it only started to make it worse.
So, in the end I had to agree to disagree with it and move on. Feel free to let me know how you feel about it though:
