If I’m being totally honest, I didn’t really appreciate the full spectrum of animation coming out of Japan, back in the younger years. While I fully embraced the more futuristic, violent and openly depraved offerings of the art form commonly known as Anime, my idiot ass seemingly had no interest in the whimsical side that came with the rightly celebrated, animation house known as Studio Ghibli. While I was more than happy to pull up a pew and bask in the glories of dystopian futures, sex mad demons and various other extreme tropes, the notion of cuddly forest deities and plane flying pigs just felt… well, a little silly.
In the absence of a machine that would let me go back in time to kick my own ass, I finally started to rectify my obvious inadequacies, but for someone weaned on the savagery of Fist Of The North Star, the cool factor of Akria and whatever merits may come from watching Urotsokidoji, could the gentle calm of a Studio Ghibli release hold my attention? Pigs might fly.
The year is 1929 and Marco Pagot, an Italian former WWI fighter ace now is the bounty hunter known as Porco Rosso who pursues gangs of air pirates over the Adriatic Sea. However, for reasons left typically vague for a Ghibli film, the crack pilot has been cursed to wear the form of a mustachioed pig and chooses to live the majority of his life in seclusion when he isn’t rescuing ocean liners from the threat of bumbling bandits or dining in the hotel owned by his friend, Gina. However, fed up of his constant interference, the various bands of pirates group together to hire swaggering American ace, Donald Curtis, to match skills with Porco and get his snout out of their business once and for all.
After Porco and Curtis duel in the skies after the former is ambushed on the way to have his plane serviced, the porcine pilot has to crash land after his craft is peppered with more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s death car. Surviving the experience, Porco has to travel to Milan with a wrecked plane despite the fact that there is a warrant for his arrest in Italy for desertion. Meeting up with his mechanic, Piccolo, work begins on creating a brand new plane from scratch – but as it progresses, Porco bonds with Piccolo’s young granddaughter, Fio, who proves to be both a gifted designer and incredibly interested in the bounty hunter’s strange and tragic past.
Sooner or later, Porco is going to have to take to the air to once again face Curtis, who not only wants to score a decisive victory over his rival, but has eyes on Gina who in turn has feeling for Porco. But with Italian air force still actively searching for him and an entire township showing up for the duel, can the gruff, literally pig headed pilot figure out what is best for everyone in the chaos of the day.
While I would like to point out that I wasn’t a complete Ghibli novice before watching Porco Rosso (I had, like every semi-intelligent being on this Earth, at least seen Spirited Away) and so I had some idea of the sweetly gentle tone that was going to pull a flyby on me. However, I was completely unprepared for just how effortless director Hayao Miyazaki manages to weave together such bizarre material in a way that makes perfect sense despite being as plainly illogical as a woolen crash helmet. Creating a colourful world that both sticks heavily to history concerning interwar life in the Mediterranean and blurs it with fanciful make believe with comedy pirates, death-free dogfights and a lead character who seems to be an incorrigible ladies man despite having the head of an anthropomorphic swine. Also, despite lavish detail to history, Porco Rosso also indulges in that Japanese animation fetish of obsessively delivering gorgeous retro-futurist redesigns of fighter planes from the 20s and 30s.
In lesser hands, these seemingly random aspects would have resulted a culture clash smoothie that would have been pretty tough to swallow, but with Miyazaki in control (basing things off of his own Manga) he turns such a chaotic recipe into a light-footed romp that radiates a warm relaxing glow. However, while the warmth of the film is enough to vacation in (it’s a bizarrely relaxing experience), Miyazaki ensures that the spectre of war casts a sobering and deceptively shade on the playful happenings. Yes, we’re dealing with a film that sees a pig-headed man with a cigarette nonchalantly hanging from his mouth somehow be an unmitigated chick-magnet, but who also utters things like “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” in defiance of what’s occuring with the world.
In fact, once you muscle past the absurdities of the surface level stuff, the gruff but oddly endearing Porco proves to be an impressively malleable mouth piece for a whole range of topics. A legitimately touching war story from Porco involving his war buddy (and Gina’s husband) being killed in battle shifts to an achingly poignant moment that sees our hero transported to a world above the clouds that sees every pilot shot down in battle traveling in an airborne procession that tails off to infinity and softly delivers anti-war gut punches that are both light as a feather and utterly devastating. Elsewhere, Porco’s rather unique condition could be seen as a metaphor from everything from survivor’s guilt, to PTSD, to just plain old middle-age as the aging porker ruminates on paths not taken and days gone by. However, what’s really impressive us that Miyazaki doesn’t lean into any of these things at all and is just content to let everything sit there naturally for the viewer to make their own choices rather that wave his themes and messages directly in our faces. You can be utterly moved by his tender points, or you can just enjoy a comfortingly strange tale about a fighter pilot with a pig for a head. Even here, Miyazaki has you covered as the animation is mouth watering and the views of the Mediterranean are so beautiful (despite being drawings) that it may my chest hurt from yearning. Similarly, the filmmaker chooses not to play too rough with the dogfights either, with Porco (still affected by his time at war) refusing to put a bullet in anything but Curtis’ engine during the big finale. Even then, the movie has the two enemies settle their differences with a farcial fist fight that feels like it’s come right of a goofy comedy like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or (more fittingly) Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, and it this sense of playful pacifism that allows the flick to get your heart dead in the middle of its crosshairs.
As deeply profound as it is amusingly deadpan involving it’s surrealism, Porco Rosso only sets the occasional trotter wrong when it comes to the relationship between Porco and Fio that brings the pilot out of his shell, which proves to be mostly harmless, but still starts to tread into the same, slightly uncomfortable areas as Luc Besson’s Leon when it seems that the younger girl has a crush on her pilot. However, as an antidote to other animated movies that tend to be as loud as they can, this touching tale of a pig and his plane proves to be deceptively heartfelt as it barrel rolls and loop de loops with your emotions.
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