Porco Rosso - Studio Ghibli's underrated masterpiece

Porco Rosso

Picture, if you will, the backdrop of a glorious summer in the 1930’s, in the azure Adriatic Sea. The shadow of Fascism encroaches Italy and the normally warm sirocco is infused with the iron and blood tang of revolution.

An ex-World War I fighter pilot, Marco Pagot, a middle-aged, world-weary and disillusioned bounty hunter in his crimson Savoia S.21 flying boat, serves as the titular protagonist of the piece.

One evening, as twilight sets in, Marco, a deep and reticent man, docks his seaplane by a beautiful verdant island on which sits the rustic and grand Hotel Adriano. He enters a dimly-lit restaurant.

As he lights his cigarette and orders a short drink at the bar, a piano plays softly and a beautiful young woman in a simple dark violet dress, who moves with a languid, fragile grace, sings in a husky voice with a trace of melancholy ‘Le Temps des Cerises’, a song whose soft, warm melody and wistful lyrics weaves the image of a beautiful tomorrow; a song that could be heard in the revolutionary streets of the Paris Commune some six decades earlier when it symbolised to the revolutionaries what life could be.

An atmosphere perhaps not unlike Casablanca, with a sensual maturity attained through the accumulation of regrets, remorse, love and loss. Encapsulating all these themes and more, Porco Rosso, a film by Miyakazi, is a subtle, adult and thoughtful masterpiece. Therefore, it can seem at first jarring that Marco is a pig.

Marco and Curtis having a manly banter

Gina mesmerising her audience

Miyazaki’s fondness for pigs is obvious as he often sketches himself in the guise of a porcine humanoid. But, as with his many films where allegories abound, Miyazaki’s casting of Marco as a pig-faced man is not mere gratuitous indulgence of this whim.

In a flash-back scene midway through the film, when Marco recollects his transformation during WWI, we learn that he gained his pig-like form after the air squadron which he was commander of was ambushed by a much larger fleet of enemy planes. Left and right his friends fell like Icarus on fire. Marco flew with all his strength, driven by an instinct to survive, chased by multiple enemies. After a dream-like sequence, when he saw the planes of his friends gently ascend into the sky to join a stream of thousands of ghost planes high up in the heavenly vault, he awoke, flying alone just above the sea, the only survivor. After the episode, he found that he had become a pig. While Marco calls it his curse, it is not hard to see that the pig-headedness of the hero is the internal conflict, blame, self-loathing and self-chastisement materialised. His guilt is made ever more acute by the fact that his best friend, comrade and wingman Bernini, who had just married the beautiful Gina, owner of the hotel Adriano and whom Marco also loved, was among those he failed to protect.

The planes of the dead - Miyazaki's tribute to those lost in the War

A glimpse of Marco as a man

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the enormously popular Little Prince, was an avid pilot who died flying a P-38 Lightning on a reconnaissance mission near Marseille in 1944 during WWII. His almost lyrical autobiographical account, Wind, Sand and Stars, tells in heart soaring words the pure and life-giving love he had for flying. A man of moods and an incurable romantic, he wrote about the camaraderie between fellow flyers:

“Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together.” 

Marco flying past Gina

The pain and sorrow, guilt and shame cleaved together and made Marco enter a self-imposed exile. Cynical, tough but living with the constant awareness of his culpability, he chooses to live on a beautiful but isolated little island where he can be free to fly, a love he shares with Saint-Exupery, making his living by chasing down sky-pirates and rescuing kidnapped school girls (a uproarious scene that’s pure Miyazaki magic). It is a life style that affords him liberty but it also renders his life at a standstill. 

The kidnap victims having a great time with the incompetent pirates

He would often visit the Hotel Adriano, perched on a small island with beautiful gardens, where his old friend Gina is. It is his safe harbor and where his heart is, where he returns to reminisce, perhaps in spite of himself, the halcyon days of their shared youth and to search for a time and a life he deemed lost. Gina, who has great love and affection for Marco, is indulgently frustrated at Marco’s reluctance to allow her to get closer to him. Hence the situation is at an impasse.

Marco's island home

The peripeteia comes by the entrance of the American ace Donald Curtis, hired by the local pirates to deal with Marco, who has been destroying their plots one by one. Curtis, a boyish romantic, is instantly mesmerized by Gina’s beauty. Taking down Marco to him now represented three birds with one stone, to get paid, to become famous for beating the top flyer in the Adriatic, and to impress the uninterested Gina. 

After an encounter, Marco required some major repairs to his plane. He goes to his old pal and mechanic Piccolo, only to find that all his sons have left to find work in a post-depression Italy and the one that would be responsible for his plane will be his 17 year old granddaughter Fio, who ended up flying with him as his on board engineer whose presence catalyses the final chapter and instrumentalised Marco’s metamorphosis.

The Piccolos looking over the new designs

The film's exhibiting the power of the female - feminism blossomed as result of the war

Miyazaki has a history of utilizing strong female characters who have the strength of character and resolute will to forge their own ways against the vicissitudes of life and forces of oppression and strangle-hold of convention or tradition. Creations like princess Nausicaa in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to San in Princess Mononoke and recently Nahoko in The Wind Rises all bear out this pattern. Gina, who managed to wrap the unruly sky-pirates around her little finger and in particular Fio, are more such example. 

Fio is prodigious young engineer who single-mindedly loves designing flying machines but who at the same time bears all the sweet innocence of youth and beginning to show the blooming of her femininity. She is a marvelous creation who naturally establishes feminine and moral principles without at all being pretentious, didactic or overbearing and at the same time makes a very attractive duo with the taciturn and gruffly male Marco. Her entering the world of clumsy, scheming (but likeable - one gang is known as 'Mamaaiuto', or 'Mama, help!') sky-pirates with their petty vendettas and enmity towards Marco is like a Spring breeze gushing into a stultified, stagnant, smoke-filled hovel. 

In one scene, having being surrounded by the pirates, who ambushed Marco at his home and were about to destroy his newly-repaired plane, Fio’s pure innocence, frankness, friendliness and the simplicity of her assured morals surround her like an impenetrable carapace and in one hilarious swoop, turns the tables and wins the pirates to her side. Curtis, the incurable romantic, fresh from having Gina refuse his marriage proposal, falls for Fio and asks for her hand. Fio then offered herself as the prize – Curtis is to have a duel with Marco for her but if he should lose, Curtis has to pay for the rest of Marco’s repair bills. The pirates, always ready for a buck, makes the duel into an event where the two flying aces will fight it out in the cerulean battleground for love. Fio represents all that is good in life. Youth, innocence, intelligence, hard work and kindness. She is the future Marco had wished for and what he would protect at all costs and so fights with all his skills and determination in a dramatic final sequence.

The artistry is amazing as would be expected of Studio Ghibli. The exquisite beauty of the hand-painted backdrops of the Mediterranean in all her glory is something sadly going out of vogue. But in film like Porco Rosso we can marvel in what it can achieve. Somehow it seems to me that the technique and style of Ghibli, much influenced by Miyazaki’s personal rounded elegance, is at its best when painting the veil of Italy. The ability to capture light, clouds and infusing movement and weight into the tiniest of action are astounding as is the painstaking attention to minuscule details. 

Gina's garden

There are beautiful extended scenes of flight that’s purely joyous to behold. While Miyazaki returns to the theme of flight in his wonderful and serious swan song, The Wind Rises, due to the political and historical background, the double-distilled feeling of freedom and elation of flight is better expressed in this semi-fantasy take. 

The music by Joe Hisaishi, Miyazaki’s longtime partner and a maestro, is perfect. The theme of Marco and Gina in particular is gut-wrenchingly moving. The changes in tones from comedy to action to somber reflection is so well controlled by his scores and each piece is more than simply adequate but always profound.

Hotel Adriano

The ending of this film leaves a degree of ambiguity. Did Marco, in the end, finally rid himself of the curse? A sweeping melodrama capturing a momentous time and the love, hate, hopes and dreams of a generation of people caught in the vice of shifting epochs and mutating values, Porco Rosso is a masterpiece of cinema bathed in the slightly melancholic and sepia light of wistful reflection, of youth, adventures and love. It is a story that allows you to complete the final chapter and imbue in it your fondest wishes.