The Engineer's Curse
Submitted by lev_lafayette on Mon, 04/19/2021 - 12:21For the third time in the past year I have sat down to watch "The Wind Rises", the fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli, the title derived from a line in Paul Valéry's "The Graveyard by the Sea", "Le vent se lève! Il faut tenter de vivre!" In this tale, Jiro is an engineer who follows his childhood dreams of designing aircraft. However, the setting is imperial Japan in the 1930s and Jiro's employer, Mitsubishi, is under direction to build efficient planes for the purposes of warfare.