Miyazaki in the time of cherries: Retrospective resonances in two European songs from Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013)

Anderson, Nick

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132423 Copy

Description

Title

Miyazaki in the time of cherries: Retrospective resonances in two European songs from Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013)

Author(s)

Anderson, Nick

Issue Date

2025-10-22

Keyword(s)

• Music
• Studio Ghibli
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Porco Rosso
• The Wind Rises
• Hauntology
• Europe

Abstract

Hayao Miyazaki’s two films set in the interbellum, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises, are remarkably similar aside from their temporal setting: both are suffused with anti-war sentiment, their protagonists closely resemble the director himself, and they present the Studio Ghibli catalog’s most indulgent celebrations of Miyazaki’s obsession with aircraft. In this paper, I discuss the role of diegetic song as a vital mechanism in forming a transcontinental symbolic network across these films. I focus on two scenes that, I argue, function as hauntological expressions of pacifism, Miyazaki’s foundational political stance. In Porco, the chanteuse Gina performs “Le Temps des Cerises,” a tune from 1866 often associated with the Paris Commune; in The Wind Rises we hear a rousing chorus from “Das Gibt’s Nur Einmal,” made famous by Lilian Harvey in Der Kongreß Tanzt (1931). These melancholic melodies operate as a resonant nexus, exemplifying and affording us access to a web of thematic interconnections that spans multiple dimensions, from the specific films to Miyazaki’s artistic project as a whole to broadly recognizable Japanese tropes. I identify retrospection as a complex and fundamental thread here, as these deployments of song move beyond merely indexing a nostalgic atmosphere and point toward a retrofuturist sensibility. As I unravel the associative networks that Miyazaki has sonically developed, I demonstrate that this pair of scenes strikingly illustrates how musical crossings of borders and eras can produce cinematic hauntologies.

Series/Report Name or Number

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, volume 6 issue 1

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

Articles

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v6.2125

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2025 Nick Anderson
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0).

Owning Collections