風立ちぬ

風立ちぬ [DVD]

The movie is finally available on DVD. I saw the movie first time at a theater and was surprised that it was very honest of Yahao Miyazaki, the director of this movie to make such a "shocking" work. I think it would be easy for him to expect what people who watched the movie might think, but he confessed very egoistic parts of his own character in it. The main character Jiro is an alias of nobody other than Hayao, no doubt. You can see it easily as you see the movie.
What impressed me strongly was the very positive behavior of Jiro and his colleagues. Working on the first purely domestic plane with great efforts to catch up with those advanced countries, they had trials and errors a lot of times. It is very essential to try and error to accumulate the basic knowledge to achieve great works of course, but I was surprised to what extend he described that process in detail.
There are many scenes I remember well. The first is when Jiro and Mr. Honjo is working at night on a new design of their plane in a room during their visit in Germany. They have seen completed German planes to be shocked and greatly inspired by that. They enthusiastically exchange their ideas smoking amazingly a lot filling an ash tray up to make a small mountain on it with ash. I think the scene is very realistic. Another is when their team get duralumin imported, and they find it very light weighted. Jiro, Mr. Honjo, their boss and other engineers gather and they start observing very closely on it. Interest and persistence to material, design or parts themselves is very essential for creating really good product. I felt that the episode reminded me of the very important lesson.