Porco Rosso’s original title in Japanese is Kurenaino Buta, which means Red Pig. Also the Porco Rosso means a red pig in Italian, but it seems a word of insult sense. The leading role character is a man who was forced to be a red pig by magic. This story is based on Miyazaki’s faith that a man should live like this. It’s very romantic and adult oriented animation although it’s OK for kids too.
The dandism of a man, or the mental dandism is probably the theme of this movie. And that was what Miyazaki believed to be beauty of men. When I first saw this one, I remembered the famous movie, Casabranca. But Miyazaki seems to have tried to describe his idol ,Detective Cojack, because the suites and hat of Porco are the same as ones Cojack would wear in the TV series.
Fans know Miyazaki loves the dream of flying in the sky, so in this movie, he set a lot of sky stories in the movie. Story is set just after the 1st world war, and the country is Italy with serious economic recession. But the story has a glory of men to live with hope and dandy cool lifestyle, which is absolutely Miyazaki’s ideal life style. I, as a Japanese, think some of this movie essence is somewhat similar to Japanese Samurai spirit. These aspects are also seen in his works like Lupin, Castle in the sky, or Nausicaa. Some of them have female leading role characters, but they also exude the spirit of Japanese beauty, I think.
This work doesn’t have that depth of the message as much as others like Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke have. But it’s really cool and refreshing when it ends and we can enjoy it thoroughly without any serious minds. But again, the movie is completed on really high standard, the animation is like an art, airplanes are like dreaming fantasy world, and the story is impressive enough to know one of men’s world even if it’s a little different approach from his other social message movies like Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke.
Porco Rosso is more interesting for a fan like me to know Miyazaki’s origin of creation. In that sense, this movie is above all important for me and I’m very glad to have touched a standard human aspect of Miyazaki that standard people like us have as well in this work.
As a reference, I watched this work firstly in the airplane movie, Japan Air Lines Flight. This movie was sponsored by JAL then. In the flight, we could choose a movie among many kinds of variation, but as far as I know, all the people around me there watched Porco Rosso like I chose. I noticed it because everybody around me had the simultaneous reaction with me at the same part of the movie, as you know, in the airplane, we need to put the headset on. But the sound of laughter or applause comes from outside of headset.
That was a very fantastic flight for me.
