Despite featuring multiple dogfights, a fascist government, pirates, pursuit by the secret police, an economic depression, and what is surely cinema’s longest fist fight, Porco Rosso might be the Miyazaki movie in which the least happens. If I try to distill this movie into “a plot,” I come up with the following series of events:
Porco is a bounty hunter who thwarts air pirates. We witness him rescue some school girls being held for ransom (though it’s clear the girls were never in any serious danger).
The air pirates hire a hotshot American named Donald Curtis to defeat him.
Donald Curtis defeats him.
Porco fixes his plane and comes back for round two.
This time, he wins.
The end.
Now I am doing this summary partly to demonstrate what I mean when I say not much happens. What’s at stake in the on-screen conflicts in this movie is pretty low, because everybody’s broke, except for the American. All the planes are held together with a wish and a prayer. The appearances of the air pirates, as they threaten to kidnap and steal, are greeted by their victims as entertainment. Porco and Curtis like each other fine; they are friends by the end of the movie. The face of the fascist government is an old friend of Porco’s, a guy who goes along to get along, and who helps out his friend in a pinch without being asked.
But I’m also doing it because the most basic thing about this movie, the thing that anybody will tell you about the movie, is not in there, because it is not directly related to any of the movie’s events. That is: Porco has a pig’s head.1 He didn’t always have one. He used to have a normal human head and went by “Marco.” Now it is a pig’s and he goes by “Porco.” Despite being asked, explicitly, how he came to have a pig’s head, Porco doesn’t answer. He tells a story that we can infer has something to do with it, about how he almost died in World War I and witnessed other pilots, including a friend, being taken up toward an afterlife that might have been heaven and might have been hell. It would be in keeping with the tone of the movie, though, for his story to be entirely unrelated. Porco Rosso is the story of how he regains his human face, but this regaining is done in an almost by-the-way fashion and we do not see it happen.2
This non-relationship between the movie’s most salient qualities (pig head) and the events it contains is part of the magic of Porco Rosso. Actually, “non-relationship” isn’t quite right. There is a relationship. It’s just not causal. Situated as it is between the World Wars, the movie takes place in a slightly unreal Italy in which the conditions for disaster are in place but the ultimate disaster hasn’t occurred. Things are going to get worse; for now, people are getting by. The conflicts that are put front and center aren’t serious because everybody knows they are living between cataclysms. The serious thing is coming. When, who, what—nobody knows that part.
Porco already knows he doesn’t want to be in the next war. He doesn’t want to be in the future, so he doesn’t fit into the present. What he does want to do is fly—even though skills like his, and planes like his, are meant for war. So the thing he loves the most is linked in a way he can’t undo with what he does not want to do again. Porco has lost his place in the world.
As a rule I’m not a big fan of narrative ambiguity, particularly in movies. Movies that end by asking you what really happened, if it was all just a dream—annoying. Movies that end the split second before resolution—annoying. Of course, not every movie that chooses ambiguity is annoying; but when it is, I experience such ambiguity as a refusal to make an artistic decision, rather than making one.
On the other hand, I like stories that offer you “givens,” such as: this guy has a pig head. Why, how—that’s not our business. He just has a pig head. If you want to go any further you’ll just have to accept it. Porco Rosso has both the given of Porco’s condition and an “ambiguous” ending where what has happened can be put together (Porco has become human and is now with Gina) but will not be depicted on screen. Both work.
Part of what it means for Porco’s pig-headedness to be a given rather than ambiguously caused is that there is no obvious “answer” you can arrive at about what is going on. There are different ways to understand it—including a refusal to assign it any meaning at all. Is Porco a pig, spiritually speaking? Is that what his transformation means? He’s selfish, so sure, that could be part of it.3 On the other hand, it’s strongly implied his last “human” action was offering to die in the place of a friend. His quip “better a pig than a fascist” also implies there’s something noble about his status. Another possibility: maybe he looks like a pig because he’s not a pig (spiritually speaking). He’s a man with a conscience in an amoral time; nobody’s shocked by his appearance, but he can’t disguise himself as a normal person or hide in a crowd.4
I prefer to understand Porco’s curse as the kind of thing that happens to people who unexpectedly trespass on divinity. Your hand withers, you go blind, your face ceases to be a human face. Having briefly seen beyond the veil, Porco exiles himself from humanity, and lives on an island where he spends his days drinking and napping until he has a job to do. A question for him is if he wants to stay this way or not: other people (well, women) wish for him to be restored to full humanity, but does he? Is he resigned to being a pig-headed man or is this in some weird way how he’s happiest?
All of these possible ways of understanding Porco Rosso seem plausible to me, even if I have my own preferences, and even if they contradict each other. Miyazaki has made Porco a pig out of an artistic intuition that has meaning and creates meaning but which does not need to be explained. What he has created is a story about a guy who thinks it’s impossible for him to live a human life anymore. Then he asks: what would convince somebody who felt that way, and felt that way for good reasons, that he might be wrong? And if he changed his mind, because somebody forced him to see things he was refusing to see, would it matter?
In 1998, Miyazaki released the first part of Tigers Covered With Mud, a manga adaptation of a memoir by Otto Carius. Who was Otto Carius? Well, he was a Nazi. The line among fans, as far as I can tell, is that he did this because he’s a “military otaku,” i.e., obsessed with things like tanks and planes. (Miyazaki even traveled to visit Carius and show him the comic.) I find that easy to believe. I’m not bringing this up to be like #HayaoMiyazakiIsOverParty.
No, I’m mentioning this here because the characters in Tigers Covered With Mud are all pigs (example on this page). This decision must be some private joke or commentary about Porco Rosso, particularly given the images in the credits in which all the soldiers are pigs. But I have no idea what that comment could be.In this post I just had to assume that anybody reading it has seen the movie. Apologies if you haven’t seen the movie. Go see it.
The afterlife scene reminded me a lot of End of Evangelion.
The scene where the schoolgirls are escaping from the air pirates and one tells the pirates not to worry because they’re all on the swim team is so funny. The whole sequence is funny, but that bit in particular… just perfect.
Also love the sequence when all the women come to work on the plane. Honestly there is so much in this movie! I love it!
The poster for Curtis’s movie is amazing.
Gina is an interesting type for Miyazaki—the clearly adult woman who also isn’t a matron (or a crone). Fujiko is an earlier version. Kushana is close. The fashion designer in Kiki is another one, though we don’t really get to know her.… I tend to like these characters of his because there’s something a little bit uncomfortable about them. They don’t quite fit into his systems and they provide some interesting friction.
On that note: Gina has three dead husbands… awful lot of dead husbands.
There is one aspect of this movie that doesn’t really work for me—during the unending fist fight Curtis says to Porco that he has to choose Fio or Gina, he can’t have both. Is there any point at which Fio feels like an actual romantic prospect? Maybe she envisions herself as such. In any case this bit felt like the movie’s one false note to me.
People actually say that he’s turned into a pig but I don’t see little hooves or a little curly tail so I’m calling it a shoulders-up transition only.
Despite the line about it being “our secret” I think it’s not ambiguous what happens.
In English “pig-headed” is an idiom that means “stubborn,” but I don’t know if that’s true in Japanese. (I do think there’s a small joke here about “when pigs fly.”)
When his fascist friend warns Porco that the government is going to try to assassinate him, he’s watching a movie about a villainous aviator pig, which suggests Porco has become a stock bad guy in government propaganda.
I always thought the reason he turned into a pig was fairly clear. (Imho:) he felt like a pig because he was guilty he survived the war and his friends didn't. He felt like that so badly that he became it. Things like that can happen sometimes.
"I prefer to understand Porco’s curse as the kind of thing that happens to people who unexpectedly trespass on divinity. "
I don't know if Miyazaki is the kind to be that consistent in his semiotics, but that would certainly fit in with the pig transformations in Spirited Away. There, the transformation signifies both trespass and greed, its straight out the Odyssey. Which...now that I think about it, is a pretty interesting parallel to Porco Rosso, being the story of a man who's trapped in a sort of supernatural purgatory after a war and can't seem to figure out how to come home again.
But if the greed thing is true (big if), the question becomes, what is Porco greedy for? And the answer seems to be...nothing bad in itself. He wants his friends back, he wants to be able to fly freely through the skies. But that's basically wishing to be back in the war, and wishing for that, even for benevolent reasons, is maybe a sort of sin worthy of transfiguration.
So Porco can't let go of the war, because as awful as it was, it was a beautiful transcendent thing for him, and that's the source of his curse. It matches for me with the general nostalgia Miyazaki has for WWII. I said it before, but to me the most interesting thing about him is that he deeply feels the beauty and transcendental spirit behind industrialization, even as he knows it only ends one way (bad). Its like his famous quote: "Today, all of humanity's dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams." That sounds like Porco Rosso, doesn't it?
This might also explain the "you have to choose" line from Curtis. Its not about choosing a romantic partner, its about how the decision to travel around with a talented young mechanic means you haven't really given up your aspirations of flying and will never settle down for the woman who is waiting for you to come home. And Gina is my favorite Miyazaki woman who is not herself the protagonist, she's portrayed with such a palpable sadness you can really feel the inner life spilling out of every frame she's on screen.