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Review: The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ) (2013)
This was a romantic film. I knew very little about this movie going on, only that it was based on a real Japanese engineer. What I mean by romantic is that the movie was meant to invoke emotion, both inspirational and heartwrenching.
Given the war backdrop of the movie, if the goal of the movie was to somewhat detach the movie from any of those ill feelings and only lean into the personal and loving stories, then I think the movie fulfilled that goal. However, I couldn't help but keep wondering how much of the movie was in fact true to history.
After doing some reading, it seems that much of the movie was fictionalized, as I had suspected. But again, given that it was based on a war backdrop, the question of portrayal kept popping up in my mind, considering the fact that Horikoshi Jiro had designed a fighter jet.
But I'll discuss this all under the cut. If you only consider this as fiction, I think it was a decent movie. The love story felt a little forced at times, but it was 1000% a top notch animation movie, as we can always expect from Miyazaki Hayao and Studio Ghibli. It's just that the story was not the most convincing to me this time because it was more tied with actual history.
Spoilers.
Story
This movie covered the life of Horikoshi Jiro from youth to his completion of a fighter jet that could reach high speeds. In his youth, Jiro was obsessed with planes. His inspiration was Caproni, an Italian aeronautical engineer who often appeared to him in his dreams with encouragement.
Jiro met a young girl during an earthquake and helped her to safety. Though they didn't exchange names, they would remember each other forever, and this was planting the seed for their future reunion.
After studying at university, Jiro went to Nagoya to work with Mitsubishi. They were trying to get an army contract for their planes. Unfortunately, they did not get the contract, but life went on.
Jiro and his friend Honjo Kiro went to Germany (the Weimar Republic) to take a look at the planes there. The Japanese were having trouble engineering planes with metal and they wanted to know more about German engineering. Afterwards, Jiro was told by his company to travel further to learn more, though we did not see this in the film.
Jiro went to a resort where he bumped into the young girl, now a young woman, called Satomi Nahoko, who was there with her father. They fell in love and Jiro proposed to her. As a response, she told him that she had tuberculosis and wanted to get better before they got married.
Jiro began to get busier from this point on, as Mitsubishi was trying to win another contract. This time, as chief engineer, he could put to practice the ideas he'd been building up until then.
Simultaneously, Nahoko's condition was worsening. Jiro had once took a very frantic trip to see her after he found out she'd had a lung hemorrhage. Nahoko then admitted herself to a sanatorium.
At this point, the movie became much more of a love story. After time spent at the sanatorium, Nahoko decided to make the journey to see Jiro. She figured that her days were numbered and she wanted to spend them with Jiro. They got married right then and there, under the supervision of Jiro's boss Kurokawa and his wife.
Jiro was pretty busy at work and Nahoko spent much of her time resting. Jiro's sister, a medical intern, was upset that she wasn't getting the care that she needed, but what she didn't see was that Jiro and Nahoko had basically come to an unspoken agreement that they would stay together as long as Nahoko could bear it.
On the day that Jiro's plane was finally going to be demonstrated, Nahoko told Mrs. Kurokawa that she was feeling better and went out for a walk. I thought that maybe she was going to make it out to the demonstration but in reality, she was returning to the sanatorium, and had wanted to leave Jiro with a positive impression of her.
In the end, Jiro's plane successfully reached their goal. However, in a dream sequence with Caproni, he found out that Nahoko had died. There was also a bit of regret on Jiro's side that his planes would be used not for passengers but for fighting.
So one problem I had with the movie from a narrative standpoint was its change from being about planes to being about love. I think it was possibly a mistake to combine these two stories. Miyazaki was inspired by the story of Hori Tatsuo, whose novel was about spending time with his fiancee at the sanatorium. However, Jiro's story was supposed to be about his breakthrough in the field of aeronautics and not his heartbreaking romance. I just felt that these two stories elicited very different emotional responses and that they didn't mesh well. Perhaps the story was supposed to ask us "he achieved engineering feats, but at what cost?" If that was the case, maybe the romance story should have come much earlier. In my opinion, if Miyazaki was going to fictionalize Jiro's love life anyway, I would have gone with a story that was a bit simpler, and again started earlier. It's just that towards the end I felt that the love story overshadowed the planes story when it never had before. I think it would have made more sense to show how love fueled Jiro as a whole from earlier on. I don't think Nahoko necessarily had to be as important to Jiro as aeronautics as that would not be true to Jiro, but I think there should have been some other way to show how Nahoko's death would have affected Jiro more. I know there was that implicit agreement, but show me that this means something to Jiro.
Actually the name of Hori Tatsuo's autobiography was "The Wind Has Risen," so actually the recurring line about wind was related much more to this romantic story line than Jiro's story line about aeronautics, which definitely surprised me.
The other thing that was iffy was the war backdrop. Based on a quick google I think there was some controversy about it but I don't know the full details as I'm not familiar with Japanese history.
That being said, I do think the film kind of brushed over the war quite a bit. Other than Nahoko's home being destroyed, we didn't really see what war meant to Japan. (And in this scenario, it seemed clear that Nahoko was from a wealthy family so it wasn't a huge blow to her).
I read the Wikipedia section regarding controversy on this movie. And I understand the sentiment that at the time, this plane was one of the innovations that Japanese people could feel proud of. I guess it just so happened that it was used for war, and that was why the war context was explored but not in so much detail in the movie. But not being Japanese, it's hard to say what feelings this is supposed to cause.
So overall, the story was okay at moments, but as a whole it wasn't the most cohesive.
Production
TERRIFIC animation. Apparently this was supposed to be Miyazaki Hayao's last film, but Wikipedia tells me he's planning something this year. Artists never quit, huh.
Anyway, this movie was such a feast for the eyes. Here is just a list of things that I loved about the animation.
- Great aerial shots, important in a movie about airplanes.
- Cool use blurry vs. sharp animation to show Jiro's vision (he has poor eyesight and needs glasses).
- Refractions through Jiro's glasses so that his eyes look a little funny when we look at him from an angle.
- Mirage on the train tracks due to the heat.
- Rustling of clothes, seen in basically every Studio Ghibli film.
- Breathing and waiting time, how people breathe when the fall asleep.
- Small quirks in motions like tripping when walking.
- Honjo shaking his leg while working.
- Body language of all the characters, including a worker at the resort when he leaned on one leg to look out the door on a rainy day.
- Special effects like propeller rotations and lighting.
I don't know if the clothes are historically accurate but they were definitely very cute.
I will say one thing that bothered me was that I didn't think the original Japanese voice actor for adult Horikoshi Jiro was particularly charming. He had somewhat of a wooden delivery at times.
Characters
Horikoshi Jiro
Jiro was our main character, obsessed with aviation from a young age, going so far as to sit with a dictionary to read English magazines about aviation. I read an article that suggested that this was fictional to show us Jiro's passion for aeronautics, when in truth he appeared to only have been interested after university.
In the movie, aeronautics was portrayed as Jiro's first and greatest love. His inspiration came to him in the form of Caproni. He was good at his job too, having been labelled a genius when he went to Mitsubishi.
In his dreams, he was inspired to create a passenger plane. I don't know if this is true, or if it was only meant to portray Jiro as a more sympathetic character than one who purposely created a fighter jet. In this movie, his goal was mostly to create planes that would go a certain speed.
I felt that Jiro's relationship with Nahoko was a bit...detached. She was important to him but it was clear that Jiro's first priority was his planes. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he seemed to be able to forget Nahoko very easily. It didn't really seem like he ever thought of Nahoko unless Nahoko did something. He never longed for her, only having thought of her when Kinu visited him at the school, or when her father called him. So that's why the love story part of the movie didn't really move me.
Even in the end, his only farewell to Nahoko was through his dreams.
Satomi Nahoko
Nahoko was the love interest. She first met Jiro in an earthquake, in which Jiro helped him and her family maid Kinu. They shared intellectual interests, but did not keep in touch after the ruckus of the earthquake.
Later on, Kinu had dropped off Jiro's things at the school, but Jiro had missed her. Jiro had told Kayo about her but otherwise I think he accepted that they would be forever a loose end.
Jiro met Nahoko again at the resort. We got a hint about Nahoko's identity when Jiro caught her parasol and she said "good catch," a callback to what Jiro had said when Nahoko had caught his hat all those years.
Nahoko had recognized Jiro off screen. It wasn't really explained, except she said that he hadn't changed. Over the course of their stay at the resort, they got to know each other, but we already saw hints of Nahoko's poor health. Though Jiro proposed to her, Nahoko revealed that she wanted to get better before marrying. An odd thing was that this proposal and reveal had happened on the stairs at the resort, hardly a private area.
Nahoko's health only got worse. I think it also appeared that way because Jiro only really saw her when she was in rather poor health. So he wasn't with her on her better days, but he was there when she had a lung hemorrhage.
Nahoko decided to check herself into a sanatorium to get better. But part way through, I think she felt it was too difficult to be away with Jiro, and that she would rather be with him to the end of her days than to wait for forever. So she made the long trek in the winter snow to see Jiro.
Apparently Nahoko's father had given the blessing for their marriage, so they got married under the supervision of Kurokawa and his wife. From then on, she and Jiro lived with the Kurokawa family.
Again, we didn't really see the deterioration of Nahoko's health. She seemed to be in similar health on the days we saw her. We were only told that she was ailing quite badly by Kayo. Again, maybe it was meant to be that way to see Jiro's side of the story. But it did little to sway Jiro.
As I mentioned, there was that unspoken agreement between Jiro and Nahoko that this was what they would do.
On a particularly happy day, when Jiro was to see his new creation being demonstrated, Nahoko left to go back to the sanatorium. As Mrs. Kurokawa said, she wanted to leave Jiro with a positive impression of her.
Nahoko was implied to have died off screen. Which again showed how Nahoko was not as important to Jiro as his planes. But she made such sacrifices for Nahoko. I just wished we got a little bit more acknowledgment from Jiro.
Horikoshi Kayo
Kayo was Jiro's younger sister. Given that Jiro means second son, I'm assuming they have an older brother too, but he never showed up in the movie.
Kayo and Jiro had a good relationship, though he was more bookish and she was chatty. She had big dreams to be a doctor but had trouble convincing their father because she was a girl, so Jiro helped her out.
The next time we saw her, she was already a doctor intern. That was after Jiro and Nahoko's wedding, in which she was there to visit on behalf of the family.
Kayo and Nahoko got along very well but honestly the way that it was portrayed in the movie felt kind of forced. The way they talked about it, they became besties immediately, but it was kind of hard to imagine because they had such different temperaments and also because we never actually saw them interacting.
Anyway, Kayo was upset at Jiro because he wasn't looking after Nahoko's health, and Kayo just knew that Nahoko needed more medical attention. But again, that agreement between Jiro and Nahoko.
It was Kayo who saw Nahoko walking back to the sanatorium and alerted Mrs. Kurokawa. While she wanted to stop Nahoko from leaving, Mrs. Kurokawa understood her intentions and stopped her.
Giovanni Battista Caproni
Caproni was not a real character in this movie, just a figment of Jiro's imagination and his inspiration.
Caproni was the one who convinced Jiro to be an aeronautical engineer. Jiro had dreams of being a pilot but he could not due to his eyesight, but Caproni convinced him that there was still a way to be involved with planes.
Caproni showed Jiro his dreams of building passenger planes, which became Jiro's distant dream as well. Later, a plane that Caproni showed Jiro inspired the look of his newer planes.
Caproni "retired" at the end of the movie which was a bit odd, as I don't know if that was necessary. It's not like Jiro was never going to design planes ever again (nothing in the movie implied that). He was also the one who revealed that Nahoko was not with Jiro anymore, now in the dream world.
So while Caproni was Jiro's inspiration, he was also somewhat of his internal conscience I guess.
Honjo Kiro
Honjo was Jiro's friend from their years in university. He later went to work with Jiro at Mitsubishi as well.
Honjo was one of the engineers who went to Germany with Jiro. I think Honjo was a way for Jiro to show his ideas. We knew that Honjo had a wife, having gotten married shortly before the trip to Germany.
Jiro wanted to include Honjo on his project, the last one of the movie, but Kurokawa had shot that down, saying that they would lose their friendship. So Honjo worked on another project, though still at Mitsubishi.
Jiro had given Honjo's plans for certain engineering features, but out of respect, Honjo said he would not use them until Jiro did first. However, later on, Honjo asked Jiro if he could use them, as he was working on a project in which alterations were limited and possibly only Jiro's engineering ideas could work.
Hattori
Hattori was the chief at Mitsubishi. He was basically supposed to be the wise upper executive who saw Jiro's genius and was the contrast to Kurokawa's more frenetic energy.
Kurokawa
Kurokawa was Jiro's superior and as I mentioned, he was definitely a lot more frenetic. The kind of guy to always find things to complain about, but he clearly liked Jiro and respected him.
Dr. Junkers
Dr. Junkers was a German engineer that we saw very briefly. When Jiro and Honjo wanted to take a look at a plane, they were stopped by Germany officers. However, in the distance, Dr. Junkers had called over the officer and told him to let the Japanese engineers take a look. It was something of a camaraderie between engineers, I suppose.
The last we heard of him was from Castorp, a man that Jiro met at the resort. He mentioned that Dr. Junkers was in trouble for opposing Hitler's government.
Themes
Patriotism and development
There were definitely strong patriotism themes in this movie, as Jiro's invention was meant to be a proud moment in Japanese innovation.
Jiro's younger years, he was always thinking about how behind Japan was. He pointed out how ironic it was that oxen were used to pull the aircrafts to the testing locations.
It kind of got on Honjo's nerves at times as Jiro's observations on Japan's current level of development seemed like he was denigrating the country and its people and praising foreign countries. I think Jiro was meant to be portrayed as just making an observation and always looking for a way to catch up.
That being said, I think the entire movie very much had an undercurrent of "we are doing this all for the country." All the planes were designed with Japanese flags.
War
As mentioned, the war parts of the movie were pretty light. At first, our only interaction with war was simply just that the military wanted better planes.
We got a better glimpse of it when Jiro went to Germany. It highlighted the relations between different countries. Even though Germany and Japan were technically allies in WWII, clearly there it wasn't like they were friends or anything.
We were alerted to things starting to get worse when we found out that Dr. Junkers was in trouble. And I guess the movie ended with the Japanese having Jiro's new plane.
Overall
As I said, this was a great film in terms of animation, but the story didn't really come together for me.
Given the war backdrop of the movie, if the goal of the movie was to somewhat detach the movie from any of those ill feelings and only lean into the personal and loving stories, then I think the movie fulfilled that goal. However, I couldn't help but keep wondering how much of the movie was in fact true to history.
After doing some reading, it seems that much of the movie was fictionalized, as I had suspected. But again, given that it was based on a war backdrop, the question of portrayal kept popping up in my mind, considering the fact that Horikoshi Jiro had designed a fighter jet.
But I'll discuss this all under the cut. If you only consider this as fiction, I think it was a decent movie. The love story felt a little forced at times, but it was 1000% a top notch animation movie, as we can always expect from Miyazaki Hayao and Studio Ghibli. It's just that the story was not the most convincing to me this time because it was more tied with actual history.
Spoilers.
Story
This movie covered the life of Horikoshi Jiro from youth to his completion of a fighter jet that could reach high speeds. In his youth, Jiro was obsessed with planes. His inspiration was Caproni, an Italian aeronautical engineer who often appeared to him in his dreams with encouragement.
Jiro met a young girl during an earthquake and helped her to safety. Though they didn't exchange names, they would remember each other forever, and this was planting the seed for their future reunion.
After studying at university, Jiro went to Nagoya to work with Mitsubishi. They were trying to get an army contract for their planes. Unfortunately, they did not get the contract, but life went on.
Jiro and his friend Honjo Kiro went to Germany (the Weimar Republic) to take a look at the planes there. The Japanese were having trouble engineering planes with metal and they wanted to know more about German engineering. Afterwards, Jiro was told by his company to travel further to learn more, though we did not see this in the film.
Jiro went to a resort where he bumped into the young girl, now a young woman, called Satomi Nahoko, who was there with her father. They fell in love and Jiro proposed to her. As a response, she told him that she had tuberculosis and wanted to get better before they got married.
Jiro began to get busier from this point on, as Mitsubishi was trying to win another contract. This time, as chief engineer, he could put to practice the ideas he'd been building up until then.
Simultaneously, Nahoko's condition was worsening. Jiro had once took a very frantic trip to see her after he found out she'd had a lung hemorrhage. Nahoko then admitted herself to a sanatorium.
At this point, the movie became much more of a love story. After time spent at the sanatorium, Nahoko decided to make the journey to see Jiro. She figured that her days were numbered and she wanted to spend them with Jiro. They got married right then and there, under the supervision of Jiro's boss Kurokawa and his wife.
Jiro was pretty busy at work and Nahoko spent much of her time resting. Jiro's sister, a medical intern, was upset that she wasn't getting the care that she needed, but what she didn't see was that Jiro and Nahoko had basically come to an unspoken agreement that they would stay together as long as Nahoko could bear it.
On the day that Jiro's plane was finally going to be demonstrated, Nahoko told Mrs. Kurokawa that she was feeling better and went out for a walk. I thought that maybe she was going to make it out to the demonstration but in reality, she was returning to the sanatorium, and had wanted to leave Jiro with a positive impression of her.
In the end, Jiro's plane successfully reached their goal. However, in a dream sequence with Caproni, he found out that Nahoko had died. There was also a bit of regret on Jiro's side that his planes would be used not for passengers but for fighting.
So one problem I had with the movie from a narrative standpoint was its change from being about planes to being about love. I think it was possibly a mistake to combine these two stories. Miyazaki was inspired by the story of Hori Tatsuo, whose novel was about spending time with his fiancee at the sanatorium. However, Jiro's story was supposed to be about his breakthrough in the field of aeronautics and not his heartbreaking romance. I just felt that these two stories elicited very different emotional responses and that they didn't mesh well. Perhaps the story was supposed to ask us "he achieved engineering feats, but at what cost?" If that was the case, maybe the romance story should have come much earlier. In my opinion, if Miyazaki was going to fictionalize Jiro's love life anyway, I would have gone with a story that was a bit simpler, and again started earlier. It's just that towards the end I felt that the love story overshadowed the planes story when it never had before. I think it would have made more sense to show how love fueled Jiro as a whole from earlier on. I don't think Nahoko necessarily had to be as important to Jiro as aeronautics as that would not be true to Jiro, but I think there should have been some other way to show how Nahoko's death would have affected Jiro more. I know there was that implicit agreement, but show me that this means something to Jiro.
Actually the name of Hori Tatsuo's autobiography was "The Wind Has Risen," so actually the recurring line about wind was related much more to this romantic story line than Jiro's story line about aeronautics, which definitely surprised me.
The other thing that was iffy was the war backdrop. Based on a quick google I think there was some controversy about it but I don't know the full details as I'm not familiar with Japanese history.
That being said, I do think the film kind of brushed over the war quite a bit. Other than Nahoko's home being destroyed, we didn't really see what war meant to Japan. (And in this scenario, it seemed clear that Nahoko was from a wealthy family so it wasn't a huge blow to her).
I read the Wikipedia section regarding controversy on this movie. And I understand the sentiment that at the time, this plane was one of the innovations that Japanese people could feel proud of. I guess it just so happened that it was used for war, and that was why the war context was explored but not in so much detail in the movie. But not being Japanese, it's hard to say what feelings this is supposed to cause.
So overall, the story was okay at moments, but as a whole it wasn't the most cohesive.
Production
TERRIFIC animation. Apparently this was supposed to be Miyazaki Hayao's last film, but Wikipedia tells me he's planning something this year. Artists never quit, huh.
Anyway, this movie was such a feast for the eyes. Here is just a list of things that I loved about the animation.
- Great aerial shots, important in a movie about airplanes.
- Cool use blurry vs. sharp animation to show Jiro's vision (he has poor eyesight and needs glasses).
- Refractions through Jiro's glasses so that his eyes look a little funny when we look at him from an angle.
- Mirage on the train tracks due to the heat.
- Rustling of clothes, seen in basically every Studio Ghibli film.
- Breathing and waiting time, how people breathe when the fall asleep.
- Small quirks in motions like tripping when walking.
- Honjo shaking his leg while working.
- Body language of all the characters, including a worker at the resort when he leaned on one leg to look out the door on a rainy day.
- Special effects like propeller rotations and lighting.
I don't know if the clothes are historically accurate but they were definitely very cute.
I will say one thing that bothered me was that I didn't think the original Japanese voice actor for adult Horikoshi Jiro was particularly charming. He had somewhat of a wooden delivery at times.
Characters
Horikoshi Jiro
Jiro was our main character, obsessed with aviation from a young age, going so far as to sit with a dictionary to read English magazines about aviation. I read an article that suggested that this was fictional to show us Jiro's passion for aeronautics, when in truth he appeared to only have been interested after university.
In the movie, aeronautics was portrayed as Jiro's first and greatest love. His inspiration came to him in the form of Caproni. He was good at his job too, having been labelled a genius when he went to Mitsubishi.
In his dreams, he was inspired to create a passenger plane. I don't know if this is true, or if it was only meant to portray Jiro as a more sympathetic character than one who purposely created a fighter jet. In this movie, his goal was mostly to create planes that would go a certain speed.
I felt that Jiro's relationship with Nahoko was a bit...detached. She was important to him but it was clear that Jiro's first priority was his planes. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he seemed to be able to forget Nahoko very easily. It didn't really seem like he ever thought of Nahoko unless Nahoko did something. He never longed for her, only having thought of her when Kinu visited him at the school, or when her father called him. So that's why the love story part of the movie didn't really move me.
Even in the end, his only farewell to Nahoko was through his dreams.
Satomi Nahoko
Nahoko was the love interest. She first met Jiro in an earthquake, in which Jiro helped him and her family maid Kinu. They shared intellectual interests, but did not keep in touch after the ruckus of the earthquake.
Later on, Kinu had dropped off Jiro's things at the school, but Jiro had missed her. Jiro had told Kayo about her but otherwise I think he accepted that they would be forever a loose end.
Jiro met Nahoko again at the resort. We got a hint about Nahoko's identity when Jiro caught her parasol and she said "good catch," a callback to what Jiro had said when Nahoko had caught his hat all those years.
Nahoko had recognized Jiro off screen. It wasn't really explained, except she said that he hadn't changed. Over the course of their stay at the resort, they got to know each other, but we already saw hints of Nahoko's poor health. Though Jiro proposed to her, Nahoko revealed that she wanted to get better before marrying. An odd thing was that this proposal and reveal had happened on the stairs at the resort, hardly a private area.
Nahoko's health only got worse. I think it also appeared that way because Jiro only really saw her when she was in rather poor health. So he wasn't with her on her better days, but he was there when she had a lung hemorrhage.
Nahoko decided to check herself into a sanatorium to get better. But part way through, I think she felt it was too difficult to be away with Jiro, and that she would rather be with him to the end of her days than to wait for forever. So she made the long trek in the winter snow to see Jiro.
Apparently Nahoko's father had given the blessing for their marriage, so they got married under the supervision of Kurokawa and his wife. From then on, she and Jiro lived with the Kurokawa family.
Again, we didn't really see the deterioration of Nahoko's health. She seemed to be in similar health on the days we saw her. We were only told that she was ailing quite badly by Kayo. Again, maybe it was meant to be that way to see Jiro's side of the story. But it did little to sway Jiro.
As I mentioned, there was that unspoken agreement between Jiro and Nahoko that this was what they would do.
On a particularly happy day, when Jiro was to see his new creation being demonstrated, Nahoko left to go back to the sanatorium. As Mrs. Kurokawa said, she wanted to leave Jiro with a positive impression of her.
Nahoko was implied to have died off screen. Which again showed how Nahoko was not as important to Jiro as his planes. But she made such sacrifices for Nahoko. I just wished we got a little bit more acknowledgment from Jiro.
Horikoshi Kayo
Kayo was Jiro's younger sister. Given that Jiro means second son, I'm assuming they have an older brother too, but he never showed up in the movie.
Kayo and Jiro had a good relationship, though he was more bookish and she was chatty. She had big dreams to be a doctor but had trouble convincing their father because she was a girl, so Jiro helped her out.
The next time we saw her, she was already a doctor intern. That was after Jiro and Nahoko's wedding, in which she was there to visit on behalf of the family.
Kayo and Nahoko got along very well but honestly the way that it was portrayed in the movie felt kind of forced. The way they talked about it, they became besties immediately, but it was kind of hard to imagine because they had such different temperaments and also because we never actually saw them interacting.
Anyway, Kayo was upset at Jiro because he wasn't looking after Nahoko's health, and Kayo just knew that Nahoko needed more medical attention. But again, that agreement between Jiro and Nahoko.
It was Kayo who saw Nahoko walking back to the sanatorium and alerted Mrs. Kurokawa. While she wanted to stop Nahoko from leaving, Mrs. Kurokawa understood her intentions and stopped her.
Giovanni Battista Caproni
Caproni was not a real character in this movie, just a figment of Jiro's imagination and his inspiration.
Caproni was the one who convinced Jiro to be an aeronautical engineer. Jiro had dreams of being a pilot but he could not due to his eyesight, but Caproni convinced him that there was still a way to be involved with planes.
Caproni showed Jiro his dreams of building passenger planes, which became Jiro's distant dream as well. Later, a plane that Caproni showed Jiro inspired the look of his newer planes.
Caproni "retired" at the end of the movie which was a bit odd, as I don't know if that was necessary. It's not like Jiro was never going to design planes ever again (nothing in the movie implied that). He was also the one who revealed that Nahoko was not with Jiro anymore, now in the dream world.
So while Caproni was Jiro's inspiration, he was also somewhat of his internal conscience I guess.
Honjo Kiro
Honjo was Jiro's friend from their years in university. He later went to work with Jiro at Mitsubishi as well.
Honjo was one of the engineers who went to Germany with Jiro. I think Honjo was a way for Jiro to show his ideas. We knew that Honjo had a wife, having gotten married shortly before the trip to Germany.
Jiro wanted to include Honjo on his project, the last one of the movie, but Kurokawa had shot that down, saying that they would lose their friendship. So Honjo worked on another project, though still at Mitsubishi.
Jiro had given Honjo's plans for certain engineering features, but out of respect, Honjo said he would not use them until Jiro did first. However, later on, Honjo asked Jiro if he could use them, as he was working on a project in which alterations were limited and possibly only Jiro's engineering ideas could work.
Hattori
Hattori was the chief at Mitsubishi. He was basically supposed to be the wise upper executive who saw Jiro's genius and was the contrast to Kurokawa's more frenetic energy.
Kurokawa
Kurokawa was Jiro's superior and as I mentioned, he was definitely a lot more frenetic. The kind of guy to always find things to complain about, but he clearly liked Jiro and respected him.
Dr. Junkers
Dr. Junkers was a German engineer that we saw very briefly. When Jiro and Honjo wanted to take a look at a plane, they were stopped by Germany officers. However, in the distance, Dr. Junkers had called over the officer and told him to let the Japanese engineers take a look. It was something of a camaraderie between engineers, I suppose.
The last we heard of him was from Castorp, a man that Jiro met at the resort. He mentioned that Dr. Junkers was in trouble for opposing Hitler's government.
Themes
Patriotism and development
There were definitely strong patriotism themes in this movie, as Jiro's invention was meant to be a proud moment in Japanese innovation.
Jiro's younger years, he was always thinking about how behind Japan was. He pointed out how ironic it was that oxen were used to pull the aircrafts to the testing locations.
It kind of got on Honjo's nerves at times as Jiro's observations on Japan's current level of development seemed like he was denigrating the country and its people and praising foreign countries. I think Jiro was meant to be portrayed as just making an observation and always looking for a way to catch up.
That being said, I think the entire movie very much had an undercurrent of "we are doing this all for the country." All the planes were designed with Japanese flags.
War
As mentioned, the war parts of the movie were pretty light. At first, our only interaction with war was simply just that the military wanted better planes.
We got a better glimpse of it when Jiro went to Germany. It highlighted the relations between different countries. Even though Germany and Japan were technically allies in WWII, clearly there it wasn't like they were friends or anything.
We were alerted to things starting to get worse when we found out that Dr. Junkers was in trouble. And I guess the movie ended with the Japanese having Jiro's new plane.
Overall
As I said, this was a great film in terms of animation, but the story didn't really come together for me.