Porco Rosso (1992)

Original title: 紅の豚, Kurenai no Buta

A somewhat different Italy, though still one ruled by the fascists, between the wars. An anthropomorphic pig and genius pilot usually known as Porco Rosso, not a friend of the fascists, lives half in hiding on an Adriatic island, working as a bounty hunter fighting against the local tribes of pretty goofy sky pirates. Porco is a bit of a standoffish guy, but then, he hasn’t always been a pig person but has been turned into one through some sort of curse or spell, and this sort of thing does tend to make guy a bit reticent. Add to that his experience in World War I, and that the handful of friends who survived it have been dying like flies in the last couple of years or went fascist, and you can see where he’s coming from. There’s also a tragic romance between him and a nightclub singer.

Anyway, his pursuits in the sky have angered the various groups of sky pirates so much, they have hired American ace pilot Curtis – a guy of dubious morals dreaming of a film career as a stepping stone to becoming president of the US – to get rid of Porco for good. Curtis does manage to ambush Porco when our hero is on his way to Milan for repairs and nearly destroys his plane completely. Porco does manage to make his way to Milan and the old mechanic friend he knows there eventually. His old friend tasks his seventeen year old granddaughter Fiona with doing the design and leading the improvement work, something the not exactly feminist Porco at first isn’t terribly happy about – until he sees Fiona’s work and slowly begins to appreciate the young woman’s character too. Together, they might even survive a rematch with Curtis.

Usually, Porco Rosso is treated as one of the odd pigs out among Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli films, so much so that I haven’t even been bothering with the film at all before he went up on Netflix. That turns out to have been rather a large mistake, though, for while the film at hand might not have quite the emotional drawing power of a Spirited Away, it is very much a film filled with the joy of a director playing with many things he is particular enthuasistic about. In this case, these enthusiasms are centred on planes and the Golden Age of Aviation (though the film is actually set rather late for this particular love), and old Hollywood. There is a surprising amount of Casablanca in here, but also quite a few moments that reminded me of the Marx Brothers and Howard Hawks. Miyazaki definitely shares Hawks’s appreciation for professionals doing professional work, but not so typical of Hawks (though not unheard of in that man’s films either), the best demonstrations of this in the film concern women working – Fiona reconstructing Porco’s plane in scenes that suggest what kind of woman this particular late teen will grow up into, and the female members of her family (the men are all gone somewhere else in hopes of paying work) doing the actual manual labour involved.


There’s a sense of delicate melancholy and a bit of a quietly tragic world view hidden away in the movie too, not the chest-beating variety of youth but a calm, accepting one that comes from a certain experience of life and what it entails. It’s not all melancholy, of course, for there’s also a lot of slapstick concerning the very funny pirates, more little lovely side gags than you can shake a pig sticker at, and an aeroplane and adventure plot that glows with enthusiasm, Miyazaki creating a sibling of the tone of his Lupin III films in those scenes.