“Better a pig than a fascist.” This line, one of Hayao Miyazaki’s finest, first appeared in his 1992 film Porco Rosso. Yet the line reappeared last summer in Tunis, on signs protesting the visit of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-right populist leader whose Brothers of Italy party traces its roots to the Movimento Sociale Italiano, established by Mussolini supporters. A spokesman for the NGO Sea-Watch repeated the line soon thereafter, in an editorial decrying the Meloni regime’s violent treatment of North African immigrants.

Italy’s right-wing press decried the quote. “Taken out of context,” Miyazaki’s line “sounds just like profanity in church,” declared the Machiavelli Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a pro-Meloni think tank. Miyazaki is “one of the greatest figures in world cinema,” they argued, and should not be “reduced to an empty slogan of the Italian Left.” Moreover, the Machiavelli pundits declared, Porco Rosso “is about veterans who refuse a return to normalcy.” Porco Rosso “is an authentic and profound homage … to Italy and Italian aviation,” the Center continued, “of which [Miyazaki] is passionate and a fine connoisseur.” Indeed, Miyazaki’s “universal values” resembled traditional Italian values: “Courage, sense of duty and sacrifice, love of family, nature, history, justice and freedom.”

Porco Rosso is not about veterans who refuse to return to normalcy, not really. Instead, it is about a fighter pilot who, shaken by the horrors of World War I, curses himself with a pig’s face and opts to live alone. He becomes a bounty hunter in the Adriatic into which the Italian military has begun to push in 1929, when the film is set. About Italian fascism itself, Porco Rosso says nothing more than its famous line. Still, the noir-cum-cartoon sensibility with which the pilot Rosso stays aloof from humanity, lest he succumb to the fascism that increasingly defines it, seems to tell us all we need to know about Miyazaki’s take on the world from which he is in flight.

In fact, it does not. American audiences accustomed to anodyne descriptions of the beloved director’s “pacificism” and “environmentalism” might expect him to be as stalwartly against fascism as he is, say, war. And no doubt he is against both. But however apparently addressed to children, Miyazaki’s films are often disquietingly equivocal in their politics. And, in fact, these films have been fascinated by Italian and Japanese fascism in surprisingly complex, self-implicating ways.

In this spirit, let’s credit the Machiavelli Center: Porco Rosso is indeed an homage to Italian aviation. As was Miyazaki’s career as a whole: the director wanted “to blow a new wind through the anime industry” when in 1985 he cofounded Studio Ghibli, named after an Italian plane used to assist Mussolini’s imperialist adventures in North Africa. Dubbed “the Ghibli”—from an Italian word with Libyan Arabic roots, meaning “hot desert wind”—the aircraft was designed by Giovanni Battista Caproni, who, almost three decades later in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013), plays muse to a Japanese engineer designing Zero fighters for the Imperial war effort.

The name comes home in Porco Rosso, after a fashion, when our intrepid pig installs in his plane a glistening new engine stamped with the word GHIBLI. Inspiration returned, with a difference: if Studio Ghibli took off with an assist from Caproni, Porco Rosso enlists its lead pilot against the fascism that Caproni’s real-world aircraft abetted.

But this clever gesture does not fully convey how insistently Miyazaki has revisited his debt less to Caproni’s aesthetics than to the capital-intensive modernization that led to Japanese fascism. The director’s remarkable last two films, Wind and The Boy and the Heron (2023), revisit that debt in a confessional key and communicate a newfound unease with the magical means by which, Miyazaki appears now to believe, he has sought to evade its full implications.

Flying has been the beating heart of Miyazaki’s Ghibli magic. Handheld gliders made from insect parts, spinning tops, a living catbus, Da Vinci–like prosthetic wings, broomsticks, propellered chariots, sinewy dragons, black blobs with X-wings, humanoid birds of prey, leviathan dirigible gunships, levitating castles: we have soared above the director’s mesmerizing worlds on the miraculous wings of these fantastical devices and beings. “A moving perspective that incorporates a sense of space,” Miyazaki wrote in 1980, “that creates a sense of liberation, and that makes our souls want to greet the wind, the clouds, and the beautiful earth we see unfolding far below—these are the wonderful scenes and machines I dream of someday depicting.”

It is a dream he fully realized. “The world is so beautiful!” cries a young mechanic as she and Rosso barrel roll over the lakes of Northern Italy. Few directors, animators or not, have produced as many moments of heart-stopping aerial delight. Which is not to say Miyazaki’s flights are only delightful. Witness the reverently solemn sequence in Rosso when, near death after a dogfight, Rosso breaks silently through a white cloud canopy and sees a ghostly contrail snaking across the sky, bearing heavenward many thousand dead. He tries to join, but the world has other plans.

Affective complexities attend Miyazaki’s flights of fancy, even as they induce childlike wonder. His extended wings often drift downward into darkness. Historical monstrosities seethe beneath his magical bestiaries, just as the specter of military aircraft haunts his most whimsical flying contraptions. Porco Rosso may feature a man becoming an animal to avoid becoming a fascist, but more common in Miyazaki’s films are fantastical creatures that allegorize fascists: roiling jet-black globules serving Germanic wizards in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), or paramilitary parakeets in The Boy and the Heron (2023).

Miyazaki’s tonally complex, incipiently political relation to flight comes to a head in The Wind Rises. The 2013 film focuses on famed engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Imperial Navy fighter planes, the Zero in particular, which Miyazaki has said “represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of—they were a truly formidable presence.” He elsewhere added, “Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan”; “He wasn’t thinking about weapons—really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.” Such statements generated critical backlash. But although the film is indeed besotted with its gorgeous war machines, Wind is deeply equivocal when seeming to idealize them.

Wind does not entirely exonerate Jiro, who does briefly think about weapons. “Who are they going to bomb with it?” he asks a fellow engineer about his bomber. The answer: “China. Russia. Britain. The Netherlands. America.” In distress, it seems, Jiro responds, “Japan will blow up.” The engineer reassures, “We’re not arms merchants. We just want to build good aircraft.” Jiro remains silent, and it’s entirely unclear how the film wants us to feel about his moral blinker.

Miyazaki’s own father was, in his son’s eyes, a thoughtless man who leveraged Japan’s militarization to personal advantage. “A man who professed that he didn’t want to go to war, [and] yet profited from the war,” his father headed “the Miyazaki Airplane factory,” in which capacity he bribed officials to look the other way when delivering defective parts produced by unskilled workers. Jiro cannot but evoke this looming presence, though he does so with a telling difference. Like The Boy after it, Wind revisits the young life of one of the director’s parents, in this case his father, who is made over into everything Miyazaki’s actual father was not and everything, one feels, Miyazaki himself aspires to be.

Wind is the most painterly of Miyazaki’s films, and possibly the most indulgently lovely. But it is a thoughtful loveliness that asks if a warplane’s beauty might, somehow, exist apart from the lethal function for which that plane is designed. The answer to that question bears immediately on Miyazaki’s art. The animator’s craft and military aircraft: the analogy is all but explicit, and its implications, Wind suggests, extend beyond either Miyazaki’s family history or this particular film’s depiction of the Japanese war effort. “Ever since I was a child,” Miyazaki admitted in 1980, I “have been a fan of military planes, warships, and tanks.” He still liked them, and wanted “to continue drawing them,” but “resolved not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power.” Thirty-three years later, he is unsure about that fine line.

The issue at stake is bigger than the director’s complicity in the depiction of military hardware. Wind forces us to look at Miyazaki’s other films anew, and how they have deployed modernist industrial design on the one hand and magic on the other to tell stories about the long process of Japanese modernization.

It is surely meaningful that Wind is the only one of Miyazaki’s Ghibli’s films that is entirely devoid of magic, which necessarily assumes pointed significance in the film’s final exchange. Here, Giovanni Caproni comes to Jiro in his dreams. “A masterful design,” the engineer compliments him. “Not a single one returned,” Jiro replies, as we cut to a version of the ghostly contrail from Porco Rosso. Caproni has the final words: “There was nothing to return to. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.”

Tellingly, in this vision, the beautiful and the cursed are interchangeable. For the great animator, aircraft are the pinnacle of mechanical design, but also death-dealing instruments of an incipiently fascist power that, Miyazaki worries, he has spent his life aestheticizing. The film’s final line acknowledges that its own beauty cannot be separated from this dialectic of enlightenment, even as it implicates Miyazaki’s more properly magical flights of fancy. The director’s fantastical fabulations, the film seems to confess, have been less escapes from an historical ugliness than one constitutive expression of it.

When acknowledging his father’s war profiteering, Miyazaki claimed his father’s faults as his own; above all, he thought he had inherited his father’s “lack of concern about embracing contradictions.” But the director’s greatness derives in no small part from his willingness to sit with and even amplify the contradictions that that define his animation. Those contradictions have been historically precise and resonant for Miyazaki’s own craft in ways that might elude American audiences.

Miyazaki’s singular worlds emerge from a deep well of Japanese animation and manga. Yet the origins of both were, according to Eiji Ōtsuka, “an unholy alliance of Disney and Eisenstein under conditions of fascism,” during the 1930s especially, when the Imperial state first promulgated a national policy for film and culture propaganda. And, indeed, anime’s ongoing fascination with Nazi Germany in particular has remained a source of consternation and embarrassment.

But Miyazaki’s films tend to look back further than the genre’s origins in the ’30s. Instead, they consistently return to the Meiji Restoration of 1868–1889. These were years that saw the centuries-long Japanese shogunate give way to a new centralized Imperial order, one that embraced western capital and technological modernization. That new order also sowed the seeds of “Japanism,” which by the 1930s had become a full-blown fascist ideology. And tellingly, for our purposes, that ideology strategically deployed the archaic, historians from Masao Maruyama to Harry Harootunian have noted. This archaism served as a counterweight to the ostensibly foreign technological rationality upon which economic development depended, as well as a mystified origin of the emperor’s timeless authority.

One senses in Miyazaki’s films an awareness that his flights of fancy, his magical displacements, offer similar archaisms. Indeed, the filmmaker has spoken of the “yearning for a lost world” that defines his craft. “Nostalgia is one of the fundamental starting points for most people involved in creating animation,” he has said. And while there are numerous lost origins for which his wistfully melancholy works long, they consistently evoke the Meiji Restoration when staging a specific double bind: the animator, having transformed a lethal modernity into something ancient and even otherworldly, discovers in his magical makeover the very stuff of fascism.

Consider My Neighbor Totoro (1988), which for Phillip E. Wegner offers “a glimpse of a Japan in which the catastrophe of World War II did not occur.” And this, Wegner maintains, is another way of asking, “what if the Meiji revolution did not happen?” After all, it is the Restoration, he argues, that gave rise “to the virulent imperialist nationalism and militarism that ultimately results in the Second World War.”

Hayao Miyazaki’s greatness derives from his willingness to sit with and amplify the contradictions that define his animation.

That is undeniably useful. But it doesn’t make full use of the fact, for example, that the giant camphor tree that houses the cuddly Totoro looms over the film’s lush landscape as if a giant mushroom cloud. Totoro will at one point accelerate the growth of a magical tree that, here too, rises undulating from the ground like an atomic blast. Historical catastrophe is immanent even in this bucolic setting, and it’s worth noting that while “environmentalism” represents, with flight, one of Miyazaki’s great themes, unsullied nature rarely if ever amounts to a simple alternative to industrialization and the long march to fascist disaster.

In Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Miyazaki’s first Ghibli film, the Meiji Restoration marks the origin of a similar double bind. Pazu has spent his young life wanting to vindicate his father’s claim that he once saw a wondrous city appear in the sky. Pazu’s only lead is his dad’s photograph of the city, dated 1868, at the start of the Restoration. Pazu eventually finds the city with his young companion Sheeta, descended from the city’s rulers, and discovers in it a lethal contradiction. Cultural and technical imports are for Miyazaki always entangled: in this case, in the form of Jonathan Swift and miraculous scientific advancements that make the city both an Edenic ectopia and a weapon so powerful that it cannot be trusted to human hands—let alone the vaguely German military power pursuing it.

Decades later, this same version of the Meiji Restoration appears in The Boy and the Heron. Here, the Restoration is the origin story of an equivocal modernization that points once more toward fascism, and is, moreover, an unavoidable family inheritance.

The film takes place in 1944, toward the close of World War II. The “boy” of the title is Mahito Maki and air raids have killed his mother; the boy and his father have moved to the countryside with the mother’s sister Natsuko—now pregnant with the father’s child. After fighting with local schoolboys, the grimly serious Mahito knocks himself on the head with a rock. He begins to hear a heron calling to him in the voice of his mother: “Mahito, save me!” The heron tells him his mother is in a mysterious tower built by his great uncle. When Mahito sees his aunt Natsuko disappear into the woods, headed toward the tower, the boy enters the gloomy building.

Its entrance adorned with a phrase from Dante’s Gate of Hell (“Fecemi la divina potestate,” “a divine power has created me”), the tower is, paradoxically, a passage to the underworld, in which Mahito encounters a younger version of his mother. This underworld also contains the source of the overworld’s power: at its center is a magical rock that “fell from the sky … just before it started the Meiji Revolution.”

This is a version of the miraculous stone that keeps the city Laputa aloft in Miyazaki’s 1986 film, and its powers are just as equivocal: they promise both salvation and ruin. Mahito’s great uncle, we learn, has spent his afterlife apprenticed to the stone. He thinks the “destiny of this world is to be a beautiful gem or an abomination”—and he thinks that, one outcome or another, the stone will show the way. Precipitant of the Restoration, the stone is a mystical pharmakon; modernization as poison and cure, it offers a saving progress while threatening a calamitous ruin—embodied by a parakeet flock that has evolved, because of the stone’s power, into a fascist horde, led by the mock-regal, Mussolini-like “Duch.”

The narrative’s crux involves the great uncle offering Mahito stewardship of the stone and the geometric blocs with which he has ordered and controlled the world. The moment is explicitly political: the parakeets have come to power while the uncle has built his tower. The moment is also intensely personal. Mahito is a young Miyazaki, and the director’s closest friend, Toshio Suzuki, confirms that the great uncle is Isao Takahata, who died during the film’s production. All three together founded Studio Ghibli, whose first production was Laputa and whose last, it would seem, is Boy. Mahito refuses the stewardship because he feels evil in himself and, as he declines, the parakeet Duch sneaks up and slices the blocs in half, destroying the magical stone and, by implication, the studio for which it is an emblem.

Thus does the curse of the Meiji Restoration seem to break. The jackbooted budgies become harmless parakeets again and are released into the countryside, a splash of color in a re-naturalized landscape. The garden is marvelous for being simply what it is—and covered in shit. The parakeets crap profusely (in a private wink, much of it lands on Mahito’s father), but innocently enough. Magic dissipates, and we embrace a messy beauty.

The Boy and the Heron has prepared us for this final embrace. Again and again, the film has suggested the need to release what’s stored inside, emotionally and otherwise, and, in the process, desublimate even contrived notions of beauty. We first see the film’s titular heron as it floats effortlessly downward, the picture frame rising around the great bird’s seemingly still silhouette, marked out against a lush forest background. But over time, the heron transforms, gradually releasing an inner homunculus.

Later, in the underworld, Mahito slice opens the belly of a sea creature whose flesh will nourish souls waiting to be born. “Don’t let out what’s inside!” his instructor bellows, too late, as the creature’s guts spill out and overwhelm the boy. Not all insides are noxious: Natsuko’s child will be born healthy, for example. The point is rather that, ultimately, the film would release itself from the magic with which it disguises its swallowed unpleasant realities.

His mother lost to a firestorm, his father betrothed quickly to his aunt, Mahito spends his days in a bucolic garden that is also a weapons factory. His father’s workers traverse the green, carrying cockpit canopies for fighter planes that will prolong the war that claimed his mother. The heron in its naturalized form itself is an aestheticized warplane, one of its magical feathers transformed by Mahito into an arrow that cannot miss its target. There is no magic stone that can save Mahito from this world—which must be lived.

The Japanese title of The Boy and the Heron—How Do You Live?—is taken from Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 antifascist primer of the same name. The title The Wind Rises is taken from Tatsuo Hori’s The Wind Has Risen, an homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). Different in tone and intended audiences, the two works form a couplet: both published near or at the start of Japan’s brutal incursion into China, they derive their titles from two halves of a single line, from the last stanza of Paul Valéry’s “Graveyard by the Sea” (1922): “The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!”

A rising wind might mean many things—in Wind, it intimates historical calamity as well as the air currents that bear Jiro’s fighters aloft. But in “Graveyard,” the rising wind demands renewed engagement with the world. Contemplating a placid sea, Valéry’s speaker becomes entranced by death, until gusts blow him back to life. It’s unclear how or even if art will matter to that return: “the immense air,” Valéry’s speaker declares, “opens and closes my book.”

Heron’s conclusion is similarly ambiguous. The film depicts a version of Valéry’s cemetery (as well as Yoshino’s novel). And, in his refusal of the magic stone, Mahito seems to enact a version of Valéry’s conclusion: he turns toward life, in all its vitalizing simplicity, rather than seek to control it through art. But a door is left open: art need not control or abet those who do.

What Mohito’s choice means for Miyazaki, now 83, is anybody’s guess. He’s closed his animation book before, only to reopen it. Let’s hope he does so again: the flights we have taken with him have been extraordinary.