The Best Quotes From The Wind Rises, Every Line Verified

The Wind Rises has a short Wikiquote transcription, and this page does not stretch it: five lines are quotable and sourced, so five lines follow. The transcription does not say which English version it records. It names the heroine Naoko Satomi; Zac Bertschy's Anime News Network review of the 2014 Blu-ray calls her Nahoko, and both spellings appear in English writing about the film. Each line is tied to the scene around it, and the film's last dream is discussed, so this page contains spoilers.

“But, remember this, Japanese boy: airplanes are not tools for war. They're not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.” — Caproni

This is the film's founding promise, and the film breaks it on purpose. Bertschy describes the final dream conversation: Jiro says none of the pilots who flew his plane came back, and Caproni repeats what, in Bertschy's words, he has been saying all along: aviation is a “cursed dream” whose creations are “destined to be used for destruction and slaughter.” The man who said airplanes are not tools for war ends the film conceding that they are and still choosing them. The early line is a young engineer's creed; the late one is the bill for it.

“Life is wonderful, isn't it?” — Naoko Satomi

Her answer to Jiro's “I'd forgotten what rainbows look like,” and the film's weakest exchange. Bertschy calls her long-suffering and completely fictional, a character given nothing to do but get sick and be tragic, and this line is that role at its purest: the woman the film is going to kill exists to remind the hero that life is wonderful. Miyazaki gives Jiro an engineer's specificity throughout and gives Naoko a greeting card. The film's tagline, recorded on Wikiquote as “Ikineba. (We must live.)”, makes the same point with more weight and less sugar.

“Yes. A good place for forgetting. Make a war in China? Forget it. Make a puppet state in Manchuria? Forget it. Quit the League of Nations? Forget it. Make the world your enemy? Forget it. Japan will blow up. Germany will blow up, too.” — Castorp

Castorp sets this up by calling the place “der Zauberberg,” and Jiro catches the reference: The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann. The list does work the film otherwise declines to do. Screen Rant notes that the war is never directly depicted; in the transcription it is Castorp who names its causes aloud, one after another, and the sting is that he is recommending the place as somewhere to forget them. Wikiquote's cast list gives his English voice as Werner Herzog.

“Cigarette? I'm afraid they're Japanese.” — Jiro Horikoshi

An apology for his country's goods, offered by a man who has been sent abroad to catch up with them. CBR has Jiro and his friend Honjo sent to Germany to obtain a production license for a Junkers aircraft after a project goes wrong, and in this same conversation Castorp tells him Dr. Junkers is in trouble. The objection is that this is small talk and should not be read into. Half of that is right: it is small talk. It is also the one moment in the transcript where Jiro sounds like what he is, the representative of a country still licensing other people's designs, in a film whose whole project is the plane that would end the apology.

“The Nazis are a gang of hoodlums.” — Castorp

Blunt enough to sound like hindsight put into a character's mouth. In the scene it is the opposite of hindsight. Jiro has just asked, “He fights Mr. Hitler's government?”, about Dr. Junkers, and Castorp answers in the present tense; later in the same conversation he says Germany must be stopped. The engineer listens and goes back to work. Screen Rant writes that every one of Jiro's milestones carries an underlying dread about what his creations will be used for. In this scene that dread gets a name.

For more Miyazaki, see the Spirited Away quotes and Princess Mononoke quotes, and his most misquoted remark in our Miyazaki fact-check. Verification method, as always, at our notes.