Miyazaki in the Time of Cherries: Retrospective Resonances in Two European Songs from <i>Porco Rosso </i>(1992) and <i>The Wind Rises </i>(2013)

Hayao Miyazaki’s two films set in the interbellum, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises, are remarkably similar aside from their temporal setting: both are suffused with anti-war sentiment, their protagonists closely resemble the director himself, and they present the Studio Ghibli catalog’s most indulgent celebrations of Miyazaki’s obsession with aircraft. In this paper, I discuss the role of diegetic song as a vital mechanism in forming a transcontinental symbolic network across these films. I focus on two scenes that, I argue, function as hauntological expressions of pacifism, Miyazaki’s foundational political stance. In Porco, the chanteuse Gina performs “Le Temps des Cerises,” a tune from 1866 often associated with the Paris Commune; in The Wind Rises we hear a rousing chorus from “Das Gibt’s Nur Einmal,” made famous by Lilian Harvey in Der Kongreß Tanzt (1931). These melancholic melodies operate as a resonant nexus, exemplifying and affording us access to a web of thematic interconnections that spans multiple dimensions, from the specific films to Miyazaki’s artistic project as a whole to broadly recognizable Japanese tropes. I identify retrospection as a complex and fundamental thread here, as these deployments of song move beyond merely indexing a nostalgic atmosphere and point toward a retrofuturist sensibility. As I unravel the associative networks that Miyazaki has sonically developed, I demonstrate that this pair of scenes strikingly illustrates how musical crossings of borders and eras can produce cinematic hauntologies.