Miyazaki Marathon Day 5: Porco Rosso

Name: Porco Rosso
Type: Movie
Rating: Any Age
Runtime: 93 min
Directed By Miyazaki Hayao
Produced By Studio Ghibli
Year Produced: 1992

The To Aru Kagaku no Home Theater Miyazaki Marathon... and then some... continues, despite public protest!

This is a "festival" where I sit down at spend about a week and a half watching all of the Miyazaki movies that I want to.  I didn't mention this last time, but I don't have any particular interest in Ponyo.

What's still to come are:

Saturday - Whisper of the Heart (1995)
Sunday - Princess Mononoke (1997)
Monday of Next Week - Spirited Away (2001)
Tuesday of Next Week - Howl's Moving Castle (2004)


I've already reviewed Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki's Delivery Service, so if you're interested in that, then check it out... back there.


During the golden age of bi-wing airplanes, the sky is filled with pirates using sea planes to raid local commercial vessels.  In all this rather peaceful time, there are those who fly the skies tracking down and recovering stolen cargo; Bounty Hunters.
Among all of these fliers, there is one name that every pilot in the Adriatic knows; Porco Rosso, the flying pig.

 ... What?!

... Yes, you heard me correctly, I said pig.

Keeping the local skies safe from all of the pirates, Porco Rosso has made quite a name for himself, and earned himself a lot of fans and enemies, namely these guys...

Don't look very happy, do they?  Well that's correct, but now they've gone and hired an American to come and fight with Porco.  His name is Curtis, and he speaks very good Japanese and French... but not Italian... this again.

Now not only are they rivals in the sky, but also for the love of Gina, a singer at a club and another local legend.  "Every pilot in the Adriatic is in love with Gina".

Probably the best one out of the set that I've watched so far (not including Princess Mononoke).  It was funny and had action, anime dogfights!  Always fun to watch, though they can get kind of confusing if you don't know what's going on, but since in my past experience I have done a lot of research on military tactics, I was set (don't worry, it doesn't get that complicated).

Again, Miyazaki's love of things that fly comes back, this time making a staring role, though the naturalist/environmentalist theme was tuned way down again, possibly nonexistent in this one.
There was probably a humanitarian message in there if you were hypersensitive, but I'm not, so I couldn't tell you.

The music was pretty good, a couple of anthems and some other stuff.  There was also a solo that Gina did in the beginning, but I'm kind of adverse to older French songs.  A lot of vibrato and always depressing.

The Japanese version is the one that I stuck with, though the English one surprised me.  Actually, I've noticed that movies (namely Miyazaki movies because that's all I've seen) tend to have a better selection of English voice actors, so the English versions aren't bad.

Maybe it was the better quality that I found in this download, but the animation definitely looked better, a lot smoother, and it might have been a forced reaction to the abundance of action scenes in this movie.

Porco Rosso MegaUpload
- I'm sorry, but I couldn't find this all in one place.  For some reason, people haven't gotten around to ripping it in any kind of quality in one piece (it comes in parts everywhere though), so I had to find this by web searching it...
... So I'm sorry to whoever uploaded this, but good job, man!  French, Japanese, and English, damn!

Coming up next!

Day 6: Whisper of the Heart!