#5 Porco Rosso (1992) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[On Cinema] If pigs could fly…

Sorry folks for the hiatus, but we’re back! A bunch of life adjustments as I finished up a temporary stint at The New Republic newsroom and I’m currently in Romania (yes, Romania for tourism, for all my passport control skeptics), but we’re chugging along the silly bus. Big shout out to my new Pucioasa subscribers and everyone who’s just joined~

This week, by persuasion from an impassioned subscriber and ex-roommate, we’re going to discuss the legendary Studio Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki’s historical dreamscape of flying pigs … DUN DUN DUN … Porco Rosso!

If you’d like to watch along, you can watch Porco Rosso for free on Internet Archive.

I grew up watching My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and the likes, but I had never watched Porco Rosso, which is probably one of Studio Ghibli’s less-raved-about and arguably-adult-audience films. It is also Miyazaki’s most obvious nod to history, the film being set in Italy in 1929 (but sensitively released during the Yugoslav Wars). The protagonist is an anthropomorphic pig nicknamed Porco Rosso—“red pig”—who is a renowned ex-World War I fighter pilot, freelance bounty hunter, and so-called womanizer. He flies a characteristically impressive red seaplane, donning dashing aviators, a portly dad-bod figure, and a charismatically aloof cigarette dangling from his snout.

Miyazaki’s signature touch of magical realism is visibly in play here. Porco Rosso was once a handsome human fellow named Marco Pagot. When he was an Italian fighter pilot during World War I, his squadron was ambushed by Austro-Hungarian aircraft. Flying in some ambiguous “cloudy” territory between the living and the afterlife, he witnessed the deaths of his men, including his best friend Bellini who had gotten married two days earlier to glamorous hotel owner Gina. After blacking out, Marco became cursed and forgoes hope in humanity, or as he famously says, “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” We only get glimpses of his human face in rare seconds of vulnerability.

Unlike Miyazaki’s other animated films, Porco Rosso doesn’t build a world, it inhabits the one that the film auteur sees. A Japanese animator imagines a growing Fascist Italy with contrail-patterned Adriatic skies as the ideological battleground. Hollywood and America are foolishly perceived as the next great frontier. Women are heroic and independent, even when doubled as love interests. And Porco Rosso is a pig who’s a ruggedly independent cynic of humanity, talented and good at what he does (making money by doing crazy eights on planes), but incapable of seeing good in himself.

Some reviewers of the film paint Porco Rosso as a fairy tale, but I think it’s far from it. The protagonist is a pretty disinterested antihero (and he accepts it) and there’s no happily ever after for the pig or largely, for Italy’s imminent future. While Porco Rosso must battle it out with his enemies, the most aggravating being an American pilot, he must also weigh what to do with the love triangle he’s caught in the middle of: Gina, the beautifully poised hotel owner who is in love with Porco Rosso, and Fio, the genius, high-energy seventeen-year-old daughter of a mechanic who designs Porco Rosso’s plane.

And yes, the age difference is the elephant in the room, so this journal article by Patrick Drazen explains things a bit further about the sexual innuendos littered not-so-subtly throughout the film. During the duel, the American wanna-be actor-president rival yells at Porco, “You can’t have both [women]!” Porco is taken aback as a man sandwiched between two women he can’t fathom who actually care about him. How often do you get male protagonists visibly admit that they’re unworthy of love?

When Porco tells Fio the story of how he came to be a pig, Fio dreamily tells him that God must have saved him that battle. Porco disagrees: “I thought [God] was telling me to fly on alone, forever … The good guys were the ones who died.” Fio tries to comfort Porco. She goodheartedly believes the “worthy love as transformation” trope of the princess who kisses the frog and the beauty who falls in love with the beast, that a person can be changed if someone can catalyze it. Fio tells him that she thinks he’s a good man and kisses him on the cheek. Only in Miyazaki’s world where women do not need men but men need women, I suppose.

The kiss is supposed to be the ~transformation~ moment, and even though he blushes a bit, Porco remains a pig. And even at the very end of his scheduled duel with an American pilot, Porco is still a pig. Even after he finds out that Gina’s been waiting for Porco all this time in her garden, that Porco is unwilling to accept, not that he has been refused, love all this time, Porco does not magically transform into a human.

Porco Rosso is a fascinating character study of un-cinematic human character. I’m especially conscious not to describe him as “unlikable” because that label is dependent on a supposed universal audience taste. As Shrek aptly put it, onions have layers. But even beyond Porco, the film rests in stagnancy. The two pilots do not kill each other as they’re expected to. We don’t see which of the two women Porco Rosso loves, although we’re left to speculate. It’s a climax that never happens, and an ending that’s purposefully elided.

For this reason, I’m reminded of Jack Halberstam’s seminal work in queer theory, The Queer Art of Failure, which reframes failure as a productive force that resists capitalism and heteronormativity. Halberstam has a chapter on animated films for children that are moved and motivated by instances of failure because that lovely period in queer lives is often stunted—“growing sideways” as Kathryn Bond Stockton refers to it—as opposed to progressing or growing “up.”

Likewise, Porco Rosso in the film doesn’t necessarily transform to be “better.” There is no fairy tale ending of becoming a handsome human fellow, marrying one of his love interests, or some other “happy” ending trope. Instead, it is left ambiguously open. Porco lives in a liminal stage of human—or really, pig—anti-betterment. Even more the film itself is probably part of Studio Ghibli’s lesser-known films in the catalogue, a popularity and commercial audience favorite “failure.”

So imagine what this would all mean if we were to reframe the “failures” of the film, of Porco Rosso remaining a pig who is still wracked with survivor’s guilt and chosen alone-ness, of the duel that is an anticlimactic, non-flying duel, of the women who don’t end up with the pig (as far as we know). Maybe it’s another symptom of Miyazaki’s known resignation for humanity and a testing departure from other Ghibli’s fantastical films, maybe it’s a character study of an unlikely, anti-fandom-appealing protagonist, maybe it’s a scoffing upturned nose on audiences’ fairy tale expectations.

If you’ve watched the movie (or any of Miyazaki’s oeuvre), let me know in the comments your thoughts and what other works can be in conversation with the dashing, misanthropic red pig.

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Additional readings xoxo:

• Sex and the Single Pig: Desire and Flight in “Porco Rosso” by Patrick Draven (2007)

• “‘Porco Rosso’ Is a Fun, Beautiful Movie About a Cartoon Pig” by Lauren O'Neill, Ryan Bassil, and Hannah Ewens (2020)

• Vengeance dir. B.J. Novak (2022)

• The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam