There is a specific kind of magic that happens every May; a shift in the light that feels nostalgic and expectant. To celebrate this season of transition, I am launching May-Azaki, a deep dive into the works of Studio Ghibli. Shall we say one review per week? Let’s start with my favourite Ghibli film, Porco Rosso.
I remember the first time I sat down to watch it. I expected a whimsical romp about a bounty-hunting pig in a bright red plane; the kind of high-flying adventure Miyazaki is famous for. But as the jazz-infused score by Joe Hisaishi began to swell and I watched Marco Pagot lounge on a beach chair, a radio playing soft Italian tunes while he ignored a ringing telephone, I realized I wasn’t watching a children’s movie. I was watching a film about a mid-life crisis.
Porco Rosso is a curious outlier in the Ghibli canon. While Spirited Away captures the liminal space of childhood and Princess Mononoke tackles the grand scale of environmental war, Porco Rosso is unashamedly adult. It is a seinen meditation masquerading as a Saturday morning serial. Set against the backdrop of the Adriatic Sea during the interwar years, it captures a world suspended between the trauma of the Great War and the encroaching shadow of a second one.
At the centre of it all is Marco, or “Porco”, a man who has quite literally “made a pig of himself.” For years, I viewed his porcine features as a simple fairy-tale curse. Now, I see it as a shield. Marco is a man who has looked at the rise of fascism, the loss of his brothers-in-arms, and the corruption of his beloved aviation, and decided that he no longer wants to belong to the human race. “Better a pig than a Fascist,” he famously grunts, and in that one line, Miyazaki elevates the film from a fantasy to a political and personal manifesto.
This month, as we kick off May-Azaki, I want to peel back the layers of this scarlet-painted masterpiece. Porco Rosso isn’t just about the thrill of the dogfight; it’s about the burden of being the one who survived, the difficulty of accepting love when you no longer recognise your own face, and the defiant beauty of flying solo in a world that is trying to force everyone into a uniform.
There’s a lot to talk about.
To understand Marco Pagot’s transformation, we’ve got to understand the air he breathes; the thick, stagnant atmosphere of 1930s Italy. The Adriatic of Porco Rosso is not a playground; it is a region held in the tightening grip of the Partito Nazionale Fascista. While the film drapes itself in the sun-drenched blues of the Mediterranean, the… “pigness” of our protagonist acts as a stark, grey anchor to reality.
Marco’s transformation into Porco is never fully explained by a witch’s hex or a magical artifact, and that is entirely the point. In the Ghibli universe, physical form is often a reflection of spiritual state. Marco has “made a pig of himself” because he has reached a point of total disillusionment with the human race. Having witnessed the Great War turn his friends into ghosts and his country into a nationalist machine, he chooses to defect not just from the Air Force, but from humanity itself.
The most iconic line in the film, “Better a pig than a Fascist”, is more than a witty retort to his old friend Ferrarin. It is a moral boundary. By donning the snout, Marco escapes the expectations of the state. A man can be drafted, a man can be forced to march, and a man can be made to salute a flag he no longer believes in. But a pig? A pig is an outcast. A pig is just a pig. By embracing his bestial form, Marco finds a perverse kind of freedom. He becomes a mercenary who operates on a personal code of chivalry rather than a nationalistic agenda.
However, this self-imposed exile is a double-edged sword. While his transformation protects him from the corruption of the state, it also acts as a wall between him and those who love him. He uses his face as a reason to stay in the shadows of the Hotel Adriano’s garden, or tucked away in his hidden cove. It is a profound exploration of cynicism as a defence mechanism. Marco is so afraid of being hurt by human cruelty again that he chooses to forfeit his humanity altogether.
Miyazaki challenges us to look at our own snouts. We all have ways of withdrawing when the world becomes too loud or too dark. We tell ourselves we are staying pure by opting out, but Porco Rosso asks a difficult question: Is it enough to simply not be a fascist, or does a life of total isolation eventually turn into its own kind of prison? Marco may have escaped the uniform, but in doing so, he nearly lost the ability to look a friend in the eye.
If the first half of the film explores why Marco grounded his soul in the form of a pig, the second half explains what happened to him in the sky. In most Miyazaki films, flight is an expression of pure, unadulterated joy; a literal lifting of the spirit. But in Porco Rosso, the sky is a graveyard.
The emotional centrepiece of the movie is the ghost plane sequence, a dreamlike flashback that Marco recounts to Fio. He describes a dogfight during the Great War where, after losing consciousness, he finds himself floating above a sea of white mist. There, he sees a shimmering, ethereal ribbon stretching across the heavens. As he watches, the planes of his friends and his enemies alike – all those he saw fall in battle – ascend silently to join this endless, celestial procession.
This theology of flight is one of the most hauntingly beautiful depictions of death ever put to film. The ribbon is a milky way of silver wings, a silent march of the dead that is indifferent to the politics of the world below. For Marco, this wasn’t just a vision; it was a trauma. He watched his best friend, freshly married to Gina, fly up into that light while he was left behind, tethered to the earth by his own survival.
This scene transforms Marco’s story from a simple political protest into a profound study of survivor’s guilt. He doesn’t just hate the Fascists; he hates himself for being the one who didn’t ascend. Every time he takes to the air in his red Savoia S.21, he isn’t just flying for money or sport; he is flying in the shadow of those ghosts. The red of his plane, often seen as a colour of passion or aggression, begins to look more like a memorial, a defiant splash of blood against the indifferent blue of the Adriatic.
Through this lens, the act of flying becomes a religious experience for Marco. He is a fallen pilot in every sense of the word. He loves the machine, the smell of the oil, the vibration of the engine, the physics of the lift, but he fears the destination. By staying in the air but refusing to join the procession, Marco lives in a state of purgatory. It takes the mechanical genius and pure-hearted optimism of Fio to remind him that a plane isn’t just a hearse for dead heroes; it can also be a vessel for the living.
While the men (and pigs) in Porco Rosso are busy posturing, dogfighting, and chasing ghosts, the film’s emotional gravity is held entirely by its women. They are the ones who ground Marco, serving as the two different paths he might take: one rooted in the tragic beauty of the past, the other in the unwritten promise of the future.
Madame Gina is the personification of the bygone days. Every time Marco’s plane circles the Hotel Adriano, he is circling his own history. Gina is grace, patience, and sorrow personified. She has lost three husbands to the sea and the sky, yet she remains a lighthouse in the Adriatic. Her private garden, a lush, walled-off sanctuary, represents a world that Marco isn’t ready to re-enter. To love Gina is to return to being Marco Pagot, the man, and to face the grief of everyone they both lost. Their relationship is a masterclass in the unsaid; it is written in the way she looks at him from her balcony and the way he refuses to land his plane in her waters during the day.
On the other side of the cockpit is Fio Piccolo. If Gina is the sunset, Fio is the dawn. A seventeen-year-old engineering prodigy, Fio doesn’t carry the weight of the Great War. She isn’t interested in Marco’s pigness or his self-pity; she is interested in the curve of his wings and the horsepower of his engine. Fio represents a shift in Miyazaki’s world; the idea that the next generation can look at the monsters created by the past and still see the human underneath.
Through Fio, the film explores love as a form of work and belief. She doesn’t wait for Marco to change; she forces him to participate in his own life by making him responsible for her safety. She drags him out of his cynical isolation and back into the light of a workshop. While Gina offers him a place to rest, Fio offers him a reason to keep flying. It is this tension between the comfort of nostalgia and the challenge of the future that eventually begins to crack the curse Marco has built around his own heart.
The climax of Porco Rosso is not a grand aerial victory, but a messy, exhausting fistfight in the mud. It is undignified, painful, and deeply human. By the time the dust settles, the curse has become a secondary concern to the exhaustion of survival. But it’s the final moments of the film, the kiss and the quick, blurred glimpse of a man, that leave the most lasting impression on the viewer.
Miyazaki famously refuses to give us a clear, lingering shot of Marco’s restored human face. We see it only through the eyes of others: Fio’s sudden gasp, Curtis’s bewildered double-take, and a fleeting silhouette in the cockpit. By denying the audience a happily-ever-after reveal, the film tells us that Marco’s face was never the point. The curse was a state of mind, a physical manifestation of his refusal to engage with a broken world. Once he regains his will to protect something, and once he realises that Gina is still waiting for him, the snout becomes unnecessary.
The ending is a masterpiece of ambiguity. We see Fio, all grown up, taking over the Piccolo engineering firm, and we see Gina’s garden from the air. There is a red plane docked at her private pier, suggesting that Marco finally landed in her world. But Miyazaki leaves the details to our imagination. Why? Because the Adriatic of the 1930s is still heading toward the fire of World War II. There are no permanent escapes in history.
The reflection here is about the nature of change. We often wait for a magic moment or a grand apology from the universe to fix our lives, but Porco Rosso posits that redemption is quieter. It’s found in the decision to stop hiding. Whether Marco is a pig or a man in the final scene is irrelevant; what matters is that he is no longer a ghost. He has returned to the world of the living, acknowledging that while the sky may be a graveyard, the earth is still a place where gardens can grow.
Porco Rosso leaves us with a lingering sense of mono no aware (物の哀れ); the beauty of the impermanent. It is a film that acknowledges that the world can be ugly, political, and cruel, but it also reminds us that there is still honour in a well-tuned engine and a loyal heart.
Marco Pagot is perhaps the most human character Ghibli has ever produced, precisely because he spent most of the movie trying not to be one. I suppose that even when we feel like outcasts, even when we’ve “made pigs of ourselves” through cynicism or regret, there is always a path back to the garden. You just have to be brave enough to land the plane.