The casual pace of life and easy camaraderie amongst citizens will be shattered by politics. In a few years, seaplanes will no longer rule the skies (They never did, of course, but you’re convinced by Miyazaki that they did.), and much of the landscape will soon be pockmarked by bomb craters.

More than anything, Porco Rosso is an elegy. It looks like a tangible Italy, beautiful but dilapidated. The port towns and island villas are not cultural hodgepodges-a Roman arch here, Spanish terra cotta roofs there, signs in German and French-as they are in some of Miyazaki’s other European excursions. The hillsides are impossibly green, the water impossibly blue. Half of Porco Rosso is spent in the sky, and this bird’s-eye view of the Mediterranean boggles the mind. Another day, another band of pirates to round up for hard cash. When a phone ring rudely awakens him, he answers it with world-weary humor. At least, his face has a snout and his ears are pointy. He’s the Ace of the Adriatic, a decorated war hero of World War I who makes his living as a bounty hunter. Here’s our hero, Porco Rosso (Crimson Pig). A man dozes in a chair, shaded by a weather-beaten umbrella, face covered by aforementioned magazine, feet resting on a table that holds a half-empty bottle of red wine. A sleek, gorgeous red seaplane floats on the shore. A thin slit between the 30-foot-tall rock provides the only way in and out, short of dropping onto the beach by parachute. The first shot shows us a beach hidden in the interior of an island, surrounded by sheer cliffside that encircles the little beach. In fact, it’s nostalgia for a world that almost existed. The world is so well-rendered that you accept Porco Rosso is a construction of our actual past.

The filmmaker has grafted England’s 17th- and 18th-century pirate folktales and sea shanties into post-WWI Italy. All the pilots, pirate or not, fly seaplanes everyone’s inextricably linked to both ocean and air.

Evidently, during these days, the skies are ruled by air pirates.

Fascism from Italy is beginning to spread. The Depression has hit the Mediterranean hard. It’s the early 1930s along the Adriatic Sea. Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are so often timeless and allegorical, and seem to take place in such enchanted fairylands that Porco Rosso is a shock.

Porco rosso plane real