Porco rosso

Porco Rosso (紅の豚, Kurenai no buta^?, lit: Crimson Pig) is a Japanese animated film from Studio Ghibli, directed by Hayao Miyazaki in 1992. It is the Miyazaki's fifth production with Studio Ghibli, of which he is a co-founder, and the seventh feature film made by the studio.

The film tells the story of an Italian World War I pilot who for an unknown reason is bewitched and transformed into a pig-like being. In addition, it is seen how the profession of military pilot is replaced by that of bounty hunter that earns him rivalries with the pirates in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. The film later developed a manga that is made up of six volumes and was written by Hayao Miyazaki himself.

Plot

It is the interwar period and Benito Mussolini rules Italy dictatorially. Marco Pagot is an experienced Italian military pilot who, after seeing a colleague die in battle, becomes the victim of a strange spell that makes him look like a pig. Because of this and because he pilots a crimson seaplane he takes the name Porco Rosso, becoming a renowned bounty hunter. Porco loves to thwart pillaging attempts by pirate gangs raiding the Adriatic coast. The pirates, tired of the Porco boycott, decide to fight back by hiring an American adventurer whose goal is to defeat Porco Rosso.

Characters

The following is a brief description of the most prominent characters in the film:

• Porco Rosso (chanting・: your real name is Marco Pagot And it's a war atonement for the Italian Navy. Its mote is because it pilots a carmine-coloured hydroplane (very similar to the Savoia S-21 of the Savoia-Marchetti company) and suffers a curse that gives it the appearance of a right man. He works as a bounty hunter.

• Madame Gina (distinct chanting): famous singer who acts at the Adriano hotel of which he also owns. She's been widowed three times, and all her husbands were pilots. She's in love with Porco Rosso, though she's hiding it.

• Master Piccolo (tax exclusivity): it is the director of the Piccolo hydroplane maintenance workshop in Milan. He used to work with his children, but they were enlisted in the army in the face of the impending war, now the women of the family and neighbors help him.

• Fio Piccolo (wise and persuasive). At her early age she is an expert in mechanics and hydroplane design, and ends up having a special relationship with Porco Rosso.

• Donald Curtis (Connouncer ▪ LINKING) U.S. pilot hired by “air pirates” to end Porco, pilots a hydroplane called “Serpiente de cascabel”. He owes his name in homage to the Curtiss Falcon planes. The plane model Donald Curtis pilots is Curtiss R3C-2 of the American company Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Company and who participated in the series of the Schneider Cup, European speed competition of hydroplanes.

• The band of Mamma Aiuto (disturbing longing): "air breaths" with the mortgaged hydroplane due to its many encounters with Porco.

Production

Porco Rosso was originally planned as a film to be shown on Japan Airlines flights, loosely based on Miyazaki's manga The Age of the Flying Boat (&# 34;The Age of Hydrocanoes"), but the production was overshadowed by the war in Yugoslavia, which ended up giving the film a more serious tone. Although it was originally going to be a short film about fifty minutes long, Miyazaki decided to make the short film a feature film and release it in mainstream theaters. The airline, confident of a possible success, decided to change the contract and be one of the producers of the tape. Due to this, at the beginning of the film there are credits in the form of a prologue in several languages (English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and Russian).

Due to the war in the republics of the former Yugoslavia, specifically in Croatia, the film had a more serious and vindictive tone, having above all one of the primary messages of the study, pacifism.

Being set in the interwar period, Miyazaki did not evade the political and social situation in Europe. Thus, the fascist military can be seen in the film thanks to the uniform they wore, since Miyazaki's objective was not a single criticism of fascism, but of the totalitarianisms that were experienced and continue to be experienced internationally. A future production of this one, Howl no Ugoku Shiro, manages to better reflect this message.

Relating to the theme of the war in Croatia, Miyazaki wanted to alternate the settings between Italy and Rijeka, Croatia, where the scenes on the islands of the Adriatic Sea take place. Historically, the film takes place in 1929 and in sequences of the film it can be seen that Porco fought in World War I against the Austro-Hungarian Luftfahrtruppen. It should be noted that it is one of the few films from the studio where the protagonist is only a male. Miyazaki has stated several times his fascination with pigs. In this film he had the opportunity to create a pig protagonist and in addition to setting another of his great fascinations, airplanes. The name of the protagonist before he became a pig, Marco Pagot, is a tribute to the Pagot brothers, famous Italian cartoonists, creators of the Calimero series and with whom Hayao Miyazaki collaborated for the production of the series. animation Sherlock Holmes. The song that is sung at the beginning of the film by Gina, Les temps de cérises, is a hymn of the Paris Commune that was later turned into a popular song.

Voices

Character	Seiyū	Voice actors	Voice actors (1.♪. bending)	Voice actors (redoblaje)	Voice actors
Porco Rosso	Shūichiro Moriyama	José Luis Sansalvador	Carlos del Campo	Alan Miró	Michael Keaton
Fio Piccolo	Akemi Okamura	Nuria Trifol	Monica Estrada	Marisol Castro	Kimberly Williams-Paisley
Madame Gina	Tokiko Kato	Silvia Vilarrasa	Rocío Prado	Magdalena Leonel	Susan Egan
Donald Curtis	Akio ⋅tsuka	Juan Carlos Gustems	Adrian Fogarty	Héctor Rocha	Cary Elwes
Mr. Piccolo	Sanshi Katsura	Alberto Trifol	Gerardo Reyero	Carlos Becerril	David Ogden Stiers
Leader of the Mamma Aiuto	Tsunehiko Kamijoe	Miguel Angel Jenner	Bardo Miranda	Carlos Díaz	Brad Garrett
Avia Piccolo	Hiroko Seki	Carmen Contreras	Rocío Robledo	Love Santini	Three MacNeille
Girl	Yūko Kobayashi	Michelle Jenner	Rossy Aguirre	Mildred Barrera	Kaitlyn Maggio

• Bending study in Spain: Q. T. Lever, Barcelona.
• Double study in Mexico: Audiomaster 3000Mexico City.
• Redoblaje study in Mexico: Elefante FilmsCuernavaca.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack was created by Joe Hisaishi in Tokuma and released on July 22, 1992.

• Les temps des cérises and Once in a While, Talk of the Old Days the songwriter and singer Tokiko Kato. The arrangements of the last song were made by Yoko Kanno and Junichiro Ohkuchi.

Global distribution and reception

Porco Rosso managed to be number one at the Japanese box office in its first weekend in theaters. In addition, it managed to be the highest grossing opening of the year 1992 in that country, raising 2.8 billion yen. Such was the success of the film that the Japanese video game company SNK Playmore wanted some characters from the film to make brief appearances in the movie. The last video game he released at that time, Metal Slug, in which Porco Rosso and Fio Piccolo made a brief appearance. Likewise, the character of Porco Rosso makes brief appearances in future studio projects such as Whispers of the Heart, Pompoko and I can hear the sea.

The film has had great international recognition. In 1993 it was awarded the Cristal Award for Best Feature Film at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, France, where a year later another studio film would also win the same award, Pompoko. The film obtained the title of "Best Note" on the American film review website RottenTomatoes.com, since with twelve reviews it obtained 100% support, being one of the few films that obtained that recognition. It was chosen by the British magazine Time Out as one of the best animated films of all time, coming in at number 30.

In Europe, the film had mixed distribution. Spain released the film in September 1994, being the first western country to release Porco Rosso. The film was released in theaters and dubbed into Spanish, also being the first country to dub the film into a foreign language. The tape was the first premiere of Studio Ghibli in Spain and had a remarkable success. When Aurum obtained the distribution rights for the film, he wanted to re-release the film in theaters but in the end it was decided to release it directly in domestic format. In France the film was released in June 1995 in theaters and dubbed into French. The film was a success in France, and it was also the studio's first film to be released in France. The French dubbing included the participation of the prestigious actor Jean Reno in the role of Porco. It had a theatrical re-release in 2006, serving as its debut release in Belgium and Switzerland in December 2006 and February 2007, respectively. In Germany it was also released in 2006, while in Finland and Sweden it was released domestically in 2008, although in Finland it had a television premiere in September 2005. In Italy it was released in 2005.

Its international distribution was scattered. In the United States, it was presented at the Austin Animated Film Festival in 2003 and a year later it was shown at the New York International Children's Film Festival. Although the film did not come out in a domestic format until 2005, within the studio's collection catalogue, in the English dubbing it had the collaboration of prestigious actors such as Michael Keaton, Cary Elwes and Brad Garrett. In Canada it came out on DVD in the same year. However, in Latin America the film was not distributed domestically until October 2010, although years before it had been shown on the HBO pay channel.

Sequel

In an interview with Cut magazine while promoting the film Gake no ue no Ponyo, Miyazaki commented that he might like to create a sequel to the Porco Rosso, since he would like his next films to have a male lead as opposed to the unwritten rule whereby the studio casts a female character as the lead. On various websites and even in newspapers Prestige such as El País, from Spain, it was stated that the sequel to Porco Rosso was in production, that it would be set during the Spanish Civil War and that its title would be Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie (in Spanish: Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie). Arriety, in Rome, Miyazaki, who was one of the film's scriptwriters, denied that the sequel to Porco Rosso was in production. Official release of Ghibli's next production in progress, Poppy Hill, Studio Ghibli denied that Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie was in its mid-term projects.