Search #1 began with the following youtube video

The video looks at the work of the famed Hayao Miyazaki, and does a small deep-dive into his apparent obsession with flight. I would typically have considered Miyazaki’s works fantasy, but after watching this video I have a new point of view on his perspective and there is something undeniably SF about his portrayal of flight.

Miyazaki presents flight in two lights, first by hi lighting the magic and wonder of taking to the air. His shots tend to follow the pilot rather than just focus on how ‘cool’ the machine is, and there is impeccable detail used in the way everything works which not only makes his airships believable, but also adds a sense of humanity to them. The aircraft he uses to display the wonder of flight are not giant anime robots smashing each other with lasers, they are intricately crafted and immeasurably fragile creations which the viewer is shown that they themselves could learn to operate, which brings the whole experience into an immediately understandable place.

However, being incredibly smart, Miyazaki knows there is one driving force has shaped the history of aviation far more than any sense of wonder: War. His airships of war are big, brutish, and carry with them the very sense of evil. They are not small and intricate, and often times the means keeping them aloft are not immediately understandable. They are un-relatable and cold, foreboding in their size and overwhelming in their shape that viewers consider who could have been motivated to create such a thing, or worse what motivated them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki

We Learn from Miyazaki’s life that he grew up around airplanes, his father manufactured components for WWII fighter aircraft in Japan. Thus, we also learn that his interests lie not only in aircraft but in aircraft of war and the beauty in their design. Here, Miyazaki runs into a dilemma that I personally can relate to: the impossibility of separating flight from its history of blood. As a man who stands by anti-war values Miyazaki grapples with the history of flight, its present uses, and what it could some day be used for. In his films he seeks to answer this question by painting flight in it’s two distinct lights and in his more recent works he has hi-lighted the overlap of beautiful and destructive airplanes.

At first I thought this might be SF because of the often steampunk-esque creations he was drawing. In fact, it seems that Hayao Miyazaki has been a SF writer when it comes to flight from the beginning, grappling with the morality of technology balanced with it’s beauty and imagining what flight could become if either side of the scale began to tip over.