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In my last post, I wrote about the Studio Ghibli film Porco Rosso and lamented the sense of nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced—specifically, the beauty of its depicted architecture.
But something else in the film stood out to me. Something that, even now, weeks after watching, still lingers in my mind.
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This scene takes place in Porco’s cove hideout. He sits at his desk, fixing bullets into casings by lamplight. Nearby, Fio lies in a sleeping bag, watching him work.
Instead of sleeping, Fio asks for a story. Porco obliges in his usual standoffish way and begins recounting a dogfight between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces in World War I.
The Italian squadron was ambushed. All seemed lost. Even Marco Pagot—the ace pilot who would become Porco Rosso—sustained damage that should have been the end of him. Should have been.
Instead, he wakes to a surreal scene.
His plane, engine silent, skims the surface of a white cloud-sea that stretches endlessly beneath a blue sky. There’s no fanfare, no grand reveal—just the film’s subtle, haunting score.
Above him, a stream of aircraft floats in eerie silence—hundreds, maybe thousands, drifting together. Then, the white sea parts as Marco’s friend, Bellini, begins to ascend, just as silently. Porco calls out, desperate to reach him, but nothing breaks through. Bellini continues rising, joining the endless procession of fallen pilots.
This is a familiar trope—a liminal space between life and death. Not a place one is meant to stay, but a passage from one world to the next. And yet, this depiction in Porco Rosso struck me differently. More than that—it struck me at all.
In that moment, I felt something unfamiliar, something I struggled to articulate. What had my eyes glued to the screen in rapt silence was existential dread. For the first time in recent memory, a film had made me feel the echo of my own mortality.
A film about an anthropomorphic pig. A sea-plane pirate.
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments