Porco Rosso (Japanese: 红のののート
Adapted from Hayao Miyazaki's manga series The Age of Flying Boats, the film mainly tells the story of the protagonist who is cursed by himself and turned into a pig to fight against air robbers and protect the people around him.
Although there is not much anti-war content in the entire anime, the story is created against the background of the First World War, and the protagonist has imposed a curse on himself in order to escape from reality and become a monster with a pig's head.
Although not mentioned in the film, a press release said: "Because he saw through the human world, he cursed himself as a pig." Hayao Miyazaki put it this way: "When a man enters middle age, he has become a pig. "Polluk seems to have a lot of baggage that he can't put down, which is also related to his no longer being a person."
In the beginning, Miyazaki intended to set the story in Dovrok, Croatia. However, during the period when he was creating Porco Rosso, the civil war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, which shocked Miyazaki.
The official answer is this: Captain Marco Pagot (named after Hayao Miyazaki's friend, an Italian manga artist) was the ace pilot of the Italian Air Force in World War I. When he realized the constant rise of fascism, he chose to leave the army, and he wanted to fly as he wished. Hence the use of "Porco Rosso". With this new name, he became a man who hunted down fugitives for a reward. In order not to let others know that he was a person, he destroyed his young face—the same young face in the painting hanging on the wall of Gina's hotel.
According to Miyazaki, Polluk had intended to marry Gina, but world war I soon broke out. Gina lived on an island that was Austrian territory—as an officer, Polluk could not allow himself to marry an enemy. He struggled with his loyalty to his country and love for Gina, and finally chose his country. But as he witnesses the deaths of his colleagues— including Gina's husband— he begins to reflect on whether he was right or wrong in doing so, what he was flying for and sacrificing for his country. These contradictions swirled around in his mind and could not be resolved, and eventually, he became a pig.
Although the entire film does not explicitly state the theme of opposition to war, but rather resembles the story of adults escaping from reality to find their own lives, and even full of fantasy romanticism, but combined with the background of its creation, it is easy to think that only war can make pilots with such superb flying skills flee their family country and everything in the past.