The Planes of Porco Rosso

If you ask Miyazaki fans which of his films is most personal to him, a surprising number say Porco Rosso. Not Totoro, which is the most beloved. Not Spirited Away, which is the most celebrated. Porco Rosso - the one about the bounty hunter pilot with a pig's head who flies a red seaplane over the Adriatic in the 1930s. Miyazaki himself has said the film is essentially "for middle-aged men", by which he means for people who understand that something important has already been lost and are figuring out how to keep flying anyway.

The aircraft in the film are not incidental to this. They are the emotional vocabulary of the story.

The Savoia S.21: what it is and where it comes from

The aircraft Porco flies is called the Savoia S.21 in the film, but it's not a direct replica of any single historical aircraft. Miyazaki designed it as a composite - drawing heavily on the Italian Macchi seaplanes that competed in the Schneider Trophy races of the 1920s and early 1930s, particularly the Macchi M.39 (which won the 1926 race) and the M.52.

The Schneider Trophy was a real international competition for seaplane speed, held between 1913 and 1931. Italian, British, and American teams competed with increasingly extreme aircraft, pushing the limits of aeronautical engineering. The race produced aircraft that later directly influenced the design of WWII fighter planes - the Supermarine S.6B that won the final Schneider Trophy in 1931 was a direct ancestor of the Spitfire.

Why Miyazaki chose this era specifically

The interwar period - after the First World War, before the Second - had a particular character in Miyazaki's imagination. Aviation was still connected to individual pilots and personal daring rather than industrial mass production. The planes were beautiful and dangerous in equal measure. Their pilots were figures of romance and melancholy rather than propaganda. Setting Porco Rosso in this period allowed Miyazaki to examine flight before it became fully weaponised - and to use a man who literally wears the face of an animal as a way of exploring what it means to refuse to be part of the human violence that is coming.

Curtis and the American plane

Curtis's aircraft is broader, more powerful, more American in the visual sense - all speed and confidence without the elegance that defines the S.21. This is intentional. The film's climactic race is not just a speed contest; it's a clash of philosophies. Porco's plane has been rebuilt by hand by a woman engineer in a small workshop. Curtis's plane arrived from a factory. The difference matters to the film's argument about what's worth fighting for.

What the planes tell us about the film

Every Ghibli film uses its central visual imagery as moral shorthand, and in Porco Rosso the aircraft carry the film's entire ethical weight. A plane built with care by someone who knows your name is a different object from a machine produced by industrial process. Porco understands this. It's why he keeps flying his increasingly outdated S.21 when any rational bounty hunter would have upgraded.

Miyazaki has never made a film that was simply about what it appeared to be about. Porco Rosso appears to be about seaplanes and the Adriatic. It's actually about choosing between complicity and exile, between belonging to something poisoned and refusing to land.

If you're looking to own a piece of this - the S.21 specifically - our Ghibli collection includes Porco Rosso merchandise from officially licensed Japanese manufacturers. For hands-on collectors, the Savoia S.21 model kits are a particularly satisfying build.