Character · Porco Rosso
Porco Rosso
A bounty hunter with a seaplane, a cigarette, a pig's face and no apparent interest in discussing any of it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Seaplane pilot cursed with a pig's face
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Porco Rosso
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Porco Rosso flies a crimson Savoia over the Adriatic in the early 1930s, collecting bounties on air pirates who mostly want to be paid, not killed. He was Marco Pagot, a decorated Italian fighter pilot, and something during the war turned him into a pig. The film never explains the curse and never treats it as the mystery, because Porco clearly regards it as an accurate description rather than a punishment.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed it for Studio Ghibli in 1992, expanding a short manga he had drawn for a model magazine. It was commissioned as an in-flight short for Japan Airlines and grew into a feature while Yugoslavia was falling apart, which pushed the politics forward. The line everyone quotes gives the whole position: he would rather be a pig than a fascist.
The flying is the point. Miyazaki draws aircraft the way other directors film horses, and the film is full of stalls, spins and engines being nursed. Fio Piccolo, the seventeen-year-old engineer who rebuilds his plane, gets the film's argument about whether a man is allowed to be finished with the world at that age.
Spelling PORCO
PORCO is Italian, not Japanese, which flips the usual problem: nothing here was romanised, so nothing was trimmed. It is crimson pig in Italian, and the Japanese title translates it back as Kurenai no Buta. Five letters, an O at each end and a hard C in the middle where an English speaker might reach for a K. His human name, Marco, sits in the same letters.