“I’d rather be a pig”: Amid fascism and a reckless AI arms race, Ghibli anti-war opus ‘Porco Rosso’ matters now more than ever

2025 has marked a significant change in the US’s relationship to its fellow nations. While it would be too simple to absolve previous administrations of blame for the ways in which the US has pursued an interventionist foreign policy, it’s clear that the current regime has a dangerous worldview, often expressed through a militarism founded on spite. Animating such motives with the might of the American war machine has proven deadly and horrifying for countless people, both domestic and international. 

To make such militarism more palatable, the administration has adopted an unsettling communications tactic: recasting beloved characters and cultural touchstones as social media mouthpieces for its violent policies.

A couple of months ago, for example, in the midst of a social media trend of using AI services to make things look Ghibliesque, the Trump White House decided to get in on the act with a tweet celebrating supposed efforts to control crime. It’s a tack they’ve since used repeatedly, cribbing in the past couple weeks alone from cultural fare as wide-ranging as popstar Sabrina Carpenter’s smash hit Juno and cherished Canadian children’s book series Franklin the Turtle to tout ICE deportations and Venezuelan boat strikes.

The Ghibli glom-on is especially heinous given the studio’s emphatic anti-militarist politics. AI recreations of the Ghibli style, especially those that seek to use it for cheap political points, try to reduce it to ‘cute.’ At best, they fail to grasp — and at worst, purposely obfuscate — the biting antiwar commentary that’s as much a part of the Ghibli signature as the hand-drawn art. 

Perhaps the most timely example of this perspective is the 1992 classic Porco Rosso. Set in the interwar period in late-1920s Italy, the film centers fighter pilot turned bounty hunter Marco Rossolini, who has been transformed into a pig (the titular Porco Rosso) after seeing his squadron decimated in an aerial dogfight. Porco abhors the notion of perpetual war, echoing heroes of earlier humanist and antifascist films like All Quiet on the Western Front (first adapted for screen in 1930), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Army of Shadows (1969), all of which illustrate that the reverberations of war are lives lost, not glories gained.

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There are vestiges of Miyazaki in his porcine hero, a man who has no wish to see cycles of violence and war continue in service of some faded idea of their majesty. Although only four years old when his family fled the US’s 1945 bombing of Tokyo, Miyazaki remembers the escape. “Everything was pink with bright lights. He thought it was sunrise, but it was actually the flames all around him,” explains Susan Napier, professor of international literary and cultural studies at Tufts University and author of Miyazakiworld: A Life In Art. 

“Maybe I’m dead, and life as a pig is the same thing as hell,” says Porco at one point, just after the most beautiful shot in the film: a flashback to a tragically lost generation of airmen ascending to “pilot heaven” in their biplanes. Porco Rosso’s majesty comes from the reverence it has for sacrifice and death.

“There’s a lot of romanticism in anime, and Miyazaki is a tremendous romantic,” Napier says. “Porco Rosso is his most romantic film, but he uses animation as a brilliant way to meld it with a tragicomic narrative.”

The film’s climax is another proposed aerial combat between Porco and his American nemesis Curtis, a Hollywood blowhard who wants to be the President (sounds familiar). Moments before the battle begins, Porco rages against the pageantry surrounding it, yelling “bunch of morons, they’re turning this into one big party.” He ultimately refuses to target Curtis’ engines during the dogfight so that his opponent will not be seriously harmed. 

It’s difficult to imagine a world in which algorithms are capable of such moral calculations. GenAI, by definition, is unfeeling. Its uses in weapons design, targeting, and the military at large reduce the human being in its crosshairs to a mere data point. Porco Rosso, by contrast, holds every life — and livelihood — sacred, a stance perhaps best illustrated in a luxurious 10-minute interlude of Porco and his engineer Fio painstakingly restoring his broken biplane. 

As he waits for the plane to be refurbished, Porco enjoys the company of the mechanics who build it, all of whom are women. It’s an important gesture, says Napier, because “it foregrounds female autonomy and agency” in an era in which it was less common. We see the characters breaking bread, flirting, and understanding that good work takes time and dedication. 

The film’s most famous moment, however, comes from Porco’s steadfast refusal to help his former squadmate Ferrari’s fascist Italian army regiment and its unnamed but obvious commander. “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist,” Porco states proudly. Perhaps the greatest aesthetic failure of AI is that, given the right prompt, it can make those two things look exactly the same.

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