The Wind Rises
A fictionalised life of the Zero fighter's designer; Miyazaki's first 'final film', and arguably his most adult.
Overview
The Wind Rises is Hayao Miyazaki's beautiful and troubling film about Jiro Horikoshi, the aircraft designer associated with the Mitsubishi Zero. It is biographical fiction rather than documentary, folding dreams, engineering, romance and historical catastrophe into a story about a man who wants to make beautiful aircraft in a world that will use them for war.
This is Miyazaki staring directly at one of his own contradictions: a lifelong love of flight and machinery, coupled with a deep hatred of militarism. The film does not resolve that contradiction so much as make a home inside it, which is brave, evasive or both depending on one's patience.
Why it matters
It matters because it is one of Miyazaki's most adult and contested works. The beauty of the flying sequences is undeniable. So is the historical shadow. The film asks whether creation can remain innocent when the created thing becomes part of destruction.
It also functions as a late-career self-portrait. Jiro's dream of design, discipline and impossible beauty feels close to Miyazaki's own art-making. The cost of that dream, and what it ignores, is where the film becomes uncomfortable in useful ways.
What to expect
Expect a slow, elegant drama rather than a fantasy adventure. There are dream sequences, romance and earthquake imagery, but the central subject is work: drawing, testing, improving, failing and wanting the perfect line of a wing.
Content includes wartime context, illness, disaster, smoking and the ethical unease of weapons design. It is not a film for very young children.
Adaptations and versions
The Wind Rises is a Studio Ghibli theatrical film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, inspired by his own manga and by the life of Jiro Horikoshi, with literary echoes from Tatsuo Hori. Exact source phrasing should be checked before publication.
It stands alone within the Ghibli catalogue.
Where to start
Do not start here if you want the classic family fantasy image of Ghibli. Start here if you want Miyazaki wrestling with beauty, complicity and history.
It pairs well with Porco Rosso, though this is the colder and more ethically difficult film.
Verdict The SFcrowsnest take
The Wind Rises is gorgeous, conflicted and morally uneasy. It loves aircraft so much that it cannot pretend not to see their shadow. That tension is the film's problem and its power.