The Wind Rises

Snapshot

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) is Hayao Miyazaki's fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighter, and it stands apart from nearly everything else in his filmography: a hand-drawn, largely realist historical drama for adults, without the fantastical creatures, spirit worlds, or child protagonists that define films from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away. Spanning roughly two decades of interwar Japan — the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, the Depression, the drift toward militarism, and a tubercular love story — it braids the real Horikoshi with the poet-novelist Tatsuo Hori and threads both through the recurring dream-encounters between Jiro and the Italian aviation pioneer Giovanni Battista Caproni. Announced at the time as Miyazaki's final feature (a retirement he would later reverse with 2023's The Boy and the Heron), it is the most personal and most morally troubled work of his career, an artist's meditation on the beauty of what one makes and the uses to which the world puts it. It was among the most successful Japanese films of its release year and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.

Industry & production

The film is a Studio Ghibli production, produced by Miyazaki's longtime partner Toshio Suzuki, and it emerged from an unusual origin: a serialized manga Miyazaki drew for the model-hobby magazine Model Graphix, itself a labor of his private aviation obsession. Suzuki has recounted that Miyazaki initially resisted adapting his own manga, and that a decisive push came from within the studio to turn this adult, historically weighty material into a feature. The choice was risky by Ghibli's commercial logic: a two-hour drama about an engineer, with no obvious child audience and a politically charged subject, released into a Japanese market where Ghibli's brand was built on family fantasy.

Ghibli released The Wind Rises domestically in July 2013 — notably the same season Isao Takahata's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya was in production, framing the moment as a twin valediction from the studio's two founding directors. The film performed strongly at the Japanese box office, ranking among the top domestic releases of the year, and traveled the international festival and awards circuit, screening in competition at Venice and securing the Ghibli-standard prestige release abroad through Disney/GKIDS channels in North America. The English-language version assembled a high-profile cast — Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiro, Emily Blunt as Naoko, with Werner Herzog, Martin Short, Stanley Tucci, and others — under producer Frank Marshall, part of the long-running practice of star-dubbing Ghibli films for the Anglophone market.

Technology

The Wind Rises was made in Ghibli's mature hybrid pipeline: predominantly hand-drawn 2D animation on paper, scanned and composited digitally, with digital ink-and-paint and selective, restrained CGI integrated to serve rather than dominate the drawn image. Ghibli's house aesthetic deliberately kept computer assistance subordinate to the hand, and the film's most technically demanding passages — crowds fleeing the earthquake, the flexing of an aircraft's fabric-and-metal skin, the churn of a slipstream — are rendered with drawn animation's weight and imperfection rather than simulation. The most discussed technical decision, however, lies in the sound rather than the image (see Sound below): the choice to generate machine and disaster sounds from recorded human voices, an approach that is as much a philosophical statement about representation as a production technique.

Technique

Cinematography

In animation the "camera" is a constructed viewpoint, and Ghibli's longtime director of photography Atsushi Okui oversaw the film's digital compositing and photographic finish. The visual language favors clarity and stillness over spectacle: wide, deep-focus landscapes of green hillsides, telegraph lines, and cloud banks; carefully composed interiors; and a recurring upward gaze toward the sky that motivates the whole film thematically. Miyazaki's staging leans on long, unhurried holds and lateral movement — trains crossing the frame, wind combing through grass — and on a palette of soft, watercolor-adjacent skies against which aircraft read as fragile silhouettes. The dream sequences shift the register subtly toward the luminous and the impossible without abandoning the drawn realism, so that Caproni's fantastical flying machines feel continuous with, not opposed to, the waking world.

Editing

The cutting is patient and elliptical, structured less by conventional plot beats than by the passage of years and the rhyme of recurring motifs — wind, flight, the paper airplane, illness. Transitions frequently move through dreams or through gaps of time, letting the film compress a career and a life into an associative flow. The romance and the engineering plot are interleaved rather than segregated, so that Jiro's professional ascent and Naoko's decline advance in counterpoint. The result is a rhythm closer to a novel or a piece of music than to a biopic's checklist, with several extended set pieces — the earthquake, the test flights — allowed to breathe at length.

Mise-en-scène / staging

This is among Miyazaki's densest films in terms of period texture: 1920s–30s Tokyo streetscapes, provincial sanatoria, resort hotels, Mitsubishi's design halls, drafting tables, slide rules, and the interiors of aircraft. The staging is meticulous about work — the physical business of drawing, calculating, and building — treating engineering as a craft rendered with the same attention Ghibli lavishes on cooking or cleaning in other films. Nature is a constant presence and often an active agent: wind lifts hats and paper and hair, and the earthquake convulses the ground in one of the film's signature sequences. Recurring compositional motifs — the parasol, the paper plane sailing on a breeze, the color of a Nakajima or Mitsubishi prototype against the sky — accrue emotional weight across the runtime.

Sound

The film's most celebrated technical gambit is its sound design. Under Miyazaki's direction, many mechanical and environmental sounds — propeller engines, the rumble that precedes the Great Kanto earthquake, steam and machinery — were produced by human voices rather than conventional foley or recordings. The effect estranges the familiar and underlines the film's central tension: technology voiced by the human throat, machines given a breath. Joe Hisaishi's score, his decades-long collaboration with Miyazaki, is comparatively restrained and lyrical here, favoring period-inflected strings, mandolin and piano textures over sweeping orchestral fantasy, in keeping with the film's grounded, elegiac tone. The closing song draws on Yumi Matsutoya's "Hikōki-gumo" ("Vapor Trails"), a period-evoking pop ballad whose imagery of contrails and mortality dovetails with the film's themes.

Performance

Miyazaki cast Hideaki Anno — the director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and himself an animator and aviation enthusiast — as the voice of Jiro, a deliberately non-professional, affectless delivery that critics debated at length. Anno's flat, quiet reticence gives Jiro an inward, almost sleepwalking quality suited to a man who lives most fully inside his dreams and drawings. Miori Takimoto voices Naoko with a warmth that carries much of the film's emotional charge, and the supporting vocal cast fills out the period ensemble. The performance style throughout is understated, matching the film's realism; the English dub, by contrast, offers more conventionally polished readings from its star cast.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film operates as a lyrical bildungsroman and doomed romance rather than a documentary biography. It is openly a fiction: Miyazaki fuses the historical Jiro Horikoshi with the writer Tatsuo Hori — whose novel The Wind Has Risen supplies the tubercular love story and the Valéry-derived title — and adds an invented soulmate, Naoko, and an invented dream-mentor in Caproni. The dramatic mode is elegiac and associative, privileging mood, motif, and moral ambivalence over incident. Dreams function as a structuring device, not decoration: Jiro's recurring meetings with Caproni pose and re-pose the film's central question — whether it is worth building beautiful things that will be used to kill — without ever resolving it into a lesson. The wind of the title is at once literal, erotic, historical, and metaphysical: the current of life that must be lived even as it carries everything toward loss.

Genre & cycle

The Wind Rises sits at the intersection of the historical drama, the artist's biopic, and the melodrama of illness and doomed love, all rendered in animation — a combination rare in any national cinema and singular within Ghibli's catalogue. It belongs to a small cycle of Ghibli films aimed squarely at adults and grounded in history rather than fantasy, alongside Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Within Miyazaki's own oeuvre it forms a loose thematic cluster with his other flight-obsessed works — Porco Rosso above all, but also Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä — while stripping away their adventure trappings to confront the aircraft-as-weapon directly.

Authorship & method

The film is a near-total authorial statement. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay, directed, and originated the material as his own manga, and the project is saturated with his lifelong preoccupations: the beauty and danger of flight, the ethics of engineering, and his own family's history — the Miyazaki family firm manufactured aircraft parts during the war, a biographical fact that gives the film's guilt an intimate charge. Key collaborators are the constants of his major period: producer Toshio Suzuki, whose advocacy shaped the project; composer Joe Hisaishi, whose restrained, period-tinged score is among his subtlest for Miyazaki; and director of photography Atsushi Okui, overseeing the digital photographic finish of the drawn work. The casting of fellow director Hideaki Anno as Jiro is itself an authorial gesture — an animator directing an animator to voice an engineer — folding the film's meditation on creation back onto the community that made it. Miyazaki paired the release with public anti-war and anti-constitutional-revision statements, making explicit the political convictions that underwrite the film's ambivalence.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a landmark of Japanese animation and of Studio Ghibli's authorial, hand-drawn tradition, which positioned itself against both Disney's model and the increasingly CG-dominated global animation industry. It is also a deeply national work: a reckoning with Japan's interwar and wartime past from within a popular art form, engaging the country's contested memory of its militarist era. That engagement made the film controversial at home — criticized from the nationalist right for Miyazaki's pacifism and for depicting Japan's poverty and folly, and from other quarters for aestheticizing the designer of a war machine. It sits within a broader current of postwar Japanese cinema and literature preoccupied with the moral weight of the war, while remaining unmistakably the product of Ghibli's particular house style.

Era / period

The Wind Rises depicts interwar and prewar Japan — roughly the late 1910s through the 1930s — with the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, the Shōwa Depression, and the slide toward militarism as its backdrop, and it gestures beyond its own ending toward the war the Zero would fight. Made and released in 2013, it also belongs to a specific moment in Ghibli's history: the twilight of its founding directors, arriving amid Miyazaki's (later reversed) retirement announcement and shortly before the studio's temporary retrenchment of feature production. The film's European literary and cultural touchstones — Paul Valéry's poetry, Thomas Mann (whose The Magic Mountain is echoed in the sanatorium and in the German character Castorp), Italian aviation — place it in dialogue with a cosmopolitan interwar modernism as well as with Japanese history.

Themes

The governing theme is the artist-engineer's moral predicament: the dream of building something beautiful, and the impossibility of controlling its use. Caproni's formulation — that airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams — frames Jiro's life as a bargain in which creative fulfillment is inseparable from complicity in destruction. Around this cluster related concerns: the tension between dream and reality; mono no aware and the transience of beauty, love, and life, crystallized in Naoko's illness; the wind as the life-force one must try to live within ("Le vent se lève! … il faut tenter de vivre!"); the dignity and absorption of skilled work; and a quiet, unresolved reckoning with national ambition and its costs. The film refuses to exonerate or condemn its protagonist, holding admiration and disquiet in permanent suspension.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, The Wind Rises was widely acclaimed as a mature, beautiful, and morally serious capstone, with particular praise for its animation, its emotional restraint, and its willingness to sit with ambivalence; the flat vocal performance and the ethics of its sympathetic portrait of the Zero's designer drew the sharpest debate. In Japan the subject was genuinely divisive — attacked from opposing political directions — and Miyazaki's accompanying anti-war statements became part of the film's public reception. It earned major domestic honors and an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, consolidating its place in the Ghibli and Miyazaki canon as the outlier masterpiece: the adult historical drama in a body of work known for fantasy.

Influences on the film (backward): Tatsuo Hori's novel The Wind Has Risen and Valéry's "Le Cimetière marin" supply title, epigraph, and the romance's contours; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain informs the sanatorium and the Castorp figure; the historical record of Jiro Horikoshi and Mitsubishi's aircraft program, and the aviation lore of Caproni and interwar European design, ground the engineering material; and Miyazaki's own decades of flight-obsessed work — most directly Porco Rosso — furnish the thematic soil.

Legacy (forward): Because it was framed as Miyazaki's farewell, the film's most immediate legacy was as a supposed endpoint — a status revised when he returned with The Boy and the Heron, which revisits, in fantastical form, several of the same concerns with creation, guilt, and mortality. More broadly, The Wind Rises stands as a demonstration that mainstream feature animation can carry adult historical and moral weight, a touchstone cited whenever the medium's capacity for serious drama is argued. Its full influence on subsequent filmmakers remains to be seen; what is clear is its secure position as one of the definitive, and most debated, statements of Miyazaki's authorship.