--- title: 'The Wind Rises': An Animation Master's Last Flight? description: Isn't 70 the new 50 — the age of both vigor and wisdom? Plenty of movie directors think so. At last year's Venice Film Festival,... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7114155/the-wind-rises-review-hayao-miyazaki/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-02-20T15:00:59.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:00:20.027Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 'The Wind Rises': An Animation Master's Last Flight? og:description: Isn't 70 the new 50 — the age of both vigor and wisdom? Plenty of movie directors think so. At last year's Venice Film Festival,... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7114155/the-wind-rises-review-hayao-miyazaki/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt26c24383a344bd63/698a8d34c9e941db2c122eea/the-wind-rises.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1444 og:image:height: 812 og:image:alt: MCDWIRI EC006 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'The Wind Rises': An Animation Master's Last Flight? twitter:description: Isn't 70 the new 50 — the age of both vigor and wisdom? Plenty of movie directors think so. At last year's Venice Film Festival,... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt26c24383a344bd63/698a8d34c9e941db2c122eea/the-wind-rises.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # 'The Wind Rises': An Animation Master's Last Flight? > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Feb 20, 2014 3:00 PM UTC  THE WIND RISES, (aka KAZE TACHINU), from left: Caproni, Jiro Horikoshi, 2013\. ©Touchstone Pictures THE WIND RISES, (aka KAZE TACHINU), from left: Caproni, Jiro Horikoshi, 2013\. ©Touchstone Pictures Studio Ghibli—Copyright © ©Touchstone Pictures/ by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Feb 20, 2014 3:00 PM UTC Isn’t 70 the new 50 — the age of both vigor and wisdom? Plenty of movie directors think so. At last year’s Venice Film Festival, three 72-year-olds competed for the Golden Lion: Stephen Frears with _Philomena_ (now a nominee for the Best Picture Academy Award), Terry Gilliam with _The Zero Theorem_ and Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki with _The Wind Rises_, his 11th feature in a career that has earned him world renown. His 11th and, he says, last. On September 1st, at a Venice Film Festival press conference for the movie’s international premiere, Koji Hoshino, who runs the director’s Studio Ghibli, announced: “Miyazaki has decided that _The Wind Rises_ will be his last film, and he will now retire.” In an Associated Press interview a few days later, Miyazaki said that he was no longer up to the four-year effort required for each of his features, which are meticulously hand-drawn (little or no CGI). On _The Wind Rises_ he could work only about seven hours a day, not his usual 12 to 14\. He was ready to pass the torch to a younger generation, including his son Goro, for whose directorial effort _From Up on Poppy Hill_ the elder Miyazaki wrote the script. He said he would help update the Studio Ghibli Museum in a Tokyo suburb, telling the AP, “I might even become an exhibit myself.” **(SEE: Melissa Locker’s** [**choice of the best Miyazaki movies**](http://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/04/hayao-miyazaki-ranking-his-10-movies/)**)** He could be the prime exhibit in a Museum of Animation Masters. Miyazaki’s 1979 debut _The Castle of Cagliostro_ and the 1984 _Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind_ established him as a young visionary in the bustling industry of Japanese anime. He went on to create other creepy castles (_Castle in the Sky_, _Howl’s Moving Castle_), launched teenage witches (_Kiki’s Delivery Service_) and a flying pig (_Porco Rosso_), unleashed forest gods (_Princess Mononoke_) and fish-girls (_Ponyo_) and, in _Spirited Away_, which in 2003 won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, sent a plucky girl into a haunted bathhouse. His four films before _The Wind Rises_ have grossed $743 million in Japan and $870 million worldwide. But Miyazaki is in it only for the art, and making his kind of art is exhausting. He may not want to climb yet another mountain. Miyazaki couldn’t have picked a more piquant swan song. In his first film intended primarily for grownups, the anim-auteur courted political controversy. His protagonist, whom he portrays as a visionary genius, is Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes that on Dec. 7, 1941 (the year Miyazaki was born) dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor. _The Wind Rises_, which earned $115 million in its home country, has been ripped by the pacifist left for blessing the war aggression of imperial Japan and by the nationalist right for being “anti-Japanese.” Even the Japan Society for Tobacco Control has a grievance: people in the movie smoke too much. **(READ: Kirk Spitzer’s report on** [**the Japanese controversy over** **_The Wind Rises_**](http://world.time.com/2013/08/30/what-the-wind-rises-says-about-japans-attitudes-to-its-wartime-past/)**)** _The Wind Rises_ — its title taken from a line in Paul Valéry’s poem “The Graveyard by the Sea” (“The wind is rising! We must try to live!”) — weaves a tender, doomed love story into two volcanic decades of Japan’s history, from 1918 to the end of the ’30s. Here are indelible images of the 1923 Kanto earthquake and the firestorms that devoured whole cities and killed 140,000 people. Here is the Depression that crippled Japan while its government poured more money into its military. The movie is really a double biopic: of Horikoshi, whose life it follows from his youth to his work at Mitsubishi, with a brief postwar coda; and of the author Tatsuo Hori, whose 1937 novel _The Wind Has Risen_ tells the story of a tubercular girl at a sanatorium. The life and works of Hori, who died of TB in 1953 at age 48, inform the character of Naoko Satomi, the young woman who becomes Jiro’s wife. (In the English-language version released this week in the U.S., Joseph Gordon-Levitt provides Jiro’s voice, while Emily Blunt speaks the role of Naoko.) **(SEE:** [**A trailer for** **_The Wind Rises_**](http://entertainment.time.com/2013/11/21/todays-movie-trailer-the-wind-rises/)**)** _The Wind Rises_ is inspired by a quote of Horikoshi’s: “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” Miyazaki often achieves just that. In the amazing first scene, young Jiro climbs to the roof of his home and finds a plane parked there. Lured by its colorful avian design — white wings, blue feathers, a red tail and a yellow nose — Jiro scoots aboard this metallic bird for a lovely jaunt until he is shadowed by a huge dirigible holding dozens of military aircraft; the boy falls from the sky and awakes in his bed. The film is a series of flights and falls, airy dreams that crash-dive into disaster. Stark history and buoyant fantasy often merge in _The Wind Rises_. Jiro’s spiritual guide is the Italian airplane designer Giovanni Caproni, who says, “The whole world’s a dream!” Caproni eagerly awaits the age of commercial aviation: “Instead of bombs, we’ll carry passengers.” But his first attempt, essentially an airborne cruise ship, crashes. That was Caproni’s tragedy. Jiro’s planes flew supremely efficient bombing raids, and that was his. **(READ: Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s 2001** [**profile of Miyazaki**](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,179531,00.html)**)** Miyazaki has never cared much for the “realistic” animating of human figures; they are abstracted into giant-eyed doll faces and stiff legs, as if trudging on stilts. (Even the adult Jiro looks like any anime child.) The director expresses his true artistry in his landscapes: rural vistas rendered in the most delicate pastels, like the watercolors Naoko paints as Jiro courts her. In a hard land heading to war, Miyazaki makes sure the views are ravishing. His perfect metaphor for a Japan straddling the old world and the new: the planes Jiro designs are pulled onto the practice field by teams of oxen. This exquisite paintbrushing, or whitewashing, extends to Jiro’s visits to Germany to gauge its aircraft ingenuity against his, and to his development of the Zero prototype. But as Japan flexes its military muscle, Miyazaki tiptoes away to concentrate on the Jiro-Naoko love story. Their devotion is heart-strong and constant; as Naoko says, “I’ve loved you since the wind brought you to me.” But this last half hour might have considered the impact of the hero Jiro’s Zero. It was a beautiful machine that encouraged tyrannical Japan to dream of world conquest, and brought death more swiftly to rival airmen and civilians alike. **(READ: Steven James Snyder on** [**the Miyazaki-scripted** **_The Secret World of Arrietty_**](http://entertainment.time.com/2012/02/16/the-secret-world-of-arrietty-little-heroes-but-big-emotions-in-another-studio-ghibli-triumph/)**)** _The Wind Rises_ may be a challenging end to a major artist’s career. But Miyazaki has retired before, after the 1997 _Princess Mononoke_, and he returned to make four more wonders, including this one, that immeasurably enrich his legacy. The new film betrays no hint of flagging energy, let alone senility; it is vigorous, subtle, thematically daring, visually gorgeous. So may his stated retirement be a brief, dark whim — and may he step out of his Ghibli Museum and create more masterpieces for it. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7114155/the-wind-rises-review-hayao-miyazaki/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7114155/the-wind-rises-review-hayao-miyazaki/"},"headline":"'The Wind Rises': An Animation Master's Last Flight?","datePublished":"2014-02-20T15:00:59.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T05:00:20.027Z","description":"Isn't 70 the new 50 — the age of both vigor and wisdom? Plenty of movie directors think so. 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