The Wind Rises

• 1. Introduction

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  The Wind Rises opens not with a battle or a disaster, but with a boy's dream. In 1918, Jiro Horikoshi longs to fly. His eyes are too weak to let him be a pilot. So he does something else: he learns to build the planes instead. What follows is one of the most unusual animated films ever made, a work by Hayao Miyazaki that refuses easy categories. It is part biography, part romance, part elegy, and it was released on the 20th of July 2013 to become the highest-grossing Japanese film of that year. It was also intended to be Miyazaki's final feature. The questions at the heart of it are ones the film never quite resolves: can beauty justify what beauty is used for? Can a man who loved flight be absolved of the weapons his genius produced?

• 2. The Man Behind the Planes

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  Jiro Horikoshi was a real aeronautical engineer, and Miyazaki began thinking about how to tell his story in 2008. The result first appeared not as a film but as a manga series, published in the Model Graphix magazine from the April 2009 to January 2010 issues. The manga was later collected into a single volume in October 2015. Miyazaki considered the manga a personal project, a hobby piece never intended for film adaptation. He initially rejected producer Toshio Suzuki's proposal to turn it into a movie, believing the subject matter unsuitable for the children who traditionally made up Studio Ghibli's audience. A staff member's suggestion changed his thinking: that children should be allowed to encounter subjects outside their familiar world. The clinching argument came from Horikoshi himself. Miyazaki read a quote attributed to the engineer: "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful." That line became the film's moral centre.

• 3. Dreams and Mentors

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  Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni haunts the film as a recurring dream figure. The fictional Caproni tells the young Jiro that he has never flown a plane himself, and that building planes surpasses flying them. These visions begin after a magazine inspires Jiro, and they reappear across his entire career. The film's title carries a literary weight that goes beyond aeronautics. It is an allusion to Paul Valéry's 1920 poem "Le Cimetière Marin," known in English as "The Graveyard by the Sea." The film also draws on Tatsuo Hori's 1937 semi-autobiographical novel The Wind Has Risen, using visuals to evoke Hori's prose directly. Hori wrote about his own experience watching his fiancée Ayako Yano die from tuberculosis, and those scenes of helplessness and devotion are woven directly into the fictional romance Miyazaki constructed around Horikoshi. The name Nahoko Satomi was assembled from the female protagonist of another Hori novel.

• 4. Failures Before the Zero

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  The film traces Horikoshi's engineering career with an unusual willingness to dwell on defeat. The Mitsubishi 1MF9, designed under an Imperial Army contract, breaks apart in midair when it attempts to exceed 200 knots in testing, and is rejected. A trip Jiro and his colleague Kiro Honjo make to the Weimar Republic in 1929 to secure a production licence for a Junkers G.38 ends when the Sicherheitspolizei blocks them from obtaining the complete plans. Later, Jiro is promoted to chief designer for a fighter plane competition sponsored by the Imperial Navy, and his Mitsubishi 1MF10 also fails testing in 1933. It is in the aftermath of this last rejection that Jiro travels to the resort town of Karuizawa, where he reunites with Nahoko Satomi years after their brief meeting during the Great Kanto earthquake. The film presents these professional setbacks not as obstacles on the way to triumph, but as part of the full texture of a working life. Honjo, who remains in Germany after the Junkers trip, eventually develops the Mitsubishi G4M.

• 5. Love Under Sentence

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  Nahoko's tuberculosis diagnosis transforms the film's emotional register entirely. Jiro asks Nahoko's father for permission to marry her despite the prognosis, and she agrees to the engagement but insists on waiting until she recovers. She cannot bear the separation and returns to be with Jiro. His supervisor Kurokawa and Kurokawa's wife perform the marriage ceremony and open their home to the couple. Jiro's sister Kayo, herself a doctor, warns him plainly that the marriage will end in tragedy because the disease is incurable. The couple's time together is deliberately fragile. Nahoko's health deteriorates while Jiro works on the prototype that will become his most important design. On the day of its test flight, she leaves farewell letters and attempts to return to the mountain sanatorium alone. The film suggests her death through a gust of wind at the test site, the same elemental image that runs through the story from the beginning.

• 6. Sound and Score

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  Joe Hisaishi composed the 32-track film score and conducted it with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. One critic at Variety described the main theme as evoking the work of Nino Rota in its use of accordion and mandolin. Singer-songwriter Yumi Matsutoya's 1973 song was recommended to Miyazaki by producer Suzuki in December 2012, who felt its lyrics mirrored the story. Matsutoya had previously contributed songs to Kiki's Delivery Service. A German song, "Das gibt's nur einmal," meaning "It only happens once," is performed in the film by the character Hans Castorp at the piano in a hotel. The soundtrack was released in Japan on the 17th of July 2013 by Tokuma Japan Communications. Hisaishi's contribution was recognised with the Japan Academy Prize for Best Music Score.

• 7. Controversy and Legacy

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  Political criticism arrived from multiple directions. In Japan, the right objected to the film's portrayal of Horikoshi's ambivalence about militarism. The Japan Society for Tobacco Control raised separate objections. Miyazaki deepened the friction by publishing an essay criticising the Liberal Democratic Party's proposal to amend Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, the clause that restricts Japan from maintaining war potential. South Korean critics argued that the Mitsubishi Zero represented Japanese military aggression and that many planes had been assembled by Korean forced labour. Miyazaki responded to South Korean journalists by asking whether Horikoshi could be held responsible simply for living in that period, describing him as someone who resisted military demands. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki described his own feelings about World War II as "very complex," calling militarist Japan's conduct "foolish arrogance" while also saying the Zero was one of the few things Japanese people of that era could feel pride in. The film received 88 percent positive reviews from 182 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 8.0/10. Metacritic assigned it a score of 83 out of 100. Critic David Ehrlich rated it 9.7 out of 10, calling it perhaps the greatest animated film ever made. In 2025, it appeared in The New York Times readers' choice edition of their list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, finishing at number 235.