There is a wonderful gentleness and intelligent idealism to this animation by 73-year-old Hayao Miyazaki, understood to be his final work, now available here in subtitled and dubbed versions. It is a tribute to the aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who was a pioneer in aircraft design in the first half of the twentieth century. This Horikoshi – bookish and bespectacled like a Japanese Harry Potter – never loses his essential boyishness, never loses the distracted look of a dreamer and an artist. His planes are visions, poems in flight. The title, Kaze Tachinu, or The Wind Rises, is an allusion to lines of Paul Valéry repeatedly cited in the movie: "The wind rises, we must try to live."
Aeroplanes are a metaphor for seizing life's opportunities; flight is the ultimate glory. Horikoshi insists his vision is inspired by peaceful, civilian uses for aircraft. The film stops short of the war, but the scenes in which pilots rehearse "power dives", surely must hint darkly at the world of "divine wind", the kamikaze, a world in which aeroplanes carry suicide bombers – and, indeed, atom bombs. Aeroplanes are to lose the innocence that Horikoshi imagines for them, which makes his vision so ironically poignant. The film is arguably naive, but really exquisite in many ways, perhaps especially in the crowd scenes, in which tiny human figures cluster like bees. There is a real emotional charge in this life story of a Japanese pioneer. It is not too fanciful to link Miyazaki's own artistry with this young engineer, passionately reaching for the sky.
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