The Wind Rises

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

(PG–13)

***

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Deciding to make his final film a biopic about the designer of a Japanese warplane might seem an odd choice for “perhaps the world’s pre-eminent animator,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Hayao Miyazaki built his renown with “stunningly beautiful and completely idiosyncratic” features like the child-friendly fantasies My Neighhor Totoro and Spirited Away. Here the pacifist director again celebrates the romance of human flight, but in “a complex story that resists easy summation.” The film casts real-life engineer Jiro Horikoshi as a myopic, kindhearted dreamer who in following his muse creates a fighter plane used as a fearsome killing machine during World War II. But while Miyazaki “subtly condemns” Japan’s war culture, said Inkoo Kang in The Village Voice, he does so much to perpetuate national myths about the conflict that The Wind Rises adds a “repellent, disgraceful” coda to his marvelous career. Still, a concern about the terrible fate of Jiro’s dream project “suffuses every frame of this dark and difficult film,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. When a mentor tells Jiro that “dreams are convenient,” he’s counseling against any flight from reality.