The Wind Rises

Verdict

A beautifully animated, melancholy biographical drama that turns aviation history into a meditation on ambition, love, and moral compromise. It’s especially rewarding if you like contemplative period pieces, romantic tragedy, and films where craft and emotion are tightly fused.

Best for

• Viewers who like lyrical historical dramas
• Fans of introspective romance and bittersweet endings
• Animation lovers interested in serious adult themes
• People drawn to stories about artists, engineers, and obsession
• Audiences who appreciate war-adjacent moral complexity

Skip if

• You want fast pacing or constant plot turns
• You prefer light, purely escapist animation
• You need a straightforward inspirational biopic with no ambiguity
• You’re uncomfortable with wartime implications and ethical unease

Overview

The Wind Rises is one of Miyazaki’s most restrained and adult works, using the life of Jiro Horikoshi to explore the beauty of invention and the cost of making things that can be used for destruction. It’s less a conventional biopic than a reflective dream of a life, shaped by longing, illness, and the quiet persistence of work. The film’s emotional power comes from its tension between wonder and sorrow.

Worth noting

What stands out most is how alive the animation feels: wind, smoke, paper, machinery, and landscapes all move with tactile precision. The romance is gentle but deeply felt, and the film never lets its elegance erase the historical darkness underneath it. That balance gives it a rare kind of ache.

Bottom line

This is a film for viewers who enjoy contemplative cinema and don’t mind that the drama is inward rather than event-driven. It’s moving, humane, and formally exquisite, even when it leaves you sitting with uncomfortable questions about beauty, purpose, and responsibility.

Top Letterboxd reviews

Karsten (4.5★) · 3865 likes

feels weirdly satisfying to watch fireflies, a thesis statement for what ghibli as a studio aimed to tell stories about, and then follow it up with the wind rises, which feels like a conclusion/reflection on those themes. obviously done by two different filmmakers, but they share a lot. hard to summarize all of what i’m feeling about this at the crisp hour of 1am, minutes after finishing this. but i’m initially just very over the moon about how real the

jeaba (4.5★) · 3835 likes

ghibliheimer

mia lee vicino (4.5★) · 3747 likes

suggests that dreaming is pragmatic because it’s the only way forward, that finding the beauty in the everyday rebuffs the hideousness of war and disaster, and that sometimes all a guy needs are his planes and his girl 😃 most likely would’ve cried if watched alone in theaters and not in friend’s living room 😃

Matt Singer (4.5★) · 3412 likes

"Humanity dreams of flight, but the dream is cursed. Aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction." I'm not a Miyazai expert. I still haven't seen several of his early films, and I've been pretty mixed on most of his recent stuff. But I thought this was an absolute masterpiece about how the perfection we seek to achieve in life is only really attainable in dreams -- or, on rare occasions, in art.

matt lynch (5★) · 2736 likes

"Planes are dreams. Cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up."

Themes

ambition, aviation, dreams and imagination, romantic longing, war and moral compromise, artistry and craftsmanship, illness and mortality, modernity and industrialization

Topics

historical drama, animated biopic, romance, anti-war, melancholy, period piece, auteur animation, Japanese cinema, dreamlike, wartime ethics