Released for one week in New York and Los Angeles in December of 2013, in Japanese with English subtitles, master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises returns to theaters for a wider American release with a large ensemble English language voice cast that includes John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short, Elijah Wood, Darren Criss, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci, Mandy Patinkin, Werner Herzog and, in the lead role of historical figure Jiro Horikoshi, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Wind is a gentle, sad film about a strange subject: artistic pursuit of purity and the beauty of form versus the often ugly realm of function. The story of Horikoshi, a pioneer of aeronautical design and the man who developed the Japanese Zero fighter plane used during World War II, it follows his life from childhood to adulthood during the war. His dreams figure prominently, woven into the narrative and inextricable from it, and in them he’s usually chaperoned by Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, who pushes him toward the beauty of design. It's a place where young Horikoshi can remain pure, even as he goes to work, clear-eyed, for Mitsubishi to create machines that will be used in the service of death. At one point Caproni asks his troubled young friend if it would be better to live in a world without the great Pyramids, knowing they were built by slaves and, analogously, a world without flight to avoid war’s use of airplanes. And then the film refuses to weigh in with an answer even as it acknowledges the sorrow of its own moral dilemma.
Ethical ambiguity aside, Wind is a quiet, subtle and impeccable piece of animation for adults and thoughtful young people, and it's at its best when it allows its young artist the opportunity for creative discovery, moments he describes as
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