Film

The Wind Rises

Name: The Wind Rises
Genre: Animation, Drama, History, Romance
Released: 2013
Cast: Hideaki Anno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Miori Takimoto, Masahiko Nishimura, Stephen Alpert

Hayao Miyazaki's most adult film: a hushed, aching biography of the man who designed Japan's Zero fighter, told through his obsession with flight rather than war. Lush, unhurried animation carries a story about beauty made from things meant to kill. It's a slow burn, more elegy than adventure — for viewers who want Miyazaki's imagination turned toward history's saddest ironies rather than magic.

TMDb rating

7.8

If you liked this

Grave of the Fireflies1988

Studio Ghibli's other WWII masterpiece, and the one that will actually wreck you. Where Jiro's story is elegy for a man, this is elegy for two children — proof animation can carry grief no live-action film quite manages.

But It is genuinely devastating, not cathartic-sad but bleak-sad, and offers none of the visual wonder Miyazaki's films usually supply.

Howl's Moving Castle2004

Miyazaki's most direct anti-war statement wrapped in a fairy tale — walking castles, cursed witches, and a hero learning that beauty and destruction can share the same house, quite literally.

But The plot wanders and never quite resolves the war it's ostensibly about, more mood piece than coherent narrative.

Porco Rosso1992

Miyazaki's own pilot-hero story, but gleeful instead of grieving — a cursed WWI flying ace turned bounty hunter, soaring over the Adriatic with the same love of engines and sky that powers Jiro's obsession.

But Lighter and funnier than you'd expect from this list, which might feel like tonal whiplash if you're after more solemnity.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Wings1927

Jiro's love of flight has a direct ancestor here — Wings was made by aviators, for aviators, decades before anyone dreamed of anime, and it carries the same aching sense that the sky that lifts you can also kill your friends.

The first Best Picture winner, and still one of the great flight films — real WWI biplanes, real stunt pilots, real danger, captured decades before CGI could fake any of it.

But It's silent, nearly a century old, and its romance subplot creaks badly by modern standards.

The Right Stuff1983

Swap Zeros for rockets and Japan for America, and you get the same reverence for the men who build and fly impossible machines, plus a script that's both funny and awed.

But Three hours long, unabashedly patriotic, and far more interested in swagger than in the moral weight Miyazaki brings to flight.

Doctor Zhivago1965

An epic romance crushed under the wheels of history, much like Jiro and Naoko's — sweeping, gorgeous, and unbearably sad about how little love matters against the machinery of war and revolution.

But Three-plus hours of slow, mournful romance — commit to the pace or it will feel endless rather than epic.

Letters from Iwo Jima2006

Clint Eastwood's quiet, humane look at Japanese soldiers in WWII, made with the same instinct Miyazaki has — that the enemy in these stories is rarely as simple as the uniform suggests.

But Grim and unflinching where Jiro's story is elegiac and soft — this one doesn't look away from the cost of the war Jiro's planes fought.

Spirited Away2001

If you've somehow never seen it, this is where Miyazaki's imagination is at its most unrestrained — a strange, beautiful bathhouse fantasy that shows the same eye for wonder in a completely different key.

But It's the Miyazaki everyone's already seen, so if that's you, this recommendation is dead on arrival.

The English Patient1996

A cartographer's obsessive love affair unravels against the backdrop of a war his own maps helped wage — the same ache of beautiful, painstaking work turned toward catastrophe that haunts Jiro's story.

But Melodramatic and self-consciously literary in a way Miyazaki's restraint never is — some find it swooning, others find it exhausting.

The Bridge on the River Kwai1957

A British engineer takes pride in building something magnificent for the enemy holding him prisoner — the same uncomfortable question Jiro's film asks about craft outliving conscience, dressed as a classic war epic.

But Stiff-upper-lip 1950s pacing and a very different, more theatrical sense of moral irony than Miyazaki's hushed approach.

Manhattan2014no page yet

Same premise as Jiro's story, told at length instead of in elegy: gifted engineers telling themselves the work is the point, not the weapon it becomes. Where Miyazaki compresses decades into a hush, this stretches the same guilt across hours of television.

A tense, character-driven drama about the scientists building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos — brilliant minds convincing themselves the work is pure even as its purpose becomes impossible to ignore.

But Two seasons of slow-burn moral compromise and marital drama — patience required, and it was cancelled before it fully resolved.

Pearl Harbor2001

Same historical hinge — the Zero fighter itself, built by Jiro, is the instrument of the attack that opens this film's second half. One movie asks you to mourn the engineer; the other asks you to cheer the men shooting his planes down. Watching both back to back is genuinely disorienting.

The trashy blockbuster mirror image — same love triangle, same doomed pilots, same Zero fighters roaring overhead, but played as maximalist Hollywood romance instead of hushed elegy. Genuinely fun in a way Jiro's story never lets itself be.

But It's three hours of overwrought melodrama and slow-motion explosions — subtlety is not on the menu.