The Wind Rises (2013) Review – Between Creation and Consequence

 

A minimalist sky and paper airplane — a symbolic nod to creativity, dreams, and the quiet wind that guides us.

🎥 Film Overview

Detail	Information
Title	The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ / Kaze Tachinu)
Director	Hayao Miyazaki
Release	July 20, 2013 (Japan); February 21, 2014 (USA)
Runtime	126 minutes
Genre	Animation, Historical Drama, Biography
Studio	Studio Ghibli
Music	Joe Hisaishi
Box Office	$136.8 million worldwide (highest-grossing Japanese film of 2013)
Rating	7.8/10 (IMDb), 88% (Rotten Tomatoes)

📖 Plot Summary

The Wind Rises is a quiet meditation on dreams—how they lift us, burden us, and confront the world beyond our intentions.

Young Jiro Horikoshi dreams of flying, but his nearsightedness crushes that possibility. Instead, he finds inspiration in Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who appears in his dreams: building planes is better than flying them. During his train journey to Tokyo Imperial University in 1923, Jiro meets Naoko Satomi during the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake, helping her and her injured maid before disappearing.

As Jiro dedicates himself to designing beautiful airplanes, he encounters professional challenges and mounting pre-war tensions. Years later, he reunites with Naoko at a mountain resort. They fall deeply in love, but Naoko is suffering from tuberculosis. Jiro's dream comes true with the development of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter—but as his design takes flight, it becomes a tool for war, a symbol of an era he never intended to serve.

🌸 Key Themes

The Duality of Creation: Beauty and Destruction

Jiro's deepest wish is painfully simple—he wants to create a beautiful airplane. Yet the moment his design takes flight, it escapes his control and becomes a weapon of war. This tension between pure intention and unintended consequence is the heartbeat of the film.

The film invites comparison to Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite believing it could serve progress, only to watch it reshape warfare. The Nobel Prize became his attempt to leave something healing after creating something harmful. Similarly, Jiro never set out to enable destruction, yet his pursuit of aeronautical beauty directly contributed to Japan's military power.

Miyazaki doesn't offer easy moral judgments. Instead, he asks: What does it mean to pursue beauty in a world capable of destruction? Can we separate the creator from what their creations become?

Love, Fragility, and Life Slipping Away

Jiro and Naoko's romance glows with fragile warmth—tender yet fleeting, like a breeze that passes before you realize it was there. Naoko, knowing her tuberculosis will likely kill her, chooses to spend her remaining time with Jiro rather than isolate herself in a sanatorium. She supports his dream even as her own life fades—one more echo of the film's theme that every pursuit asks for something in return.

Dreams as Sanctuary and Burden

Jiro's dream sequences with Caproni reveal his inner world. In dreams, he escapes war, illness, and obligation—he can simply imagine. The sky is endless, planes are pure beauty, and creation exists without consequence. But as reality intrudes, those dreams become shadowed by guilt and responsibility. The film suggests that dreams sustain us but also demand from us. Creation, it insists, is never weightless.

💭 Personal Reflection

While watching The Wind Rises, I felt the film speaking to a part of my own life I rarely articulate. I'm a mother, but before that—and alongside that—I am also a person with my own aspirations, my own work, passions, and dreams. Whenever I immerse myself in the things I love, I feel alive, purposeful, whole. Yet the more I focus on my work, the more my home becomes disorganized, and someone else must fill the spaces I temporarily leave empty.

Pursuing something meaningful often creates gaps elsewhere. Time spent writing is time not spent cooking. Energy poured into creative projects is energy not available for household tasks or immediate family needs. The house grows messier. Responsibilities shift. Someone picks up what I've set down.

Just like Jiro, I am learning that dreams don't exist in isolation. They take time, attention, energy—and sometimes, they take away from the people and places we care about. This doesn't make the dreams wrong or selfish. It simply makes them real, with real costs that must be acknowledged.

The film reminded me to pause and acknowledge this duality without judgment. There's no villain in this story—not in Jiro's life, not in mine. There's simply the honest reality that we cannot do everything simultaneously. We cannot pursue our passions without something else shifting to accommodate that pursuit.

What struck me most was realizing that longing for a life of my own does not make me less of a mother. It simply makes me human—someone with multiple dimensions, multiple needs, multiple callings. The Wind Rises validated something I've struggled to articulate: that the tension between personal dreams and familial responsibilities isn't a failure of character. It's the ordinary complexity of being a whole person trying to live a full life.

I don't have answers about how to balance these competing demands perfectly. I don't know if perfect balance even exists. But watching Jiro grapple with the consequences of his choices—loving his work while recognizing its costs, pursuing his dreams while losing Naoko, creating beauty that becomes destruction—I felt less alone in my own smaller but no less real struggles.

꿈은 혼자 존재하지 않는다. 시간과 에너지를 가져가고, 때로는 우리가 사랑하는 것들로부터 무언가를 빼앗아간다. 그것은 실패가 아니라, 온전한 사람으로 살아가는 복잡한 현실이다.

(A reflection in my native Korean—because some truths about dreams, sacrifice, and being whole feel truer in the language of your heart.)

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Miyazaki's Most Personal Work

The Wind Rises is widely considered Miyazaki's most autobiographical film. Like Jiro, Miyazaki is a creator whose work brings joy to millions yet operates within complicated historical and commercial contexts. Both are artists who pursued beauty through their craft—Jiro through airplanes, Miyazaki through animation. Both faced the tension between personal vision and the industries that enable and constrain that vision.

Miyazaki announced this would be his final film before retiring (though he later returned to direct The Boy and the Heron). As a swan song, it reveals an artist reflecting on his life's work, acknowledging both its achievements and its compromises. The film won numerous awards including the Annie Award for Outstanding Writing and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (ultimately losing to Frozen).

Stunning Historical Animation

The film's hand-drawn animation captures 1920s-1940s Japan with meticulous beauty. From the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake to the graceful flight of prototype aircraft, every frame demonstrates Studio Ghibli's commitment to visual poetry. The dream sequences, where planes become almost abstract expressions of desire and possibility, showcase Miyazaki's ability to use animation not just to depict reality but to express emotional truth.

Joe Hisaishi's score, featuring the haunting theme song "Hikōki Gumo" (ひこうき雲) by Yumi Matsutoya, adds layers of melancholy and longing. The music understands what the film knows: that beauty and sadness are often inseparable.

Adult Themes and Controversy

Unlike most Miyazaki films, The Wind Rises is decidedly not for children. It deals with adult themes—mortality, moral ambiguity, historical complexity—without fantasy or whimsy to soften them. The film sparked controversy in Asia, with critics questioning whether it glorified Japan's wartime aggression or appropriately grappled with the consequences of military aircraft design.

Miyazaki's response was characteristically nuanced: he acknowledged Japan's historical wrongs while insisting that individuals like Jiro deserve understanding rather than simplistic condemnation. The film doesn't excuse or celebrate; it observes with empathy and asks viewers to sit with complexity rather than rush to judgment.

📝 Final Thoughts

The Wind Rises lingers not because of drama, but because of its quiet truths about responsibility and desire, beauty and cost. It understands that every dream—big or small—asks something of us, and we spend our lives deciding what we're willing to give.

This is Miyazaki at his most mature and contemplative, creating a film that trusts audiences to navigate moral complexity without easy answers. Whether you're an artist grappling with your work's impact, a parent balancing personal dreams with family needs, or simply someone who has ever pursued something beautiful despite its costs—this film speaks to that universal human experience of loving what we do while recognizing its consequences.

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you watched The Wind Rises? How do you navigate the tension between pursuing your passions and fulfilling your responsibilities? Have you ever created something beautiful only to watch it take on meanings you didn't intend? Share your thoughts in the comments below—I'd love to hear about your own experiences with dreams, sacrifice, and the complex beauty of living fully.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If you loved the contemplative depth of The Wind Rises, explore more films offering similar reflection:

More Hayao Miyazaki:

• My Neighbor Totoro – Finding magic and comfort in nature during difficult times
• Howl's Moving Castle - Love, acceptance, and the magic of seeing beyond appearances 

• Kiki's Delivery Service – Creative burnout, rest, and finding your way back to yourself

• Spirited Away - Finding courage and identity in a magical bathhouse

Japanese Healing Cinema:

• Little Forest (Korean adaptation) – Finding peace through seasonal rhythms and simple cooking

• Sweet Bean (An) – Patience, dignity, and finding meaning in traditional craftsmanship

Each film in our Cinematic Sanctuaries collection reminds us that life's deepest questions rarely have simple answers, that beauty and sorrow coexist, and that sometimes the most honest thing art can do is help us sit with complexity rather than resolve it.