A SOMBRE exploration of love, responsibility and death, “Kaze Tachinu” (“The Wind Rises”) is being described as Hayao Miyazaki’s first animated film for adults. After half a lifetime making exquisite fantasy films for children, such as “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away”, Mr Miyazaki, now 72 and viewed as the reigning genius of Japanese cinema, has tackled the true story of an aeroplane maker in the second world war.

The title comes from a Paul Valéry poem: “The wind is rising! We must try to live.” The wind is a portent for the disasters that anchor the film: the 1923 earthquake that levelled much of Tokyo and Yokohama, killing over 100,000 people; and Japan’s terrible war nearly two decades later.

Despite its real-world setting, the film is saturated in fantastical Miyazaki flourishes. It is book-ended with dreams. It starts with a ten-year-old Jiro Horikoshi imagining flying above his provincial home before being wakened by bombs from a hulking aerial warship. The film’s denouement sees him walking through the ruined landscape of wartime Japan, a nightmare partly wrought from his boyhood dreams of flight.

A brilliant but naive engineer, Jiro is based on the real designer of Japan’s Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Once considered the world’s best aerial fighter, the Zero had a feared reputation among American pilots during the second world war. The plane helped launch the war against America when Japanese pilots used it to attack Pearl Harbour in 1941. By 1945 the Zero had lost its technical edge; teenage Kamikaze pilots used them as suicide bombs against the approaching American maritime fleet.

The film follows Jiro as he pursues his childhood fantasies by building a plane. His love of flying is depicted as pure and uncomplicated. There is a sensual, erotic quality to the air scenes; his budding love for his fiancée, Naoko, is conveyed through the soaring flight of paper aeroplanes. Regret comes only in the final scenes.

Born in the year of the Pearl Harbour attack, Mr Miyazaki is imprinted with the pacifism of many Japanese from his generation. His films are often paeans to the natural world and warnings about its perilous state. His heroes tend to be children who warn others about the dangers of greed and militarism, only for their pleas to fall on deaf adult ears.

Fans have questioned why the great pacifist has made a film that appears to lionise a weapons maker. Mr Miyazaki says he was drawn to the story of one of Japan’s great eccentric geniuses. “It was wrong from the beginning to go to war,” he explained in June. “But it’s useless…to blame Jiro for it.”

In a country where politicians regularly rattle the ghosts of the past, this film has sparked debate. Mr Miyazaki recently published an article in which he said he was “disgusted” by government plans to upgrade Japan’s army and “taken aback” by the leadership’s ignorance of history. Though he did not mention him by name, the attack was clearly aimed at Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister. Conservatives have responded by telling Mr Miyazaki to stay out of politics. Worse, some have called the film’s slow-moving style and lack of digital fireworks “boring”.

Mr Miyazaki’s film feels personal. His father directed a company that made rudders for the Zero. And like Jiro, the director grew up obsessed with aeroplanes. A swansong, artistically and politically, “Kaze Tachinu” may soar past its critics. It has been a box-office success in Japan since it opened this month, and it has been chosen to compete for the main prize at the Venice film festival later this summer.