“The Wind Rises” has been met with some controversy in Japan and in South Korea. The film is a fictional account on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a fighter plane used in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some Japanese conservatives have criticized Mr. Miyazaki for the film’s antiwar stance, while a number of South Korean Internet users have accused him of romanticizing the inventor of a plane that became a symbol for the Japanese military during World War II.

In a 2011 interview with Cut Magazine, translated into English in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Miyazaki explained his reasoning for making the film: “My wife and my staff would ask me, ‘Why make a story about a man who made weapons of war?’ ” he said. “And I thought they were right. But one day, I heard that Horikoshi had once murmured, ‘All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.’ And then I knew I’d found my subject.” “The Wind Rises,” has made more than $80 million at the box office in six weeks in Japan.