Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most influential and powerful forces cinema has seen in the last twenty years, helping define Japanese art and culture for much of the West. People all across America will instantly recognize Totoro, the massive cuddly cat-like character from the film My Neighbor Totoro. The character has become a part of American iconography, endearingly embraced by children around the world. Hell, you can find a Totoro plushy in many stores, and some of the younger kids in my family have a plushy Totoro as part of their stuffed animal collection. He even has a cameo in Toy Story 3. That is to say, he is a loved character in homes that are otherwise anime-free. The same can be said for the breakthrough film Spirited Away, which not only has been repeatedly played on Cartoon Network for years, but took home the first and only animated film Oscar for an anime. It is safe to say Miyazaki has shaped, very positively I think, the public perception on anime in a post-Pokemon world. There are many reasons for this, but one might be that he shares Steven Spielberg’s powerful sense of wonder, stirring up the same type of movie magic audiences felt with E.T. or Jurassic Park. In My Neighbor Totoro, there is a bus with fur lining the outside. It has a mouth, paws, and even a tail. It is a cat bus, and it smiles at the camera. Few filmmakers dare to imagine, and fewer still can execute that level of imagination with the same gusto as Miyazaki. His positivism is heartfelt and sincerely rendered, and that is projected onto the audience. They love him, and rightly so. For this reason, I have to confess he is one of my favorite filmmakers. So, it comes with a real sense of loss that he will no longer be making movies, and that his final film is the one currently being reviewed. It’s called The Wind Rises.

What’s interesting about The Wind Rises is that it eschews the rulebook Miyazaki has built up with his long and incredible career. To start with, it’s a biopic, and a by-the-basics one at that. It could be called traditional. On the surface, this may seem drastically less interesting than an enormous flying castle bursting through the clouds or galloping mutant-sized wolves. And the plot synopsis might not convince you otherwise: Jiro Horikoshi is a young wide-eyed boy who wants to engineer airplanes and goes to schooling to learn how to do it. He’s also a compulsive optimist who might be a proxy for Hayao Miyazaki himself or who Miyazaki hopes to be. As Jiro’s life continues, he’s discovered as a prodigy and goes on to make some of the most important planes ever made just in time for World War II. On paper, this is the story about a boy who learns how to make planes and then makes them. The second half slowly builds into a war-torn romance right out of Doctor Zhivago, and this level of melodrama hasn’t been seen before in a Miyazaki film. As a historical drama set in the 1920s, it might seem as though a filmmaker long lauded for his unhindered imagination might come up short, at least in that department if no other. It’s with pleasure that The Wind Rises is amongst his most fully realized films on every level, and arguably his most personal.