The new film from Hayao Miyazaki is Kaze Tachinu (aka The Wind Rises, or The Wind is Rising), based on the manga of the same name about Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the famous Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane. The fighter was extensively used by Japan during World War II, and Miyazaki’s interest in flight is well-documented, making this project seem like a natural choice for the director.

The film will be released in Japan on July 20 of this year, and a trailer should air on Japanese television this week. We’ll have that trailer when it arrives, but in the meantime we can give you three new images from the film, which will be used as posters in cinemas later this spring. They’re pretty tiny, but you can compare one of them to the original manga art seen above to get a sense of how Miyzaki has translated the visual style.

Update: The same images have been released in much larger size. We’ve added them below.

Here are the larger images:

The release of the film was confirmed last year, but at that point Studio Ghibli planned to repeat its pattern from 1988 and release this movie at the same time as The Tale of Princess Kaguya (aka The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, or Kaguya-hime no Monogatari), which is the new film from Grave of the Fireflies director Isao Takahata. But Takahata’s film has reportedly been delayed to a fall opening, so Miyazaki’s movie gets the summer to itself.

We don’t have a US release date for Miyazaki’s film at this point, but presumably GKids will have it in theaters in 2014. (By which point the die-hard fans may be able to import a DVD or Blu from overseas.) [Twitch]