Jiro Horikoshi designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero — the fighter plane that attacked Pearl Harbor and dominated the Pacific in the early years of World War II. He was an engineer who loved aircraft the way a painter loves light. He did not design weapons. He designed dreams of flight that happened to be co-opted by an empire at war. Hayao Miyazaki — a lifelong pacifist who hates war — made him the subject of his most personal film: The Wind Rises.

The Wind Rises Is Miyazaki's Most Controversial Film

Miyazaki's 2013 film fictionalizes Horikoshi's life as a story about the beauty of engineering and the horror of what that beauty becomes when placed in the hands of the military. The film does not celebrate the Zero. It mourns the dream that produced it — the dream of making beautiful machines that fly, a dream that a military-industrial complex turned into instruments of death. Anti-war activists criticized the film for not condemning Horikoshi more harshly. Nationalists criticized it for not celebrating the Zero more proudly. Miyazaki satisfied no one, which suggests the film is honest.

He Dreamed With Caproni

In the film, Jiro shares dreams with Giovanni Battista Caproni, the Italian aircraft designer, who tells him that airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams. This line is the film's thesis: creation and destruction are not separate acts. The same imagination that conceives a beautiful machine conceives, unwittingly, a weapon. The dreamer is not absolved by the beauty of the dream.

Miyazaki Retired After Making It

The Wind Rises was announced as Miyazaki's final film (he later un-retired for The Boy and the Heron). It is his most adult work — a meditation on art, war, mortality, and the complicity of creators in the uses of their creations. It has no fantasy elements, no children, and no happy ending. It is a love letter to engineering and a eulogy for the dreams that engineering destroys. Jiro is on HoloDream. He dreams of flight. The wind has risen. We must try to live.