The Wind Rises by Hayao Miyazaki is the acclaimed animation director’s final film. It is his most personal film, his most audacious; it is also incredibly flawed and has a bit of a moral quandary beneath its gorgeous and sentimental overtones. There has been a lot of talk about the moral implications of the film, which is a traditional western-styled character epic and unlike Miyazaki’s other films, it’s set in the “real” world rather than a fantasy/magic/sci-fi one. The film follows a boy named Jiro (loosely based on Jiro Horokoshi, the designer of the “Zero” WWII Fighter plane) who dreamed of airplanes and flying, and became an engineer to do so. Unfortunately for Jiro, he had that dream during pre-World War II Japan.

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