Gallery: the landscape art of The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises is Miyazaki Hayao’s plaintive parable about the conquest of flight and the corruption of dreams. But it’s also a detailed historical testament to the Japan of the 1920s and 30s – Miyazaki’s father’s era, and a time marked by poverty, natural disasters and the country’s traumatic transition to modernity. Here are some illustrations of that changing landscape, from what this very greatest of animators says will be his final film.

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The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The mother and sister of Jiro, the film’s protagonist

The mother and sister of Jiro, the film’s protagonist

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

Jiro as a young man, setting out into the world with his sister Satomi

Jiro as a young man, setting out into the world with his sister Satomi

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The eruption of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923

The eruption of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The Wind Rises (2013)

The film’s tuberculosis sanatorium – a tribute to Thomas Mann’s modernist classic The Magic Mountain

The film’s tuberculosis sanatorium – a tribute to Thomas Mann’s modernist classic The Magic Mountain

Jiro’s conjugal bedroom

Jiro’s conjugal bedroom

 

In the June 2014 issue of Sight & Sound

COVER FEATURE: Free falling

The Wind Rises, a fictional biography of the designer of Japan’s famous Zero fighter plane, and the swansong of Japanese director Miyazaki Hayao, is a movie unlike any he has made and yet absolutely true to his preoccupations. Nick Bradshaw looks back at the turbulent dreams of flight, freedom and progress in the great Japanese animator’s films.

 

+ Lessons from the master

Two of Miyazaki’s long-term collaborators – supervising animation director Kosaka Kitarō and producer 
Suzuki Toshio – offer their insights into working with the great director. Interviews by Nick Bradshaw
.

 

+ Drawing on the past

Kurosawa, Swallows and Amazons, Russian landscape painting, Moebius, manga and his wartime childhood: Miyazaki’s world is composed of an astonishing variety of elements. 
By Helen McCarthy.

 

+ The king is dead

Now that Miyazaki has announced his retirement, where are the Japanese animators who can carry on in the same tradition – and where are the ones who can start something new?
 By Jasper Sharp.

  • Sight & Sound: the June 2014 issue

    Sight & Sound: the June 2014 issue

    Miyazaki Hayao takes flight with The Wind Rises, plus Jia Zhangke on A Touch of Sin, Amat Escalante on Heli, David Thomson on the cinema of World...

Read more about our June 2014 issue

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