Gallery: the landscape art of The Wind Rises

Images from Miyazaki Hayao's final film, illustrating the changing landscape of Japan in the 1920s and 30s – a time marked by poverty, natural disasters and the country’s traumatic transition to modernity.

Updated:
Gallery: the landscape art of The Wind Rises

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.

Originally published