Earlier on this year, the renowned Japanese animated-film director, Hayao Miyazaki announced once again that he would be retiring from the director’s chair after the release of his last film, The Wind Rises. Earlier today, Deadline released the exclusive official US trailer for the World War II film months ahead of its February theatrical release.
While Miyazaki has announced his retirement before, he seemed sure that his was truly the end for him in an Associated Press news conference earlier on this September.
I know I’ve said I would retire many times in the past. Many of you must think, `Once again.’ But this time I am quite serious.
Hayao Miyazaki and his company, Studio Ghibli, have captured the imaginations of audiences in Japan for the last six decades. Miyazaki made his mark stateside with his 1997 release, Princess Mononoke after which he temporarily retired until creating the celebrated Spirited Away which went to become the first Japanese anime to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
Miyazaki’s self-proclaimed final film, The Wind Rises, topped the Japanese box office for nine consecutive weeks after opening in July. The film ran in New York in Los Angeles on November 14th for a week, allowing it to qualify for an Oscar nomination. Disney’s Touchstone Pictures will be giving the film a wide-release in the U.S. February next year after a week-long limited release beginning on the 21st of that month.
The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu in Japan) is a film based off a manga that was inspired by a short story by Tatsuo Hori. The film will follow a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Mitsubishi A5M and its more infamous successor the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. While Miyazaki states that he had “very complex feelings” about the war, he told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan that the Zero fighter “represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of – they were a truly formidable presence, and so were the pilots who flew them.”
The Wind Rises has so far been met with glowing reviews in the United States. Kenneth Turan, a film critic at the Los Angeles Times wrote of the film:
To see “The Wind Rises” is to simultaneously marvel at the work of a master and regret that this film is likely his last.
Fans all over the United States will have to wait until next February to witness the swan song of the great Japanese filmmaker, in the meantime the US trailer for the film can be seen here:
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