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There’s something quietly powerful about The Wind Rises, a movie by Hayao Miyazaki under Studio Ghibli. It was meant to be his final work before he stepped away, like a closing note, soft but full of meaning, before he eventually returned back in 2017. Maybe that’s why the film feels more personal. Unlike the usual fantasy worlds Ghibli is known for, this one feels grounded, almost intimate. Miyazaki doesn’t just tell a story; he drifts between dream and reality, letting imagination sit beside engineering. Airplanes are not just machines here. They are dreams shaped by wind, equations, and human obsession. You can feel how he respects both beauty and imperfection, how creation is always a mix of hope and consequence.

Watching Jiro designing airplanes didn’t feel distant to me. It felt… familiar. Not only the result, but the process. The feasibility study, the desk calculations, the 2D drawings, the prototyping, and the stress combined with frustration that quietly builds during all those stages. It reminds me of my own work as a mechanical design engineer. Building an aircraft is not so different from building heavy equipment. Different scale, different environment, but the same soul: understanding forces, balancing constraints, making something that must work in the real world, not just on paper. When the movie showed aerodynamic thinking, I felt a strange déja vu. Back in university, I spent long nights with NACA airfoil, lift coefficients, drag coefficients, trying to understand how air moves and how shapes respond. It wasn’t romantic at the time. It was messy and full of smoke and doubt. But through Jiro’s eyes, it becomes something quietly beautiful.

What stayed with me is not just the engineering, but the intention behind it. Jiro doesn’t just want to build planes for war. He wants to build something meaningful, something elegant. And I realize, in my own work, I often deal with practical things, cost, deadlines, and products made for business. Necessary things. But somewhere inside, there is still that same quiet desire to create something that feels right, not just works right.

Carrying dreams, even when the world is not perfect. Like the wind, you don’t always control where things go. We design, we calculate, we worry, and somehow, we still choose to create.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

“The wind is rising. We must try to live.” — Paul Valéry Eora, 18 April 2026

Hayao Miyazaki breaths life into animation.

His works continue to be sought after over time.

The pursuit of innocent expression appears as a stubborn insistence and does not give a chance to think about efficiency.

Behind the expression feeling nostalgia,the passion of the author can be glimpsed.

宮崎駿はアニメーションに命を吹き込んだ。

彼の作品群は、時を経ても時代に求められ続けている。

無垢な表現への追及は頑なな拘りとして現れ、効率を考える隙を与えない。

郷秋漂う表現の裏側に、作者の情熱が垣…