YMMV / The Wind Rises

• Applicability:
  • Some have read into the film's depiction of an artist's simultaneous joy in the creative aspects of his work and trepidation at its eventual uses Miyazaki's own mixture of pride and enjoyment in his films and trepidation at many modern trends in the medium he dislikes.
  • The ending scene could be seen as a parallel to Miyazaki's announced retirement.
• Award Snub:
  • At the Annie Awards, where The Wind Rises was only nominated for three awards and only won Best Writing in a Animated Feature Award for Hayao Miyazaki.
  • The movie was nominated for but did not win the Best Animated Picture category of the Academy Awards 2014, which many did not agree with.
• Broken Base: The biopic part of the film: Is it a romanticized version of a designer's life or is it more saccharine and fictionalized than Patch Adams? Should the consequences of the planes that were built have been acknowledged more? Should Jiro have been shown regretting what he's created? This will most likely be debated long after Miyazaki is gone.
• Cargo Ship: Jiro and his obsession with planes. An in-universe example also, when Jiro reveals he's engaged, Kurokawa laughs and admits he thought Jiro would marry an airplane.
• Friendly Fandoms: Due to similar subject matter, the film has this with Oppenheimer.
• Genius Bonus: When Jiro notes that wood and canvas can be as good as metal for airplane, he was not the only one to reach such a conclusion: the Allies designed the De Havilland Mosquito, a fast, deadly effective and surprisingly durable tactical bomber made of largely plywood.
  • Wood and canvas would have been more typical material than metal for planes built in 1920s and 30s. Stressed metal skin was a new technology until at least mid-1930s and many World War 2 era planes continued to be built at least partly of wood and canvas because they could be manufactured with less skilled labor and without expensive and costly industrial equipment: British Hawker Hurricane, Soviet Lavochkin and Yakovlev fighters until 1944, and even early variants of American Vought Corsair were made partly (or even largely) of wood and/or canvas.
• He Really Can Act: Partial example. Hideaki Anno had mostly been directing or animating throughout his career. His acting repertoire consists of a role in a parody of the Ultraman franchise and the occasional cameo. In this film it’s quite noticeable that he’s not a professional VA, speaking in a somewhat more nasalised and less clear voice than the rest of the cast, but he makes emotional scenes work very well.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The movie poster has become a source of many parodies lately.
  • "I LOVE IT! AIRPLANES ARE FASCINATING."
• Signature Scene: Naoko painting on the hill, and her and Jiro's interactions on the hill. Without watching trailers, one would think this was a romantic drama rather than a biography about a WWII aerospace engineer.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Israeli cable company HOT put this film on their children’s VOD menu, dubbed to Hebrew. While it’s not as bad as Princess Mononoke or Grave of the Fireflies, the subject material, and certainly Naoko coughing blood and dying, are hardly child-appropriate material. In America, the film was rated PG-13 film and released by Touchstone Pictures.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: While the film is mostly focused on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, and shies away from exploring the nature of the Imperial Japan in general, it nevertheless attracted criticism from Koreans (for the Zero is seen as a symbol of Japanese aggression and many were assembled by Korean forced laborers) and Japanese nationalists (who denounced Miyazaki as a traitor for his criticism of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's attempt to revise the Japanese constitution). Miyazaki, a committed pacifist and leftist, addressed Korean criticism by noting Horikoshi's resistance to much of the demands of the Japanese military, and that he shouldn't be held personally responsible for the Japanese Empire's atrocities just because he lived in the period.