Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animation director responsible for such stunningly beautiful fantasies as the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away’’ (2001), has set what he’s announced will be his last film, the gorgeous “The Wind Rises,’’ in pre-World War II Japan.
But this highly fictionalized biography of airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi — who created the famous Zero fighters used at Pearl Harbor and in kamikaze attacks against US troops in World War II — effectively transcends reality even as it references real people and events.
As a youngster, Horikoshi (voiced by Hideaki Anno) has begun having the first of a series of elaborate dreams in which a real-life Italian aviation pioneer, Giovanni Caproni (Mansai Nomura), warns him of the terrible uses to which flying machines were put during the First World War.
Miyazaki offers a vivid, at times fantastical view of Japan between the wars, wracked by the Great Depression, a fearsome earthquake that leveled Tokyo in 1923, a tuberculosis epidemic and the rise of fascism.
By 1933, Horikoshi is a rising designer at Mitsubishi, sent to Nazi Germany to study the work of that country’s Hugo Junkers, whose all-metal planes make Japanese aircraft seem crude by comparison.
Horikoshi is driven not only by his creative impulses, but by his doomed romance with the sickly Nahoko (Miori Takimoto), whom he had first met during the earthquake and re-encounters at a sanitarium.
A sequence in which Horikoshi is warned of Hitler’s plans for world conquest by a German visitor specifically references Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,’’ which is one of Miyazaki’s sources of inspiration, along with a book by Tatsuo Hori, a poet who was a friend of Horikoshi.
Unlike Miyazaki’s earlier films, “The Wind Rises’’ and its pacifistic message is not specifically aimed at younger children, though there is some slapstick (as well as quite a bit of smoking). Older kids may be beguiled (and occasionally frightened) as much as their parents at the stunning images that Miyazaki has wrought using old-school, mostly hand-drawn animation.
The US distributor for Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, has booked this original Japanese-language version for a one-week run for Oscar consideration — and frankly, it’s hard to imagine any American animation this year coming close to this sublime level. An English-dubbed edition will follow on Feb. 21.