Award-winning animated film director Hayao Miyazaki will release his first movie in five years Saturday — a work based on the lives of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of Japan's legendary Zero fighter plane, and mid-20th-century writer Tatsuo Hori.
Horikoshi was one of the "most brilliant" Japanese in the early, turbulent years of the Showa Era (1926-1989), when Japan charged toward war, Miyazaki, 72, said in a recent interview about his new movie, "Kaze Tachinu" ("The Wind Rises").
The title is the same as one of Hori's most celebrated novels, his 1937 work about a woman's struggle with tuberculosis. He said it was a main source of inspiration for the movie.