The title comes from a line by poet Paul Valry: "The wind is rising, we must try to live." It's the Buddhist carpe diem — go with the flow. The wind carries off the parasol of a fragile girl, Nahoko, voiced by Emily Blunt, into the hands of Jiro — who'll fall in love with her. Their love is idealized, but what an ideal. Though she's obviously dying of TB, she's plucky. She faces into the wind.
The movie's central contradiction is between the purity of Jiro's dreams and the deadly uses to which his plane — the legendary Zero fighter — is put. Does Miyazaki downplay the evil? Some critics say yes. One even stopped an awards meeting of a Boston critics society to say that anyone who voted for the movie was accepting the whitewash of atrocities. I don't see it that way. Miyazaki's irony isn't as broad as, say, Bertolt Brecht's in Galileo, the tragedy of a man whose appetite for science and lack of regard for its consequences lead inevitably — in Brecht's formulation — to weapons of mass destruction. But it's hard to imagine Miyazaki being that on-the-nose. The terrible implications are there, but underplayed.
It's the underplaying and the evenness of tone that's the key to his greatness, the way he transforms mundane sensations from real to surreal in barely perceptible puffs. And he puts so much individuality and soul into these anime characters with their standard button eyes and tiny noses that it's uncanny. He makes the human spirit seem as fleeting yet as eternal as the wind itself.