Audiences and journalists at the Venice Film Festival, where “The Wind Rises” received its worldwide premiere, were reportedly stunned into silence when Koji Hoshino, the president of Studio Ghibli, first revealed the news at a press conference. One prominent American critic likened the announcement to “an unexpected death notice.”
All of which makes this summer’s nationalistic backlash in Japan against Miyazaki and his colleagues’ remarks on Japan’s political and historical conundrums that much more startling — and revealing.