The story begins with Jiro Horikoshi, a young boy who always dreamed of soaring the skies on mechanical wings and fly alongside birds. Being based in the early 20th century were mechanical airplane design was at its birth, they were only a select few who could reach for the heavens. Jiro on the other hand suffered from near-sightedness and thus implied he will never be able to fly an airplane. One day in his dreams, he encounters the famous Engineer Caproni, who is well-known all over the world for his designs in his aircraft. Both of them were utterly surprised to find each other in their dreams (as the movie quotes it as "Both of them trespassing their dreams"). There were many interactions shown between Caproni and Jiro in the movie, and I personally am unsure about whether they were actual meetings or was it just his mind playing games.
The film revolves much around his life and depicts some major historical events such as the Great Depression, the Kanto earthquake the TB epidemic and lastly World War II.
The movie was made with extreme delicacy and you will also observe there is no use of any of the latest CGIs (as expected from a Miyazaki movie) and is a sheer beauty when it comes to character development.
Jiro is also shown to draw the blue prints of his designs obsessively which is said to be a reference to Miyazaki himself who also spends a lot of time working on his creations.
This movie tends to have a few conflicting areas and Miyazaki wisely makes it look as the Japanese were the bearer of the brunt but infact it was them who had aimed to dominate the Asia and the Pacific. When Miyazaki was questioned about this he said he never blamed Jiro for the missteps of his nation.
One of the most troubling facts about this movie was that despite both the aircraft designers knowing that their creations were going to kill thousands of people they don't stop designing and thus it really is left to be a personal choice to whether someone's dreams are more valuable than thousands of lives (but as Miyazaki says "don't blame Jiro" (escapist)).
This is definitely not the typical "cutesy films" of Miyazaki like Ponyo or Spirited Away but you will not be disappointed by the sheer perfection of Hayao Miyazaki, certainly a fitting end to his amazing career.
This movie easily deserved an Oscar and the jury will always be haunted by their disastrous decisions of giving it to Frozen instead.
PS: I have tried to refrain from literally giving away
everything of the movie.
