Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Featuring the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt. Rated G.

Animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s features always have serious streaks of melancholia. But his best-known efforts, from Kiki’s Delivery Service to Spirited Away, generally offer equal amounts of raucous humour and mystical weirdness to occupy other parts of the brain.

In The Wind Rises, a tone of resigned sorrow dominates everything else. Perhaps because Miyazaki was born in Tokyo the year Pearl Harbor was attacked, and his earliest memories must be marked by the firebombing retribution that followed—and because he has also announced his retirement—this may have been unavoidable. The sense of fate-driven history is especially strong since his focus here is on Jirô Horikoshi, a fictionalized version of the real-life designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, one of the deadliest fighter planes of World War II.

The veteran director, again working from his own comic-strip story and lyrical script, manages to keep battle footage to the last few minutes of this two-hour venture, instead focusing on the future engineer’s precocious childhood and young adulthood between big wars. As with other Miyazaki features adapted for western audiences, Disney has done a superb job casting the dubbed version, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt starring as Jirô, John Krasinski as his loyal friend and fellow plane designer, and Martin Short as their grouchy boss, who sends them to Germany to learn from the Nazis.

Too nearsighted to pilot anything himself, the romantically introspective Jirô is inspired by early dreams of flying, usually centred around an Italian aeronautical genius (Stanley Tucci), who bemoans the notion of his beautiful creations being turned into weapons. And the lad is haunted by the little girl he helped during a massive 1923 earthquake that foreshadows atomic annihilation we (thankfully) never get to.

She grows up to be the gentle Nahoko (Emily Blunt), also fixated on him but followed by tuberculosis, not by Japan’s secret police, as Jirô is after a happenstance visit with a German dissident voiced by none other than Werner Herzog. That’s just one of many quirks (even if it’s an after-the-fact oddity) dotting this valedictory effort from one of the great storytellers of the past 30 years.