JAPANESE director Hayao Miyazaki has made his final film.

At 73, he is drawing the line under his sublime career in animation at Studio Ghibli, bidding farewell with his most adult and deeply personal work, the hauntingly beautiful but portentous biopic The Wind Rises, where dreams and nightmares, life and death, endlessly intertwine.

On the surface, it is a profound hymn to the aviation obsessive Jiro Horikoshi, who solemnly, methodically, chased the dream of designing the most beautiful flying machines, only for his sleek fighter planes to become the perfectly formed harbingers of death at the tail end of the Second World War at Pearl Harbor.

Underneath, you can read into this poetic but dark Miyazaki story his own creative ambitions; his love of invention; his wish for artistry and humanity to fly; his dedicated honing of his craft. The fantasies of past works for children, such as the fairytales Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, have made way for a sharp intake of reality, but still with the fantasia intact.

When the quiet, perfectionist Horikoshi and his dashing Italian mentor, Gianni Caproni, disappear into the long grass at the film’s finale, Miyazaki is metaphorically doing likewise. The message is we must have our dreams, and our dreams must live on, the baton taken up by the next generation of dreamers, no matter what the world hurls at them.

Borrowed from Paul Valery, the film’s title carries a highly symbolic coda: The Wind Rises....We must try to live.

Here Miyazaki’s heart pounds loudest, not only in the thrill of the possibilities of aeronautical flight but in the flight of (defiant) love as he weaves a tragic romance into Horikoshi’s story, taken from a 1936 novella by Tatsuo Hori. Love sparks in the most desperate, chaotic of circumstances, the horror of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

The wind will rise again, capable of destruction but always carrying flights of fantasy and idealism too.