TOKYO — Five times, Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement from feature filmmaking. Five times, he has returned to the drawing board. But at age 85, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli may finally be delivering on the promise — and the film, titled "The Wind Rises Again," appears to be his most personal work yet. Studio Ghibli has confirmed a 2027 release date for the film, which Miyazaki has been working on since shortly after The Boy and the Heron won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2024.

Early footage screened for a small group of journalists at Ghibli's Koganei studio suggests a semi-autobiographical film that follows an aging animator looking back at his life through the characters and worlds he has created. The sequence shown — seven minutes of hand-drawn animation without dialogue — depicts the protagonist walking through a dreamscape populated by familiar Ghibli creatures: Totoro, the Kodama from Princess Mononoke, the bathhouse spirits from Spirited Away. The animation quality is extraordinary, with Miyazaki reportedly personally supervising every key frame.

Producer Toshio Suzuki described the film as "a meditation on legacy — not the legacy of monuments or achievements, but the legacy of imagination passed from one generation to the next." Studio Ghibli will release the film in Japan in July 2027, with international distribution handled by GKIDS in North America and Wild Bunch in Europe. The studio has confirmed that longtime composer Joe Hisaishi is scoring the film. Given Miyazaki's age and the personal nature of the material, "The Wind Rises Again" is being treated by the studio — and by the global animation community — as an event of profound cultural significance.