"The Wind Rises" is a fictionalized biopic of which person?

The Wind Rises is a fictionalized biopic of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi.

Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, the 2013 Studio Ghibli film follows Horikoshi’s dream of designing beautiful aircraft. The historical parts of the story draw on his education, his work for Mitsubishi, and the development of aircraft including the Mitsubishi A5M fighter and the A6M Zero, which became famous during World War II.

The film is not a strictly factual biography. Miyazaki blends Horikoshi’s real engineering career with fictional characters and events, especially the romance between Jiro and Nahoko Satomi. The film also incorporates ideas from Tatsuo Hori’s 1937 semi-autobiographical novel The Wind Has Risen, including its literary atmosphere and themes of love, illness, and mortality.

Horikoshi himself was a real engineer who studied at Tokyo Imperial University and helped design Japanese military aircraft. The movie focuses less on combat than on the tension between artistic creation and the destructive purposes to which technology can be put. That blend of documented history, fiction, and reflection is why it is best described as a fictionalized biopic rather than a conventional documentary.