Whenever Hayao Miyazaki, now 72, makes a film, fans and critics weigh it against this anime master's past triumphs — and often find it wanting. Japanese critics, especially, fondly recall the films that Miyazaki directed at the start of his long career as peaks. That is, 1979's "Lupin Sansei: Cagliostro no Shiro (Lupin the Third: Castle of Cagliostro)" over 1997's "Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke)," the period fantasy that was a box-office smash at home and broke Miyazaki widely abroad.

I've resisted playing this game, and not only because I like the gorgeously strange "Mononoke" more than the jokey "Cagliostro." I've admired Miyazaki for his unbridled imaginative flights and prodigious labors at a time of life when many animators have long since burned out, even when the films themselves were narratively long-winded or baggy. And I've loved the worlds he created, with their finely observed, lushly rendered naturalism that made even the more out-there scenes feel thrillingly beautiful and real, the train ride through the water in 2001's "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)" being one well-remembered example.

That naturalism is still front and center in his latest film, "Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)," but it is also suffused with nostalgia for a vanished time, similar to 1992's "Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso)," his "air pirates" animation set in the inter-war era. Based on a Miyazaki manga that mixes the prewar life of famed Zero fighter-plane designer Jiro Horikoshi with a 1938 Tatsuo Hori novelette about star-crossed love, the film is again drawn with loving attention to period detail, as well as stirring flights of fantasy.