Porco Rosso ranks as Hayao Miyazaki's oddest film: a bittersweet period adventure about a dashing pilot who has somehow been turned into a pig. Miyazaki once said, "Initially, it was supposed to be a 45-minute film for tired businessmen to watch on long airplane flights... Why kids love it is a mystery to me." The early 1930s setting enabled Miyazaki to focus on the old airplanes he loves, and the film boasts complex and extremely effective aerial stunts and dogfights. In the new English dub from Disney, Michael Keaton as Porco delivers lines like "All middle-aged men are pigs" with appropriate cynicism, but his voice may be too familiar for some Miyazaki fans. Susan Egan makes a curiously distant Gina, the thrice-widowed hotel owner bound to Porco by years of friendship; Kimberly Williams is more effective as the irrepressible young engineer Fio.

In the far future, man has destroyed the Earth in the "Seven Days of Fire". Now, there are small pockets of humanity that survive. One pocket is the Valley of Wind where a princess named Nausicaa tries to understand, rather than destroy the Toxic Jungle. Note that the old US release titled Warriors of the Wind is an entirely kiddified version which edits the original movie heavily, thus creating an entirely different story.