Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese Animator, Said to Be Retiring Courtesy of the Toronto International Film Festival A scene from Hayao Miyazaki's film "The Wind Rises." The Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki will retire from filmmaking, according to a report on Variety's Web site. Mr. Miyazaki, 72, has directed 11 animated features over 34 years, including "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away," which won an Oscar for best animated feature in 2003. Koji Hoshino, who is the president of Mr. Miyazaki's production company, made the announcement on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Miyazaki's latest work, "The Wind Rises," was shown. "Miyazaki has decided that "Kaze Tachinu" ("The Wind Rises") will be his last film, and he will now retire," Mr. Hoshino said. More details are to be revealed at a news conference in Tokyo next week. The language of the announcement does leave the door open for Mr. Miyazaki to work on shorter projects. "The Wind Rises" has been met with some controversy in Japan and in South Korea. The film is a fictional account on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a fighter plane used in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some Japanese conservatives have criticized Mr. Miyazaki for the film's antiwar stance, while a number of South Korean Internet users have accused him of romanticizing the inventor of a plane that became a symbol for the Japanese military during World War II. In a 2011 interview with Cut Magazine, translated into English in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Miyazaki explained his reasoning for making the film: "My wife and my staff would ask me, "Why make a story about a man who made weapons of war?" " he said. And I thought they were right. But one day, I heard that Horikoshi had once murmured, "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful." And then I knew I'd found my subject. "The Wind Rises," has made more than $80 million at the box office in six weeks in Japan. Disney announced last week that it would handle theatrical distribution in the United States, although no release date has been set. The movie is slated to be shown this month at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.