By Jim James - images & text © 2014 Tweet Scale: 1/48 - about 7½"/ 191mm wingspan Parts: 32 injection-molded plastic, plus a polycap for the propeller. Instructions: Typical FineMolds; clearn detailed step-by-step assembly diagrams. Exceptional paint guide with paint colors in English and Gunze and Tamiya paint numbers. Decals: Very small waterslide sheet with two control panels and a name plate in Japanese. Molding Quality: 10 Detail: 9 Accuracy: 8 (mainly because the pilot doesn't look right) MSRP: ¥2200 JPY ($24.95 USD/ ~$27.75 CAN/ € 18.24 EUR) available from Starship Modeler Overall Rating: 9 - a nice kit to build. "The Wind Rises" is a 2013 anime film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The film is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi A5M and its famous successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Miyazaki announced that this was to be his final film before retiring as a feature director. Although (at the time of this writing) the film has not yet had a theatrical release in the US, it is available for viewing online and there are trailers and many images to be found for reference.

^ Completed model Image: Home-made decals replicate the pattern on Jiro's shirt. Image: The clunky kit-provided stand

The paint references in the kit seem to be fairly accurate although online images show the colors to be lighter that the recommended colors. I stuck with the recommended colors, although, for some inexplicable reason, my LHS was all out of Susie Blue. Building & Painting The kit is a joy to assemble and is almost a snap kit. Part fit is excellent and only minor seam filling is required. The kit is molded in for colors - white, red, blue (Susie Blue?) and tan - but still needs painting. The wing tips are easily masked for painting blue and all other detail can be painted pretty much on the sprue. The wheels are very flat and it's difficult to paint the tires cleanly. Masking the wheel hubs is recommended. The pilot is a little strange (and doesn't really resemble Jiro in movie stills or the box art). The upper torso is definitely 1/48 but the lower body is 1/72. This isn't a real problem since the pilot sits nicely in the cockpit opening and hides the legs and anything else in the cockpit tub. Painting instructions for the pilot are very detailed and straightforward until you get to the pattern on the shirt (small gray plus signs on white). You can either ignore the pattern (who's to know except anyone who reads this), make a freehand attempt or make a clear decal with tiny plus signs (that's what I did). The stand makes up a lot of the plastic (9 parts). FineMolds is cornering the market on clunky stands (have you seen the stand for the TIE X?) The grace of this plane calls out for a simple stand. I filled the two stand holes in the fuselage and replaced them with a piece of small brass tube. A curved piece of wire and a wood base provide the support. The image on the base is clouds from another piece of anime. Conclusions This is a nice kit to build. Painting is quite simple and it's easy to achieve a good looking model - even if you use the clunky base and can't find Susie Blue paint. A companion Finemolds 1/48 Mitsubishi Ka-14 (from the same movie) is also available.

Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are those of the reviewer.
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This page copyright © 2014 Starship Modeler™. First posted on 26 February 2014.