Film · 1986 · Films · 1980s
When the Wind Blows
Scored from 62 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Jim and Hilda Bloggs (voiced by John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft), a retired couple in a cottage in the Sussex countryside, respond to news that war with the Soviet Union is days away by following the government's civil-defence pamphlets to the letter. Jim builds an 'inner core or refuge' from doors propped against a wall, whitewashes the windows and stockpiles paper bags, confident that the common sense which carried them through the Blitz will do again. Jimmy T. Murakami's animated feature, adapted from Raymond Briggs's graphic novel, draws the couple by hand against model sets and keeps their domestic chatter running through the countdown and into the aftermath. The gap between what the leaflets promise and what follows is the film's subject.
Released in 1986, When the Wind Blows is an animation, drama and war film. The runtime is 84 minutes. It was made in the United Kingdom. It is rated PG.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 158 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 62 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 63 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where When the Wind Blows lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 62.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
