Orphaned and working in a mine, Pazu becomes the unlikely and accidental hero in a story dealing with global consequences.Īnd our other protagonist, the young girl, Sheeta, is also an orphan with little idea about why she’s being pursued or why her family heirloom matters so much to so many people, and why they’re willing to kill for it.
Though the mining town is shown as a happy place with a strong sense of community, it reveals that this is an unkind world. Pazu, one of our protagonists, is a miner and a child. Not only real people, but average people. While the film contains magic, governments, armies, apocalyptic technology, it deals with real people. The girl who falls from the sky is saved by the power of her necklace and she’s found by Pazu, a young orphan in a mining town.Īnd this, to me, is where things become very interesting. While Laputa is certainly a world imbued with magic, much of the first half is firmly grounded in reality. Many of Laputa’s themes will be seen in future Miyazaki films, which tend to deal with the real world, though influenced and refracted by magic and mythology and worlds hidden within ours. References to Jonathan Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Hindu and biblical mythology made throughout the film tie this directly to our world. The world of Laputa is a steampunk alternate reality with touches of magic, hyper advanced technology, piracy, espionage, and powerful militaristic governments. A young girl being held captive on an airship struggles for freedom while airpirates attack the ship in order to capture her.Īnd in the process, the young girl knocks out one of her captors, steals back her necklace, and falls out of the airship to avoid pirates, plunging towards the earth. Laputa: Castle in the Sky begins somewhat chaotically. I’ll also be discussing these with the assumption that they’ve been seen by you. I’ll also only be discussing the Japanese audio version of the films, though that doesn’t mean the dubs are bad or not worth seeing. This does, however, mean I won’t be discussing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was made before the founding of the studio. Because this is one of my favorite films studios and Miyazaki is one of my favorite artists, who’s made some of my favorite films, I’ve decided to go through the history of Studio Ghibli one film at a time.įor the next twenty weeks, I’ll be discussing a different Studio Ghibli film, starting with Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which is the first Studio Ghibli film. The plot is simple yet captivating and the film shows a flair which is sadly missing from most modern mass-market, homogenized animation.2015 is the 30th anniversary of the founding of Studio Ghibli and, according to Hayao Miyazaki, it may also be one of its final years as a studio. This film still blows away most recent animated films, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. But worst of all I feel that they have ruined many scenes with intrusive music - the opening scene of the airships for example was originally silent but has been spoiled thanks to Disney's moronic requirement that there be music playing whenever anyone is not speaking, which I find annoying in many Disney films. They have made some pointless alterations, such as changing the main character's name from "Pazu" to "Patzu", and added some dialogue. The voice acting is OK but the dialogue doesn't have the same raw energy that the "streamline" dub or the original Japanese had, and I think James Van Der Beek sounds too old to play the lead. Unfortunately I feel that the release has been partly spoiled by Disney. It would have been the original English dubbed version which I saw - sometimes erroneously referred to as the "Streamline Dub" (the dub was actually by Ghibli themselves and only distributed by Streamline) which is sadly unavailable except as part of a ridiculously expensive laser disc box-set. I was enchanted by the story and characters, but most of all by the haunting and beautiful music. I absolutely loved it, and was heartbroken when it was repeated a while later and I missed it.
Castle in the sky castle tv#
I first saw this film when I was about 8 years old on TV in the UK (where it was called "Laupta: The Flying Island").
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