‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky’ — sky adventure is right up my alley

Quick intro: a podcast I’m a big fan of, Blank Check with Griffin and David, is going through the filmography of Hayao Miyazaki, so before I listen to each episode I want to get my own bloggorific thoughts written down here.

Like many of my most favourite movies (of which this certainly is one), I rewatch Laputa: Castle in the Sky every couple of years. The film is just so clearly up my alley; what with the ‘Treasure Island in the sky’ story, the parallels to lost Atlantis, ancient robots, machinery overgrown with greenery, and of course, pirates!

Laputa is a place that I hate in Gulliver’s Travels, but I just love to revisit it in this movie. And what a movie it is! — Miyazaki’s trajectory at this point in his directorial career is astronomical, to have started so high already with The Castle of Cagliostro and to be this good on his third feature.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky is an intricately animated movie with countless examples of Miyazaki’s magical attention-to-detail. The story forms a beautiful whole without feeling too tidy, the world is mysterious and evocative without being overloaded with exposition.

These characters, too, are some of my favourites in all of Studio Ghibli’s output. Dola, leader of the Sky Pirates, is an all-time best antagonist-turned-ally, and Muska is a great foil for both the pirates and the protagonists, being so self-centered and power hungry that he cannot see the forest for the trees.

I always love Uncle Pomme, down in the mines, listening to the rocks.

Oh! The music. Joe Hisaishi composed additional orchestral score for the US release of Laputa (there it’s just called Castle in the Sky because of the Spanish meaning of Laputa…) and you can really tell that he is also stretching his prowess with this lush, sweeping adventurous soundtrack. There are fewer notable melodies than the truly Epic Fantasy scale that Nausicaä reaches, but the main theme is gorgeous and comes in many variations throughout the movie (my favourite has to be ‘Moonlit Sea of Clouds’, when Pazu and Sheeta are on the airship at night).

I could gush about Laputa: Castle in the Sky forever, and maybe I will if I decide to research the Pulp tradition. As Japanese as Studio Ghibli is, their movies are often indebted to the ‘two-fisted tales’ sorts of adventures that also inspire movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Rocketeer. In particular, there seem to be Tintin inspirations in Laputa, from the Hergé-esque physical comedy to some of the very comic-bookish scene blocking. Of course, being a Miyazaki movie, there is an extra dash of sublime magic from the natural world, which is more important than ever in a time that seems to have forgotten about such very real magic.

Finally, no one is going to be surprised how influential Laputa has been over the last thirty years. There are the other Atlantis adventures that have come since, each giving a tip of the hat in their own way; there are countless JRPGs and other video games that borrow wholesale from this and other two-fisted traditions; and of course, there’s Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Hideaki Anno’s smash hit anime from 1990 that basically comes from the exact same idea that he and Miyazaki were batting back and forth during their time working together. Nadia is most notable as the predecessor to Neon Genesis Evangelion, a series that does not particularly resemble Laputa but is visible in-utero in Nadia.

(Just as an aside, there’s a baffling but hilarious moment late in Nadia where the protagonist is presented with the gigantic corpse of “Adam”, the first human made by alien precursors, and it resembles Lilith of NGE — apparently the precursors had to try a few times to make humans at the right size!)

So yeah, to wrap up, if you haven’t already seen it, go check out Laputa: Castle in the Sky: it’s a great time capsule of excellent Studio Ghibli craft, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get sucked into loving it if you give it a chance, too :)