When he does get his hands on Laputa’s power, he casually uses it for murder on a mass scale that’s shocking in what’s mostly an amiable children’s adventure. He proves more than capable of threatening Pazu and Sheeta’s lives, and attempting to kill them. He’s a dapper, urbane sort of villain, capable of acting charming when it suits him, though most of his gentler words include veiled threats. And while Colonel Muska pretends to represent the government, he wants access to Laputa entirely for his own sake. Sheeta’s necklace, it turns out, is a powerful artifact that holds the keys to Laputa.
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As Dola’s gang, Colonel Muska, and the military all pursue Sheeta, the two children flee through a long series of action sequences that take them down into a series of underground mines, across a rickety series of elevated steam-train tracks, through a military fortress, and eventually to Laputa, the ancient, high-tech “castle in the sky.” When a group of sky-pirates, led by a bold, plump old lady named Dola, attacks the ship in an attempt to steal Sheeta’s crystal necklace, the girl escapes the cabin - but falls from the ship and plummets to earth, into the arms of a young miner boy named Pazu. Sheeta and Pazu soar over Laputa Image: Studio GhibliĬastle in the Sky opens on a blimp-like airship where a young girl, Sheeta, is being held prisoner by a group of stern-faced military men led by the smirking Colonel Muska. The film’s visual style is still recognizable in the studio’s films from 30 years later, and so are its character stylings and visual gags, but Castle in the Sky centers on something Ghibli has largely avoided ever since: an outright, uncompromising, unrelieved villain. (And a curse that makes him look like an anthropomorphic pig, but that’s a separate issue.) Miyazaki’s feelings emerge even more clearly in his most recent feature film, 2013’s The Wind Rises, which turns a biography of World War II airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi into a meditation on flight, and the gap between engineers’ dreams and the military’s practical uses for them.īut in Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki’s feelings about the military, and his deep-seated love of flight, emerge in ways that wound up being unique in the core Ghibli catalogue. The guilt he later expressed over his family’s part in the war is clearly expressed in his film Porco Rosso, a strange fairy tale about an Italian air ace navigating his homeland’s growing fascism. Miyazaki Airplanes manufactured parts for Japan’s Zero fighter planes during World War II, and that, too, had a long-term effect on the director’s thinking.
But it’s particularly visible in Castle in the Sky, where half the action takes place aboard steampunk-ish airships, among fantastical flying devices, and ultimately in and around a flying city.
His obsession with the mechanics of flight stretches unmissably through all his films. Miyazaki’s father ran a family business, Miyazaki Airplanes, and the director grew up around airline designs and parts.
Miyazaki’s father Katsuji, an aeronautical engineer, was a key influence whose impact has been felt in every one of the animator’s major works. Or fans could say it began before then, when Takahata and Miyazaki separately discovered their interest in animation, which led them to Japan’s Toei Animation, where they honed their talents and their narrative voices.īut given how significantly Miyazaki’s tastes and personalities in particular came to define Ghibli, it’s easiest to say that the studio’s story started with his immediate family. Arguably, the story began when animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, two of Ghibli’s co-founders and its most prolific film directors, met and worked together on anime projects like the 1968 feature film Horus, Prince of the Sun and the 1970s Lupin the Third television series. The Studio Ghibli story began long before Castle in the Sky, the ambitious action-fantasy that was the Japanese animation house’s first release. Read all of the stories on our Ghibli Guide page. With Studio Ghibli’s library now on digital and streaming services, we’ve surveyed the studio’s history, impact, and biggest themes.
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