A girl named Sheeta falls from the sky, pursued by pirates on the one hand and the military on the other. They want the mysterious blue gem she wears around her neck—after all, it’s the reason she can fall from the sky and live. She’s found by a boy named Pazu; Pazu works in the local mines, but dreams of flying and discovering Laputa, the fabled city in the sky that his father claimed to have seen. He’s smitten with Sheeta and tries to help her run away—but after successfully eluding the pirates, Sheeta is recaptured by the military.
Sheeta turns out to be a member of the Laputan royal family, and her gem is the secret to finding the floating city.1 She’s the captive of Muska, an ambiguous figure who does not seem to answer to anybody, not even the military official who seems to be the official head of the mission to find Laputa. Muska threatens Pazu unless Sheeta cooperates. She agrees, but while Pazu is off recruiting the pirates to their side, she idly activates the stone and ends up summoning a Laputan robot. The robot rescues Sheeta, who reunites with Pazu, but in the chaos she leaves the stone behind.
Eventually, all the main parties end up at Laputa. Muska reveals that he, too, is a descendant of the royal family. He intends to use Laputa to rule the world. Sheeta and Pazu decide to destroy themselves, along with the stone, to stop him. However, they live, leave Laputa, and fly off together into the sunset.
I’m pretty sure Castle in the Sky was the first Ghibli movie I ever watched on purpose.2 In terms of the Ghibli movies that are truly for children, like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, it might be my favorite, though it’s hard to choose. Like Castle of Cagliostro, which it’s almost a soft remake of, Castle in the Sky is a solid beginning-to-end adventure story, with an exciting story, a great score from Joe Hisaishi, lovable heroes, and genuinely scary bad guy.
It’s also a little overlooked—probably because it is such a traditional and well-made children’s story. Unlike Miyazaki’s movies for adults, it’s not offering anything you simply do not see in an American animated movie. Unlike Totoro or Kiki, it’s a pretty traditionally plotted movie, complete with a traditional villain. In terms of its content and its structure, there’s no reason Castle in the Sky couldn’t be a Disney movie. It even has clear Disney-style comic relief characters with the pirates.3 It’s not a Disney movie, of course, and Disney would never make this movie,4 but Castle in the Sky doesn’t have that “only in anime” factor and I don’t see people talk about it much.5
Rewatching it, what I notice is that Miyazaki refines the stories, concerns, and even the visuals of both The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaä throughout this movie. His next movie will be Totoro, and Totoro is going to be about different things, but here he remains preoccupied with history, technology, and environmental devastation. Castle in the Sky does a lot of exposition through its backgrounds, which make it extremely clear that this world has been through cataclysmic events. The countryside around Pazu’s town is pitted with giant craters from long-ago bombs, and when we see the world from space at the very end, it’s clear that much of it has disappeared into the ocean. There are fears voiced at the beginning that the mine on which Pazu’s town depends may have finally been exhausted. Pazu lives in what is essentially a cozy ruin.
The ways in which Castle in the Sky refines Miyazaki’s previous work shows up in small ways: the glimpse of Sheeta in the warship is similar to the glimpse of the princess in the warship in Nausicaä. The crystal here is similar to the pedant in Nausicaä. The robots look a bit like the God Warriors.… and so on. Like Clarisse in Cagliostro, Sheeta has inherited a bloodstained, ruined, yet beautiful legacy that is revealed by jewelry passed down through her family.
Most importantly, the tensions between the rigidity of the machine and the flexibility of life are distilled here into the crystal-powered computer that is “Laputa,” and the tree and garden that have grown around it. The tree’s roots save Pazu several times and ultimately save both Pazu and Sheeta’s life when they say the spell to destroy Lapura. Muska cannot appreciate the life that has come to flourish on Laputa in the absence of humanity; he’s enraged by its presence and says he will burn it all away. Muska and Sheeta are both revealed to be members of the ancient Laputan royal family, but their attitudes toward their legacies are markedly different. Sheeta’s family has preserved the knowledge of how to use Laputan technology over the centuries, but cautioned every generation not to use what they know. We don’t know Muska’s family, but Muska himself is both very knowledgeable and very ignorant. He craves the power to dominate, but he doesn’t really understand it.
You can contrast Muska and the military—buttoned-up, official, rigid—with the pirates, who I think we basically know are good as soon as they appear. Unlike the actual bad guys, the pirates are chaotic and colorful. Their individual planes look like insects—that is, they look alive, and they can move quickly and ably through the air. They get sidelined into a goofy contest of strength with Pazu’s boss. Genuinely bad guys wouldn’t do any of these things. The pirates are not safe, but they are good.
I don’t really think that Miyazaki is anti-tech, though he might be anti-computer. There are too many loving depictions of planes, of flying, and just of the mechanical in general. The line gets crossed when you no longer interact with a machine as something you’ve made and maintain through your own efforts and rather treat it the same way you treat the ground you walk on: it’s something that supports you and which you simply take for granted. The pirate’s ship is not a big floating hotel the way the military’s ship is. You can step through the canvas. You have to work to keep it moving. And when it’s gone, it’s okay—you can build another one.
When Sheeta says nothing can live separated from the Earth, I think this is part of what she means. The floating fortress of Laputa is terrifying in its capability for destruction, but if you stay there, you become its servant, not the other way around. Nobody can build another Laputa once it’s gone. You shouldn’t have machines you don’t know how to replace. When you create machines like that, they end up assuming the place that nature should hold.
“Laputa” comes from the floating city of Gulliver’s Travels, where the name is a dirty joke. The Laputa of Gulliver’s Travels is, however, not only a floating city that intimidates the world beneath it but also a floating city where obsession with science has led its citizens to become uninterested in life. So it’s an apt reference even if Miyazaki didn’t mean to transfer over the joke.
I’ve always named my laptop “Laputa.” (My phone’s name is Rocinante.) Whether after this movie or the book, I couldn’t actually tell you.
I assume that if you watch Miyazaki’s TV show work, like Future Boy Conan, there’s some stuff that you can also see developing into Castle in the Sky. However… I have not.
Hideaki Anno didn’t work on this movie, but he definitely watched it:
Something that does bother me: the very final image of the tree floating up in outer space. It feels strange after Sheeta’s big speech. Wouldn’t a better closing image have been the tree coming to the ground and taking root?
One thing about machines versus computers is that in my insomnia Old Time Radio journeys you hear so many ads for car parts and such—it really makes you notice how not so long ago a car was something you could, at least in theory, take care of yourself. Maybe you didn’t, but you could.6
In the Castle of Cagliostro post I listed a couple of ways that movie struck me as similar to Castle in the Sky, but I had totally forgotten the reveal that Sheeta and Muska, like Clarisse and the Count, are actually related.
When the robot that saves Sheeta dies………… I felt that………………
I think this movie marks the first time we have that delicious looking Ghibli food.
There’s some mysterious process through which girls in Miyazaki movies grow up to look like this:
image from fancaps On that note, it’s totally unclear to me how old Sheeta’s supposed to be.
The year is 2025. You are watching a movie about a power hungry man with an unclear position in the government who is obsessed with using technology to become a functional god. His name is Musk………………………………………………………a.
There’s a lot of stuff from The Prehistory of Nausicaä that ends up getting used in this movie—I don’t have my copy of the book with me but the dragonfly ships are one I remember.
The relationship between the first robot we meet and Sheeta is also not the same as, but similar to, the relationship between the God Warrior and Nausicaä in the manga.
There doesn’t seem to be an Animation Obsessive post about Castle in the Sky, but an image from the movie is used in this post, so why not link to it?
How many of the various reveals surrounding Laputa are news to Sheeta? It’s never quite clear to me. She knows way more than she lets on at first, certainly.
The actual first one was Spirited Away, which, at the time, I did not get at all.
I can’t give you a citation because I don’t have my copy of this book with me, but there’s a book by two Disney animators called The Illusion of Life where they talk (as I remember) about things like how comic relief characters are drawn and animated. The main thing I remember about it is learning that the reason male leads in early Disney films always appear for the minimum amount of time possible is because realistic men are harder to animate than women. That is because we have ideas about how women move but we don’t have similar stereotypes for men. “Comic relief”-style men (the dwarfs in Snow White, the prince’s dad in Cinderella) are easier. Philip in Sleeping Beauty does things intended for the prince in Snow White because they’d finally figured out how to animate realistic men. This summary is from memory and could be slightly wrong.
And when they tried to make this movie, it was a disaster.
Alternately, it’s overlooked because, like Porco Rosso, it is a film for people who just love watching planes. Who can say.
The Volkswagen Beetle was also a car you were supposed to be able to take apart and put back together yourself. Are there any purely mechanical cars even made anymore? Maybe I should get a Beetle when my ship comes in.…
I’ve been waiting for this post so I can tell my story about this movie so here it is. I watched it for the first time when I was maybe 8 or 9 and it scarred me because of the scene where Muska shoots off Sheeta’s pigtails and says he’s going to do her ears next. Naturally, I thought to myself, he’s going to do it because this is a Japanese cartoon and that’s the kind of thing that would actually happen.
My 4 year old and I've been making our way through a lot of Miyazaki's lately, for the first time. Though we/I haven't seen all of castle in the sky (so this is an uninformed comment), the image of a tree floating up in outer space feels alike with the endings of a bunch of his movies––so many involve a release, letting go, persevering on in the face of ecological devastation, bravely accepting the end or loss of one world for another... the Nightwalker dissolving into the sky, the freeing of Calcifer, Fujimoto releasing his daughter, Ponyo... Maybe I'm not saying anything particularly novel, here, just that a tree taking root in Earth would feel almost too optimistic for a Miyazaki, too definitive, not ambiguous enough.
Anyway, thank you for this. Also, just have to say, it's so surprising to me that this showed up in my inbox just now because I happen to put this on to watch––for the first time––with my 4 year old, last night. (We didn't finish it. It was bedtime right when the robot was reawakened and, judging by your synopsis, was before things got a little too scary/bleak for a 4 year old!)
I'm embarrassed at how long this comment has become.