I'm not an expert on Hayao Miyazaki's films. I can't even make it all the way through Kiki's Delivery Service. But Spirited Away was a revelation, and Castle in the Sky is the best kids movie I've watched in a long time.
"A girl just fell from the sky, boss!"
A sinister government agent named Muska has taken a girl named Sheeta into his custody. She escapes when pirates attack their airship, only to slip and fall thousands of feet to the earth below. Her inheritance, a crystal pendant, saves her in a blinding flash of magic that slows her plummet to a graceful descent. She quite literally falls into the arms of a boy named Pazu.
Pazu works in the local mines, but his head is in the clouds. He dreams of vindicating his father who died trying to prove the existence of Laputa, a legendary floating island, and this quest soon intertwines with the mystery of Sheeta's crystal. Pazu protects the pretty girl when the pirates and Muska's army thugs come looking for her, and together they begin a chase to find Laputa before the bad guys catch them.
The English dub carries no defects obvious to an ignorant observer like myself. The voice acting is generally good, if sometimes too, well, cartoonish. James Van Der Beek is perfect as Pazu while Anna Paquin's accent feels slightly out of place. It takes a while to stop hating Cloris Leachman as Dola, but the transition fits the movie rather well. The prolific Mark Hamill turns in a fine performance as Muska.
"What can I tell ya? They just really like dessert."
Castle in the Sky was released in 1986 but it wears its twenty years very well. The gadgets are as lovingly drawn as are the wide white faces of the characters. The jumbled mining town with its daredevil railways, the visual homage to German great coats, tanks, and grenades, and the fantasy landscapes are all beautifully realized, just as the battles and chases are vivid and tense.
To be sure the film's age is noticeable, especially when contrasted with more recent Miyazaki offerings. But if animation has come a long way, Miyazaki has remained consistent with some trademark fascinations: gluttonous gorging negatively characterizes and manifestations of the Terrible Mother have a bulbous hooked nose. Along archetypal lines there is also a descent into an underworld where the heroes are aided by a wise old man.
Miyazaki's heroes often find themselves allied with ambiguous figures who prove less evil than they first seem, but are never exactly good (a nuance that rarely occurs to American animators). I admit to a temptation to extrapolate the films to the Japanese cultural identity, but I'll resist the impulse to equate Castle in the Sky's heroes to Japan, the pirates to America, and Muska and the army to Russia or China or North Korea.
"Leave it to my little idiots to start a riot."
Castle in the Sky is a less serious film than Spirited Away. I say this because the latter's overarching criticism of consumption and approval of work and duty were expressed both more insistently and more skillfully than the two themes I felt most in Castle in the Sky, the first being a clear anti-bomb message (meaning the Bomb), and the second being a concern that humanity cripples nature with its ugly and dangerous technology.
Technology is also represented positively in the film's fascination for machines. Mining equipment, trains, tanks, and especially flying machines. The dirigibles are gorgeous, the pirates' smaller craft have dragonfly wings, and there's the floating castle itself. But the need for harmony with nature is expressed in those dragonfly wings, in the tree that forms the castle's core, and in the song with which Sheeta denounces Muska.
"You and I will die here together."
It may be that the film is slightly long, and I found the robots unattractive. But the only real flaw is in a certain incongruity in the protagonists' ages. Sheeta and Pazu have the innocent faces common to Japanese animation. This coupled with their small stature and childlike voices gives the impression that they are children. However, their affection is romantic, different clothes accentuate Sheeta's figure, and the pirates are clearly under no illusions as to her age.
This aspect of the story will largely pass over the heads of children. There is no kissing, even if one scene's roll in the grass gave me awful flashbacks of the second new Star Wars movie. This and the pirates' teasing Pazu about liking Sheeta could be consistent with young teenage characters and a young audience. It was the pirates' comedic infatuation with Sheeta that challenged my assumptions about her and Pazu's age.
"I get to lick the spatula!"
The military and flying machine motifs are eye-catching. The two protagonists are purity embodied. The themes are wholesome and presented simply instead of ham-handedly or with condescension. And I almost exploded my shirt I laughed so hard at the pirates. All rolled together it works very well.
Even though Castle in the Sky is much lighter fare than Spirited Away, it still shows American animated films to be simpleminded in comparison. Disney dragged their feet in distributing this movie. Their trepidation was not unfounded. It outshines the work Disney is doing even today, twenty years after it was made.
– Panguitch
Rather than Disney, it's better to compare Miyazaki to more important animators, like Bluth and Rankin/Bass. See for example The Last Unicorn: http://www.epinions.com/content_119157919364
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