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Laputa: Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ Tenkū no Shiro Rapyuta?) (re-titled Castle in the Sky for release in the United States) is a film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, released in 1986. This is the second film created and released by Studio Ghibli.
PlotSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The Legend of LaputaThe film opens with a brief scene (detailed below) in which Sheeta, the heroine of the story, falls from a giant airship. The title and opening credits follow, during which the Legend of Laputa is told through a series of short animations.
One city, Laputa, is said to remain in the sky, concealed within the swirling clouds of a violent thunderstorm known as the Dragon's Nest. While most people consider it to be a myth, some believe the legend is true and have sought to find the ancient city. Sheeta and PazuAboard a giant passenger airship, a young girl guarded by sinister government agents is sitting in a room looking out the window, when she sees an air pirate flying toward the ship. The ship comes under attack from a group of pirates, and the man in the room with the girl (Colonel Muska) calls for help by way of Morse Code. The girl hits Muska over the head with a bottle, takes a small pendant from him, and attempts to escape to another room by climbing out the window and crawling along the outside of the ship. Pirates break into her room and attempt to seize her. The leader of the pirates, an elderly woman, says she must have the "crystal" that the girl possesses. Suddenly, the girl loses her grip and falls from the ship, but on her way to the ground, the pendant radiates a brilliant blue light and allows the girl (now unconscious) to descend gently to the ground. Pazu, a young boy on his way to a mine (where he works as an engineer's assistant), witnesses the girl falling slowly from the sky. He is just in time to catch her, and is amazed by her apparent weightlessness. Soon after coming to rest in his arms, the pendant's light fades and the girl returns to her normal weight, nearly causing Pazu to fall. He sets her down safely and gets to work, then takes her back to his home when he's done. Image:Vlcsnap-665109.jpg Sheeta and Pazu
Before they can enjoy their breakfast, the pirates pursuing Sheeta arrive at Pazu's house, forcing the children to escape by train. Shortly after their escape, their path is blocked by a large government armored train, and the agents inside attempt to capture Sheeta. Pazu and Sheeta then escape off a side track, but are pursued once again by the pirates, and between the pirates' car and a shot from the government train, the rail trestle crumbles and causes the children to fall. They are saved, however, when Sheeta's pendant activates once again, allowing them to float safely into an abandoned mine below the town. There they meet an old miner, long a recluse from Society, known as Uncle Pomme. He reveals to them that the mine contains large deposits of "volucite" ("aetherium" in Disney's English language dub), the crystal that was used to provide Laputa with power. The mine is full of such glowing crystals, but as Pomme demonstrates, the crystals become ordinary rock when exposed to air. When he sees Sheeta's pendant, he says that it is one of the largest such crystals in existence, and he directly links it to the existence of the ancient city. Pomme counsels Sheeta to remember that the crystal's power rightly belongs to the earth, and that she should never use it to commit acts of violence. Believing that their pursuers have abandoned the search, Sheeta and Pazu emerge from the mine. Sheeta then confides in Pazu that she has an ancient "secret name", passed down through her family. Her true name is "Lusheeta Toel Ul Laputa" (Laputan for "Lusheeta, True Ruler of Laputa"). As Pazu begins to realize what this means, government agents (who have been spying on the children from the air) suddenly land next to them and take them both into custody. They are taken to a huge seaside fortress where they are separated — Pazu is placed in a prison cell, and Sheeta is locked away high in a tower. Image:Vlcsnap-665525.jpg Dola and her Boys The Chase for LaputaIn discussions between the general in command of the fortress and Muska it becomes clear that the government is sponsoring a concerted search for Laputa, and that Sheeta and her crystal are believed to be the keys to its discovery. Muska attempts to gain Sheeta's trust and co-operation by showing her the remains of a giant Laputan robot-man that are kept in a locked room beneath the fortress. He tells her of how in plunging from the sky the robot proved that Laputa's existence was not a myth, and that the advanced technology it represents could become a threat to world peace if left uncontrolled. He shows her that a winged symbol on the robot's casing is identical to the one inscribed onto her crystal. He also intimates that unless she co-operates with him in unlocking the crystal's secrets—which he believes can be used to physically locate Laputa; Pazu is likely to come to harm. Seeking to protect her friend, Sheeta confronts Pazu, telling him that she has agreed to co-operate with Muska and the government, and asking him to return home and forget he ever knew of her and Laputa. Muska pays him three gold coins to "reward" his efforts in "protecting" Sheeta and returning her to him. Stung by this apparent rejection, an angry and confused Pazu returns to his village, only to find Dola's pirate family occupying his home, feasting. An angry exchange between Pazu (who has been quickly restrained) and Dola ensues, and the chief pirate accuses the boy of betraying his friend for money. After learning the truth she, apart from guessing that Sheeta will probably be killed once the location of Laputa has been revealed, scolds Pazu for his ignorance of not knowing Sheeta has saved him from being harmed. Pazu recognizes this, and when the pirates decode a government radio transmission revealing that the following morning Sheeta, Muska, and the general are to depart the fortress in search of Laputa aboard the gigantic military airship Goliath, he begs Dola to let him accompany her. Dola agrees, and in no time they are heading for the fortress in flaptors (a kind of flying machine with ornithropter wings). Meanwhile, Sheeta recites a spell her grandmother taught her to use in times of peril; promptly, the crystal emanates power in the form of light, pointing the way to Laputa-- her ancestral refuge. It also re-animates the robot, which proceeds to rescue Sheeta, causing massive damage in the process. As Sheeta tries to restrain it, the robot places her down gently and raises a hand to its heart, proclaiming its loyalty and obedience for her. Caught off guard, it is destroyed by cannon fire from Goliath. Pazu and Dola arrive in time to rescue Sheeta, but her crystal pendant is lost and recovered by Muska, who uses it to track Laputa. Dola prepares to drop Sheeta and Pazu off at the mining town, but the children manage to persuade her to take them on the search for Laputa. Aboard Dola's airship, the Tiger Moth, they pursue the Goliath, with Sheeta serving in the kitchen and Pazu working as a mechanic and lookout. In the night, Sheeta comes to visit Pazu. She is enraptured by the beauty of the star-filled sky. After morning, they encounter a huge cloud mass - a "dragon's nest" - and Pazu recognizes it from his father's descriptions as the place where Laputa is hidden. Trying to find a way in, the Tiger Moth is buffeted by the hurricane-force winds that form the cloud, and on top of that they are spotted by the Goliath and fired upon. The crow's nest glider Sheeta and Pazu are in at the time is separated from the pirate ship, and after a hazardous ride through the storm they reach the flying city of Laputa. The Battle for LaputaThe children awake to find the city devoid of human life, with only a single robot among the massive ruins- similar to the one in the army fortress - apparently taking care of the grounds. Many animals and birds occupy the city, and the children also find a huge greenhouse with a gargantuan tree, whose roots have pervaded all of Laputa's base and whose crown forms a huge green roof over the entire palace. There are also intricate ponds and lakes that reveal, upon Pazu's looking in, that the city extends for miles beneath them, underwater. The serenity of the place is rudely disturbed by the government soldiers. The storm protecting Laputa has dissipated due to the presence of Sheeta's pendant, and so the Goliath - and the wrecked Tiger Moth - was able to land safely. The children witness the soldiers plundering the city of its vast store of riches, while the Dola pirates have been captured and sit bound nearby. While the children attempt to free the pirates, Sheeta witnesses Muska and two of his men locating a hidden entrance to the black sphere that surrounds the city's core. She is subsequently captured and taken inside. Pazu manages to evade his alerted pursuers and frees the pirates. Since the soldiers block the most direct route into the black sphere, Pazu tries to enter it from the outside, and after many difficulties (including an artillery bombardment in which he is inadvertently caught up) he manages to get in. Sheeta, with her hands bound, is taken by Muska into Laputa's core, a chamber holding a gigantic hovering Volucite/Aetherium crystal that serves as the city's power source. It is here that Muska reveals that he, like Sheeta, is an heir to the throne of Laputa. Consulting a small book, Muska uses Sheeta's pendant to take control of Laputa's formidable arsenal. He gets the attention of the General and his soldiers inside the city, then demonstrates Laputa's weaponry by firing an incredibly powerful energy beam into the ocean. He asserts that the immense destructive power of the floating fortress is the basis for the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as for the Vedic weapon "Indra's Arrow". Muska then sends the general and his soldiers to their deaths by opening the bottom of the sphere, causing them to fall toward the ocean. When the remaining soldiers attempt to flee in the Goliath, he deploys Laputa's massive, hitherto immobile army of robots and orders them to destroy it. However, during his assault on the mammoth airship, Sheeta manages to get free and steal back the crystal. She runs away through the Laputan ruins with Muska in close pursuit. Eventually, she finds Pazu in another room and passes the crystal to him. Finally, Sheeta is cornered by Muska in the city's throne room. She confronts him and declares that they will both die in that room if they must. Pazu arrives to defend Sheeta, then asks for a moment to talk to her, which Muska grants. Together, the two children decide to use the Spell of Destruction -- another incantation passed down by Sheeta's family, of which she told Pazu on the previous night. With a single word, the pendant releases an enormous power surge that hurls Sheeta and Pazu into the giant tree's roots, allowing them to narrowly escape death. The core crystal breaks out of its chamber and triggers the collapse of the city's core, causing the lower portions of the city to crumble and the roots to stick out from the bottom of the remaining parts (which consist of the top one or two layers or pavilions, out of the three or four that were there at the start of the assault). Muska, blinded by the pendant's energy burst, becomes trapped in the wreckage and falls to his doom. After a few minutes, the city stops falling apart, the remaining pieces being held together by the roots of the giant tree. The city begins rising further into the sky, apparently due to its reduced weight. Sheeta and Pazu eventually awake and find their way back to the glider, which they use to depart Laputa. The Dola pirates have also managed to survive Laputa's destruction, escaping on the Flaptors (all of which are joined together, making them somewhat unwieldy). While their airship has been destroyed, they are all still alive, and Dola herself seems to know what happened (she had listened when Sheeta had talked with Pazu about her family). They are overjoyed when Sheeta and Pazu join up with them again in the glider, and the pirates reveal that they managed to take some of the city's treasures in their escape. After reaching the next coastline, the pirates and the children bid each other a cordial farewell and part ways. Meanwhile, Laputa continues to rise, until it (in the closing credits) apparently establishes an orbit high above the planet. Characters
SettingSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The world in which the story takes place is clearly Earth, but apparently in an alternate history. None of the place names matches real-life geography. The airships appear to use buoyant gas, but are different in appearance than actual dirigibles. The pirate flappers and military planes do not resemble actual craft either. Running through the landscape are railroad tracks set on high wooden trestle bridges, more reminiscent of early railway bridges in the Rocky Mountains. The overall level of technology seems to be the equivalent to our own world in the 1920s, with telephones, steam engines, large dirigibles, ornithopters, airplanes, and radio using something like morse code (although technology in the air appears to be more advanced than our own world's 1920s, while technology on the ground appears to be more like that of the period around 1900). On the military side, the uniforms seemed to have been inspired almost to the point of direct copy from German World War I uniforms, complete with its spiked pickelhaube, while the weaponry is basically British, including Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles, Webley revolvers, and Vickers water-cooled machine guns. The armored military trains are reminiscent of those used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. HistoryThe history of the world in Laputa is hinted at in various parts of the movie: Laputa, in ancient times, once dominated the world in a hegemony; it was not the only flying castle or city in the past (suggested by a woodcut-like piece in the opening credits or scenes); it may have had a rotor on its bottom in antiquity and other rotors on its side; land may have also been attached to Laputa in antiquity (possibly in a different time period than the one in which rotors were attached). Laputa was abandoned 700 years before the setting of the movie; that city controlled the manufacture and mining of the "sky-crystal" (aethelirum?), and the art of mining and making such crystals had been lost by the setting of the movie and Laputa rendered a legend. The royal family abandoned the city, as well as the other Laputans; they left behind an electronic, high-technology core (topped by a chamber or greenhouse with a central tree, which proceeded to sink its roots deep into the city and spread its branches outside of the city's top roof), along with several layers or terraces of walls or buildings (it is shown to have had at least three terraces of walls topped with one of buildings; it may have had as many as five, as indicated in a tomb marker's seal) done in various architectural styles. (There are hints of Arabia and of classical Rome, as well as of places such as Egypt and the gothic architecture of Europe, although Gothic architecture is much more pronounced on the ground than it is in Laputa.) This abandonment of Laputa, according to Sheeta and/or Uncle Pom, may have been due to an alienation of the Laputans from the earth, a forgetting that they are intimately connected to the earth and an over-reliance on technology to solve problems. The opening part of the woodcut-like opening credits shows a windmill with a kiln behind it, set in a hillside, with a man tending it. Afterwards, the windmills grow into enormous, apparently partially wind-powered factories or machines, with machinery digging deep into the earth. Dirigibles appear, along with airplanes and helicopters or autogyros. A giant helicopter-ship is shown rising into the air (with the hull of an ocean liner and numerous rotors), and then a Laputa-like city appears, with the aforementioned rotors. Followed by this is a scene of floating islands and cities, again, with Laputa possibly among them. Enormous, boxy metal helicopter-ships are shown, rotors propelling them from the bottom. However, disaster strikes: lightning is shown and redness fills the screen, a sky-city can be seen, faintly, crumbling in the background, and then people are shown leaving the wreckage of a giant helicopter-ship. The end of the opening credits shows a farmgirl behind a windmill, next to two beasts-of-burden: a scene later in the movie (showing Sheeta on a farm with similar beasts-of-burden) implies this is Sheeta. This opening-credit roll can be compared with the "history of the world" scenery shown at the end of Wings of Honneamise and the Bayeux Tapestry-like scroll at the beginning of Nausicaä. Laputa is credited by a character with having been behind Biblical events and sacred Hindu legends - thus tying the world of Laputa to our Earth (and to western European civilization), as do the medieval castle architecture of parts of the fort on the ground, the Gothic and half-timbered buildings in the village near the fort, the British mining-town architecture, clothing, and even ground vehicles of Pazu's homeland, and the Victorian ambiance of the pirate ship. WalesSome of the architecture (and perhaps clothing) seen in the film was inspired by a Welsh mining town. Miyazaki first visited Wales in 1984 and witnessed the miner's strike first hand. He returned to the country in 1986 to prepare for Laputa, which he said reflected his Welsh experience: "I was in Wales just after the miners’ strike. I really admired the way the miners’ unions fought to the very end for their jobs and communities, and I wanted to reflect the strength of those communities in my film."[1] Miyazaki told The Guardian: "I admired those men, I admired the way they battled to save their way of life, just as the coal miners in Japan did. Many people of my generation seen the miners as a symbol; a dying breed of fighting men. Now they are gone."[2] Distribution and ReceptionThe Disney-produced English dub was recorded in 1998 and planned for release on video in 1999, but Disney eventually decided to release it to theaters instead (presumably because the first release under their deal with Studio Ghibli, Kiki's Delivery Service, performed better than expected on VHS). After the box office failure of Princess Mononoke in the U.S., however, Laputa's release date was pushed back yet again; on occasion the completed dub was screened at select children's festivals. The movie was finally released on DVD and video in the U.S. on April 15 2003, alongside Kiki's Delivery Service and Spirited Away. Like Princess Mononoke, the Laputa dub received somewhat mixed reviews -criticisms were directed at the leads, while Cloris Leachman's Dola and Mark Hamill's Muska drew raves. Despite this, Castle in the Sky was the second-best selling DVD from Studio Ghibli distributed by Disney in the year of its release (after Spirited Away and ahead of Kiki's Delivery Service). Name ChangeEnglish language dubs of Laputa has been released under 3 different titles by 3 separate distributors. The although meaningless in Japanese, "Laputa" (La puta) translates to "The Whore" or "The Bitch" in Spanish. For this reason, in 2003, the film's title was shortened from "Laputa; Castle in the Sky" to "Castle in the Sky" in several countries, including the United States, Mexico and Spain, where Spanish is commonly spoken as a first or second language. This change was also carried over to a number of non-Spanish speaking countries, including Britain and France, under Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment label, despite Laputa (La puta) having no meaning in either English or French. Curiously, although the word Laputa was removed from the title, it appeared on the rear cover of the DVD, and was used throughout the film, without modification. The Laputa's full name was later restored in Britain, in February 2006, when Optimum Asia - a devision of London based Optimum Releasing - acquired the UK distribution rights to the Studio Ghibli collection. Additionally, during the Late 1980s and early 1990s, the pre-Disney dub - released by Streamline Pictures - was screened in the UK, as an Art-house film, under the alternative title Laputa: The Flying Island. Differences between versionsImage:Castle in the Sky DVD.JPG Castle in the Sky Region 1 DVD cover. Although the plot and much of the script was left intact, Disney's English dub of Laputa: Castle in the Sky contains some changes.
Although all these alterations were approved by Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki, there have been critics and fans who called them into question. In particular, some fans pointed out that the new soundtrack placed music in scenes that previously involved the dramatic use of natural silence, as in the opening airship raid or when Pazu and Sheeta pass through the storm-cloud. On the other hand, Miyazaki himself is said to have approved of Hisaishi's reworking [3]; his compliments were echoed by several reviewers [4], [5]. TriviaImage:Laputa-robot-ghibli.jpg A full-size model of a robot from the animation Castle in the Sky on top of the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo.
CreditsCastThe movie stars the following actors:
Awards
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