My first temptation is to just pick out all the Miyazaki-isms and talk about how this fits in the Ghibli canon. Except this is the first time I’ve covered one, and also I found something more specific to talk about with it anyways.
I mean, seeing as I haven’t covered one of these, let’s hit the basics. Castle in the Sky is technically the first Ghibli film… in that the main production crew of Nausicaa founded Ghibli almost immediately after its release, so while technically nothing before then is Ghibli it’s more accurate to think of this as the second after Nausicaa. And even at this point a lot of the studio’s more enduring tropes were already present:
- Unabashed feminism in the form of young leading women unafraid to take charge or fight for themselves in the face of adversity.
- Astounding sequences of flight and an unmistakable admiration for flying vehicles.
- Gorgeous backgrounds, in particular pastoral landscapes notable for their vivid colors.
- Those same backgrounds carrying a sad undertone, celebrating the resilience of nature yet taking some pains to show the deeper scars of the story at hand underneath.
- A devotion to contrasting the humanity of monsters with the monstrousness of humanity.
And there’s plenty to like about just the overall pace, the mix of comedy and seriousness, how elegantly they weave action and quiet scenes, all sorts of stuff like that.
But what that jumped out at me was the main villain. It’s easy for me of late to see fascism everywhere for ~Mysterious Reasons~, and especially the toxic masculinity that underwrites it. But there’s enough specific imagery and lines that I’m comfortable saying this is intentional. He’s driven by entitlement: he’s a Prince of Laputa! He should rule this world! How dare these vines defile the holy temples! And the way he goes about everything is very specifically hypermasculine. He uses the military, since of course violence is power, but he also holds them in clear disdain. They are beneath him, for he is heir to the power of the ancients! The technologies and weapons that are his birthright put their paltry power to shame!
I also ran across people reading some of his comments to Sheeta about resurrecting Laputa as his intention to use her to repopulate. Which… certainly fits everything else about him…
But all this makes a lot of sense. Like a lot of Miyazaki’s work Castle in the Sky works in a lot of environmental themes, most clearly when Sheeta speculates that the people of Laputa didn’t die out or anything, they simply realized they’d cut themselves off from nature and returned to a better life on the surface. So making your villain a personification of male entitlement, complete with fetishization of technology and power over nature, is a natural contrast. Of course, it also means that the main villain is a straightforwardly evil nazi-type, which is quite the contrast from most Ghibli works. Granted, recent events have taught us that the ability to easily recognize and identify such ilk is highly relevant, and muddying those particular waters wouldn’t really be very responsible.
But there is some complexity elsewhere to make up for it.
The robots are terrifying things. The first one we see melts its way through a stone castle and all the soldiers within it. It’s a product of technology in a setting that ultimately concludes on the sanctity of the natural world. But it also only does exactly what it’s told to do. It destroys the building where Sheeta is held captive because her instruction was too simple: help me. We later see dozens of them that are inert, because with no one to utilize them the technology merely returns to nature just as nature reclaims the land devastated in the past. Until seized by Muska in the finale, most of the robots merely sat, unused, a threat to no one. The one active one we see has merely maintained the garden and brought flowers to the dead. We could probably surmise it was given a more complex instruction: tend the garden, and preserve all the lives within it. And so it does, for untold centuries, perfectly benign.
Technology is only in opposition to life and the natural world when those who covet it, rather than understanding it, use it for evil ends.
Despite individual moments of beauty I dunno that I ever fully clicked with Castle in the Sky. While the story does need characters like them I don’t really have much to say about the Dola gang, and the scenes with them serve the emotional need of “we need a quiet period between the rescue and the finale”, but aside from the flexing scene (which is indeed glorious) they’re just kinda there I felt like. Admittedly the whole scene of them ‘helping’ in the kitchen just dragged for me which plays a big part. I also never really felt much of anything for the male lead? I dunno, I feel like finding those threads made me sound a little too positive since really it’s a film I like well enough but didn’t get much emotional impact from. But here we are.
Rating- 7/10.
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