Resisting the temptation to truly give them personalities, they are only as good or as bad as the people controlling them. Under the control of the villainous Muska, or when threatened, they cause catastrophic amounts of damage, yet the robot that Sheeta and Pazu meet when they first land on the island is a gentle creature protecting a bird’s nest. The lumbering metal guardians of the floating city are deadly and kind in equal measure. Said robots are indicative of Laputa’s greatest strength: it is not a polemic, but a story that portrays the best and worst of what man can achieve. Laputa is remarkable because it conveys its themes with a degree of subtlety, hidden as they are beneath a tale of sky pirates, railway chases and gardening robots. The studio would return to these concerns repeatedly, in films such as Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and in Isao Takahata’s unforgettably weird Pom Poko, the only film ever to feature a raccoon’s testicles turning into a funeral ship. But in its story of a boy from a mining community finding a girl falling from the sky, and their quest to find the mythical floating utopia, it is these environmental themes that most clearly characterise it as a Ghibli product. al to start their own studio, Laputa contains many of the hallmarks that would go on to define Ghibli: glorious hand drawn animation Miyazaki’s enduring fascination with flying strong female leads a non-binary approach to good and evil. The first film to be made under the banner of Studio Ghibli, after Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was financially successful enough to allow for Miyazaki, Takahata et. Laputa: Castle in the Sky is an ecological parable, a warning against what can happen when man’s reach exceeds his grasp, a film of balances and tensions that are not fully resolved until the final, chaotic act. Miyazaki longs for a world in balance, but instead sees one in a great tension between man and nature, and his films are often about trying to achieve the former while dealing with the latter. Balance is two equal forces, each affecting the other and threatened if one increases but the other does not. Tension is two forces pulling away from each other the more they pull, the greater the likelihood that something will snap or break.
Think back to the physics you were taught as a 14 year old and you may remember two principles that guide the way director Hayao Miyazaki tells stories: tension and balance.
This article was originally published in 2014. With Studio Ghibli films now available on Netflix UK, we delve into our archives to look back at what makes them so magical.
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