Anime Post: Castle in the Sky
A Children's Adventure Movie by Hayao Miyazaki, about a couple of daring kids, a Jewel, and... A Castle in the Sky.
The story begins with a bout of piracy. Except the ships are more like Zeppelin Aircraft, and the high seas the hijacking is taking place on are the high clouds, way up in the skies. As The Pirates and their leader are charging through the aircraft, terrorizing the affluent passengers and blowing past the armed resistance, a man with a captive girl gives orders to his bodyguard to cover him while he dials the government for aid. While his back is turned, the girl strikes him unconscious with a champagne bottle and takes a blue crystal attached to a necklace off of his person. But, as it turns out, this jewel was exactly what the Pirates were after. The girl, trapped in her cabin between the Airships walls and its invaders, decided to try her chances at escaping through a window, and clinging on to the outside. However, she loses her grip and falls through the grey clouds and shaded skies below.
Just when one thinks that girl’s story is over, though, a miner boy named Pazu catches the sight of her floating gently down from above, with the mysterious crystal glowing from around her neck. Pazu swiftly moves to catch her, and ease her down to the surface.
The next day, they introduce themselves to each other.
The girl learns about Pazu: his job, his adoptive family, and his wish to fulfill his late father’s dreams of discovering the legendary flying island of Laputa. That is, one of the lands described in Guilliver’s Travels. Pazu learns that she goes by the name “Sheeta”, and that her glowing stone is a family heirloom. Because of it she’s wanted by pirates and the military. This is because the stone, and Sheeta herself, is proof of something that Sheeta likely believed was just a family legend, but that Pazu was always confident was true: That Laputa is real. And they, against the wild pirates and organized men who were after her, were going to find it together.
Character Details and Themes (Spoilers Ahead)
Since this is a childrens film, we could probably take it for granted that the protagonists of our story are, in simplified description, good people. But, its still a bit of fun to observe in what specific senses they might be good.
Pazu, for example, is told in some parts of the film to “Be a man”, or he’s implicitly told what he must do as a man. However, it should be obvious to the viewer that he’s already a man, in two senses of the term, in the major senses of his virtues, his habits and his morality, despite the fact that he’s clearly just a boy.
Like any boy on his way to becoming a man ought to be, Pazu is energetic and confident. And, Although this may have developed from the unfortunate fact that he’s an orphan, he shows himself to be quiet independent. Pazu is also a hard worker, since he participates in the mining work of his town. This quality has likely been reinforced in him by benefiting him with some amount of physical strength. Along side his physical strength, he is mechanically skilled and apparently had been encouraged in this area by a faith in his father’s search for Laputa. Finally, for this description of his habits, Pazu is very brave. Perhaps extremely so. Theres rarely a scene in the film involving him where he’s afraid to fight for Sheeta’s defense, or unwilling put himself through physical danger to accomplish something worthwhile or necesary.
Pazu’s bravery brings us to his being a man in the moral sense. After he encountered Sheeta, didn’t waste an hour of the day behaving courageously for her sake. Only stopping when he was forced to and partially manipulated by the military and by the antagonist, who was emotionally coercing Sheeta and using her as some mouth piece to convince Pazu to give up on her. Even then, this was temporary, because he wound up going back to rescue her that same evening. Later, he was willing to use his industriousness to serve others and earn his necessities. And by the end of the story, Pazu had taken enourmous personal risks to help allies in great need, and to halt the utter madness of the antagonist. As the final drama of the film unfolded, at least one character remarked that Pazu had “become a man.” But, its a fact that that boy was already there.
Sheeta, a girl, doesn’t have all or the same measure of Pazu’s virtues, but isn’t neccesarily expected to do that. This isn’t to say that she’s always a helpless damsel, since she does show a degree of independence and responsibility. However, this is mostly thwarted by the antagonists, as the fact simply is that she isn’t all that strong. What quality Sheeta tends to display the most, though, is a sort of compassion. Most of that compassion is expended on and felt for Pazu, of course, but that doesn’t mean she had never acted on it for anyone or anything else. For example, when the Laputian war robot was devastating the fortress she was being held captive in, and the armed men meant to keep her there, she was terrified by the destruction and reacted by trying to obstruct and make it stop. It is also demonstrated by her attempt to stop the antagonist when she saw that he was about to massacre the soldiers he had recently betrayed. Sheeta’s compassion is what moves her to try to take some kind of fight against her enemy, even though her struggle is mostly feeble.
An appreciation for natural beauty is another aspect of her character, probably imprinted on her by the rural and farmer culture and family she had been raised under. When the soldiers had come to raid Laputa’s inner areas of all of its storaged golden, silvery, and jeweled treasures, she expressed worry for the gardens on the floating land’s surface. Its probable that those soldiers weren’t ever going to molest the minor ecosystem above, due to their focus on looting the artificial and man-made treasures. Although, its quiet clear that the antagonist would’ve done this if he had his way. But what such a moment does is give the viewer a small sense of where her priorities were, or what she considered Laputa’s real treasures and richness.
Along with Sheeta’s compassion, she has a basic wisdom to her that can be appreciated towards the end of the film. When she realizes that the stone was a key to the Antagonist controlling Laputa, she urged Pazu to help her hide the stone away from humanity for good. The Antagonist was willing to bargain to some degree to recover that blue rock. This implies it might have been possible that Sheeta could’ve surrendered it in exchange for her own safety. Yet, Sheeta seems to have considered it better to take her chances with death, than to allow the Antagonist the potential power to war and lay waste to millions while he burn the earth. At the same time, she had gained an insight about why the previous inhabitants of Laputa left the flying island and its weapons behind. The antagonist was on his way to creating a “kingdom with no subjects”, and trying to survive in complete isolation from the natural world around him through the use of Laputa’s power. However, the only power Laputa truly had to offer, that the antagonist was so eager to obtain, was the potent threat of destruction. It doesn’t seem to have given the former inhabitants of Laputa everything it wanted away from nature, and it would be rendered completely useless without her stone or family seal. The Antagonist’s wouldn’t hear how his want for total domination over the planet and its inhabitants was going to prove worthless. But Sheeta understood why, and she tried her best to tell him.
Throughout this post, the reader would notice a repeated reference to an “Antagonist”. That antagonist would be a man named Muska.
Muska’s character is mostly easy to understand: He’s the bad guy, and he gets worse as the story sails on. Before the climax of the film, his evil nature was paired, and at least slightly dressed up, with the appearance of some semblance of sophistication. If there was some way to describe his characterization in the first act, it would be “A hardened military man with a fine touch”. You see, he doesn’t prefer his tortures to be physical, as such crudeness is for the brutes and meat heads. Bruising a child would be, mostly, beneath him. Causing a child to cry, however, is acceptable. Psychological abuse and emotional coercion are more his flavor, and alot more suited to an aristocratic figure such as himself. After Muska had taken control of Laputa, this cultured bearing is totally lost and had been exchanged in favor of undisguised malice and going mad with power. After he shows his insanity, the only noble thing about him left is sharing a royal lineage with Sheeta, a descendant of the True Ruler of Laputa.
On the topic of Muska and Sheeta being royal descendants, I have a minor theory that Muska saw his own actions as less of a caper, and more like a Golpe-de-Estado. His hope that “Laputa will rise again” doesn’t need any theorizing or elaboration, as it invokes a more or less clear reference to Nationalist calls from history. The obvious prescence of that, from the voice of the bad guy, is just a reflection of Miyazaki’s general brief against Nationalism.
Perhaps related to the Anti-Nationalism, Throughout Castle in The Sky, there seems to be a correlation with the levels of power held by the characters and how evil they are. The Pirates, who eventually take in and shelter Pazu and Sheeta, were never seen as morally pure. They were Pirates after all, and they simply wanted to find Laputa for the loot. The Military, on the other hand, are seen as worse and “No better than thieves” according to Pazu. Which is rather ironic commentary from Pazu. Of course, besides just having more manpower, the soldiers naturally had the law on their side. So, there was something to That is, there was an obvious expectation that they were supposed to be better. And Muska had become more powerful than all of them, even though it was for a brief time. But, in that sliver of time, he had become the worst out of them all. Arguably, the only persons that outranked Muska in both extreme evil and incredible power were the former inhabitants of Laputa.
The viewer has no reason to not take Muska at his word, when he says that the airborne kingdom once dominated the world with fearsome strength and almost superhuman technique. However, they concluded their worldwide tenure by embracing an earthbound life, as described by Sheeta. Even then, in hindsight, its not completely clear whether they were forced to or had chosen to. Laputa’s first active presence was through a giant robot, which had dropped from the sky, had been inadvertenly activated by Sheeta’s Crystal Necklace and a magic word, and which had terrified Sheeta by demonstrating its destructive abilities. Later, when Sheeta and Pazu arrive at Laputa, they see the same kind of giant robots acting as gardeners, animal keepers, and as column supports for trees.
For a time, the protagonists, and the viewer by extension, is briefly lulled into the thought that the legendary flying island was simply a wonderful, naturally beautiful and tranquil place. In other words, one is given the impression that Laputa had simply turned their Swords into Plowshares. But those gardener robots were battle robots, and always had been, even though they were programmed or had decided to be something else. When Muska takes over, he unleashes a measure of Laputa’s abilities and weapons, including those giant robots. In contrast to the idea that they had actually decided upon peace, they never disarmed when they had abandoned it. And this is how we get to know what Laputa used to be all about, before nature has planted her flag on its holding.
TL;DR:
Guy and Girl discover legendary flying island with a terrible secret. Then they become envionmentalists.