Share All sharing options for: Studio Ghibli’s first film, Castle in the Sky, is like no Hayao Miyazaki film that followed
With Studio Ghibli’s library now on digital và streaming services, we’ve surveyed the studio’s history, impact, và biggest themes. Read all of the stories on our Ghibli Guide page.
Bạn đang xem: Castle in the sky
The Studio Ghibli story began long before Castle in the Sky, the ambitious action-fantasy that was the Japanese animation house’s first release. Arguably, the story began when animators Hayao Miyazaki & Isao Takahata, two of Ghibli’s co-founders and its most prolific film directors, met và worked together on anime projects lượt thích the 1968 feature film Horus, Prince of the Sun and the 1970s Lupin the Third television series. Or fans could say it began before then, when Takahata and Miyazaki separately discovered their interest in animation, which led them khổng lồ Japan’s Toei Animation, where they honed their talents and their narrative voices.
But given how significantly Miyazaki’s tastes và personalities in particular came to lớn define Ghibli, it’s easiest to say that the studio’s story started with his immediate family. Miyazaki’s father Katsuji, an aeronautical engineer, was a key influence whose impact has been felt in every one of the animator’s major works. Miyazaki’s father ran a family business, Miyazaki Airplanes, and the director grew up around airline designs & parts. His obsession with the mechanics of flight stretches unmissably through all his films. But it’s particularly visible in Castle in the Sky, where half the action takes place aboard steampunk-ish airships, among fantastical flying devices, & ultimately in và around a flying city.
Miyazaki Airplanes manufactured parts for Japan’s Zero fighter planes during World War II, & that, too, had a long-term effect on the director’s thinking. The guilt he later expressed over his family’s part in the war is clearly expressed in his film Porco Rosso, a strange fairy tale about an Italian air ace navigating his homeland’s growing fascism. (And a curse that makes him look like an anthropomorphic pig, but that’s a separate issue.) Miyazaki’s feelings emerge even more clearly in his most recent feature film, 2013’s The Wind Rises, which turns a biography of World War II airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi into a meditation on flight, và the gap between engineers’ dreams và the military’s practical uses for them.
But in Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki’s feelings about the military, and his deep-seated love of flight, emerge in ways that wound up being quality in the chip core Ghibli catalogue. The film’s visual style is still recognizable in the studio’s films from 30 years later, and so are its character stylings và visual gags, but Castle in the Sky centers on something Ghibli has largely avoided ever since: an outright, uncompromising, unrelieved villain.
Castle in the Sky opens on a blimp-like airship where a young girl, Sheeta, is being held prisoner by a group of stern-faced military men led by the smirking Colonel Muska. When a group of sky-pirates, led by a bold, plump old lady named Dola, attacks the ship in an attempt khổng lồ steal Sheeta’s crystal necklace, the girl escapes the cabin — but falls from the ship và plummets to lớn earth, into the arms of a young miner boy named Pazu. As Dola’s gang, Colonel Muska, and the military all pursue Sheeta, the two children flee through a long series of kích hoạt sequences that take them down into a series of underground mines, across a rickety series of elevated steam-train tracks, through a military fortress, & eventually khổng lồ Laputa, the ancient, high-tech “castle in the sky.”
Sheeta’s necklace, it turns out, is a powerful artifact that holds the keys to Laputa. Và while Colonel Muska pretends khổng lồ represent the government, he wants access to Laputa entirely for his own sake. He’s a dapper, urbane sort of villain, capable of acting charming when it suits him, though most of his gentler words include veiled threats. He proves more than capable of threatening Pazu & Sheeta’s lives, và attempting to lớn kill them. When he does get his hands on Laputa’s power, he casually uses it for murder on a mass scale that’s shocking in what’s mostly an amiable children’s adventure. He’s clearly a megalomaniac, a ruthlessly amoral power-seeker who doesn’t care about other people’s lives. Given access lớn an overwhelmingly powerful weapon, he immediately sets out khổng lồ grind the world under his heel. & as villains tend to lớn in children’s stories, he pays the price for his hubris.
But none of that is typical for Ghibli movies. Castle in the Sky also explores a completely different kind of villain, one that wound up becoming much more of a mã sản phẩm for Ghibli’s films — & Miyazaki’s in particular.
The pirate queen Dola initially appears khổng lồ be as much of a villain as Muska. (She’s known as Dora in some translations, as Castle in the Sky has been released in English multiple times, with varying names and dialogue.) Her pirate crew — eight comically clumsy Large Adult Sons, and a mechanic who may be Dola’s husband & the crew’s father — ruthlessly pursue Sheeta because they’re looking for Laputa’s supposed treasure. In the process, they casually destroy anything that gets in their way. When Muska disappears with Sheeta, Dola takes Pazu captive, and her boys wreck his home.
But over the course of the film, Pazu & Sheeta impress Dola, and her softer side rapidly emerges. When Pazu begs to lớn come with her và her sky-pirates khổng lồ get Sheeta back from the military, Dola accepts because she thinks he’ll be useful in manipulating and controlling the girl. Once Sheeta’s on board the pirate ship, Dola’s sons similarly melt, from rough-and-tumble fighters lớn sheepish, easily cowed kitchen assistants. (The 2003 Disney script translation, which implies they all want to marry Sheeta even though she’s a prepubescent girl, is a deeply weird touch, và it isn’t reflected in other versions.) By the over of the film, the pirate band and the two children are all clearly invested in each other’s survival and happiness, & they part ways as friends.
The Dola gang’s brief position as bad guys is Ghibli villainy as later fans would see it, more as a matter of perspective & unfamiliarity than actual evil. Only two of Hayao Miyazaki’s later movies actually have traditional villains: the Witch of the Waste in Howl’s Moving Castle, & the monstrous witch Yubaba và her immediate coterie in Spirited Away. Lượt thích Dola, both of them soften out of pure villainy as their films go on.
Xem thêm: Quà Tặng Bạn Trai Sinh Nhật
And while from some perspectives, the fierce human leader Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke or the controlling wizard-scientist Fujimoto in Ponyo might seem to fill the villain slot, they’re also both relatable from an outside perspective. Eboshi is a pragmatist, trying lớn rescue her people & give them somewhere to lớn live. While her choices are destructive & ruthless, they’re also selfless and heroic. Fujimoto is just a concerned father who’s holding his daughter back for the same reason any parent might — khổng lồ protect her from the threats of the world.
In other Ghibli movies, the danger threatening the protagonists comes from within, not without. When Satsuki and Mei almost give into despair over their mother’s illness in My Neighbor Totoro, and Mei wanders off alone, they’re threatened more by loss of hope than by any evil. Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service và Kaguya in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya find depression much more dangerous than any adversary. Và many other Ghibli movies, lượt thích When Marnie Was There, From Up On Poppy Hill, Whisper Of The Heart, & Only Yesterday, spend more time contending with mild melancholy than with fear or fighting. Even the criminal manipulator Renaldo Moon in The cat Returns is more trickster friend than determined foe.
Why did Ghibli — & Miyazaki in particular — so determinedly detach from conventional protagonist/antagonist stories? That question seems khổng lồ particularly plague American journalists, who periodically ask him the question, on the rare occasions when he permits interviews. Miyazaki tends khổng lồ gently dodge the issue, but when former Pixar honcho John Lasseter asked him about it in 2009 as part of an Academy Awards retrospective, Miyazaki offered one explanation: he just has too much empathy.
“When I create a villain, I start liking the villain, & the villain becomes a being who is not really evil,” he tells Lasseter. As an example, he brings up one of the old 1940s Fleischer brothers dũng sĩ cartoons, where an antagonist has created a secret underground lair. The màn chơi of effort và focus involved in a scheme like that, Miyazaki says, should be admirable in its own way — even lovable. “Villains actually work harder than the heroes,” he says.
He also suggests that given Ghibli’s long production process, spending years embedded in outright irredeemable characters is emotionally wearying. “Making an evil creature that really has an empty place or a hole in his heart is very tragic and depressing & sad to lớn draw,” he says in that same interview. “So I don’t like drawing them. You can see animators drawing, & when they draw a happy face, they are smiling as well. When they draw a bad character, they’re grimacing & looking fierce. So I think it’s better to lớn have a smiling face more than a grimacing face.”
That response may seem a little facile, given that some Ghibli films vày go to such grim and horrifying places, exploring disease or suffering or death. Those threats just rarely have a single evil face to lớn represent them. They aren’t outsized baddies, they’re just negative emotions, like Kiki’s depression, Howl’s body-melting sulk-fit, or Chihiro’s fear of change and the unknown.
Or they’re functionaries & societal forces that are too big lớn grasp or fight. Madame Suliman in Howl’s Moving Castle represents a cruel và implacable military, and the way she puts a kindly face on it is as evil as anything Muska does — but she isn’t at the center of the story. The tanuki in Pom Poko are fighting human urbanization and the disappearance of the wild. Seita và Setsuko in Takahata’s heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies are suffering in wartime, but neither the aunt who resents their upkeep nor the soldiers who bomb their town are presented as traditional villains. Curtis in Porco Rosso is the face of the American military, and the hero’s primary rival. But he’s also a comic figure that has nothing to do with the story’s real threats — the rising tide of Italian fascism, and the slowly changing post-war world.
Ghibli’s only other traditional villain is Cob in Tales From Earthsea, a selfish, predatory wizard who the heroes have khổng lồ face and defeat. He feels lượt thích an anomaly in Ghibli’s library, an artifact of the source material — Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy novels, which follow a more traditional hero’s-journey arc than Ghibli’s movies generally do. He’s also Ghibli’s least memorable villain, less relatable than the abstract threats of depression và fear, & less intimidating than the unstoppable forces of industrialization và the military. Compared lớn the threats in the Ghibli movies that have them, he seems petty và predictable.
Ghibli’s stronger movies often push their threats lớn the background, but at the same time, they present humanity’s urge for conquest & the indifference khổng lồ human suffering as inevitable and unchangeable, even unreachable. And that backdrop of sorrow and inevitability speaks lớn the heart of Ghibli’s longtime philosophy. What makes heroes in Ghibli worlds is the determination khổng lồ soldier on, to lớn be brave in the face of fear or sadness or hardship. Courage doesn’t always let the protagonists win, or even survive. It doesn’t always let them change the world.
But in Castle in the Sky, it does. Ghibli’s first movie treats villainy different than its followers. But in other ways, it lays out a pattern that the studio’s later movies would follow closely, particularly in Dola’s secret gentleness, the military’s greed and inefficiency, the hilarious clumsiness of crowds và mobs, and the breathtaking feeling of flight.
And more than that, Castle in the Sky sets a course for Ghibli in the ferocity Pazu exhibits as he tries, over and over, lớn reach Sheeta’s side against long odds & implacable forces. (He’s up against gravity và entropy more often than he’s up against Muska.) Ashitaka’s determination lớn help San in Princess Mononoke, Seita’s battle for Setsuko’s life in Grave of the Fireflies, Ponyo’s obsession with Sōsuke in Ponyo, Chihiro’s bravery on Haku’s behalf in Spirited Away — they all start with Castle in the Sky, và its central relationship. Where villainy isn’t vi xử lý core to Ghibli movies, determination, loyalty, & love are.
And that’s because Ghibli movies focus on how personal connections make life worthwhile, far more often than they focus on battles to be won or worlds lớn be conquered. Ghibli characters can’t always change the larger world, or kết thúc suffering, or solve the problems of human greed and stupidity. But in Castle in the Sky and the films that followed, they can face whatever forces are arrayed against them, và make a difference for the people they love. That’s a message that resonates for real-world viewers, far more than the promise that cackling villains will be defeated, và it’s one of the secrets that’s made Ghibli so memorable over the past 35 years.
