The pirate leader, the Pippi Longstocking–plaited, snaggle-toothed battleax Dola, is one of Miyazaki’s most sparkling supporting characters, and one of his neatest semi-villain rehabilitations. Laputa is a swashbuckling steampunk treasure hunt, part Star Wars, part Raiders of the Lost Ark - or rather, in keeping with the Victorian milieu, part Burroughs or Jules Verne, part Conan Doyle or Haggard. Pazu’s strange house, with its brickwork, roof-top trap door and tower with spiral treads, is a joy, as is his curious morning ritual of climbing to the roof to release the pigeons and trumpet the dawn.Īt stake is Sheeta’s pendant, a blue gemstone with mysterious power connected to Sheeta’s past and to the legend of Laputa, a lost city in the clouds (inspired by the flying island Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels). Soon joined by scrappy young Pazu, a boy who works at a local mining plant, Sheeta attempts to evade opposing parties of airborne pirates and ruthless government forces.Īs usual, Miyazaki festoons his work with odd, gratuitous flourishes of beauty. The director’s first wholly original film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky opens in medias res with a young heroine mysteriously escaping an aerial skirmish aboard a dirigible. Then, with Babel-like or Icarus-like comeuppance, Miyazaki’s pessimism and ecological concerns are roused as technology fails, men fall back to earth, and the simplicity of the earlier images is reasserted - all before the story really gets underway. Like Leonardo’s designs, they aren’t always practical, but this doesn’t detract from their coolness. Like Leonardo da Vinci, who covered sketchbook leaves with plans for gliders and flying machines, Miyazaki’s fascination with flight comes out in this sequence, which hints at a historical progression from simpler machines to massive plants, to dirigible-like airships, to immense airborne structures, armadas and even flying islands and cities. He doesn’t begin with plot or characters, but with images, with premises, with possible worlds. That opening credit sequence, with its woodcut-like depictions of fantastic technology representing an alternate 19th century - massive structures fusing windmills, derricks, gears, pulleys, steam engines, paddle wheels, propellers and such - reveals something of how Miyazaki’s invention works.
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