Laputa - The Castle in the Sky
Laputa: The Castle in the Sky, aka Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ; Tenku no shiro Rapyuta) is a 1986 animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Characters
- Sheeta--a little girl, the heroine of this story, and possessor of a mysterious flying stone.
- Pazu--young boy, friend of Sheeta who serves as an apprentice to a boiler mechanic and helps Sheeta throughout the story.
Setting
The world in which the story takes place is clearly Earth, but apparently in a parallel universe. None of the place names matches real-life geography, and all of the aircraft (except one or two primitive airships) use different technology from real 20th century aircraft. Some of the architecture seen in the movie could belong to an English or Welsh mining town, but set in a series of steep-sided gorges that bear no resemblance to any place in Britain. Running through these gorges are railroad tracks set on high wooden trestle bridges, more reminiscent of early railway bridges in the Rocky Mountains, and there are armored military trains that also have no comparison on our world. The overall level of technology seems to be the equivalent of our own world in the 1920s, with telephones, steam engines and radio using something like morse code.
Plot
There is a legend that somewhere high up in the sky, a flying castle called Laputa is still wandering about in the air. The people who lived on Laputa had a highly advanced technology to maintain Laputa in the air and they had ruled the people on the earth with the threat of their technology some 700 years ago.
Sheeta's family heirloom, a stone that prevents one from falling to one's death has some connection to the flying city. She is pursued by pirates who wish to steal it, and by the military for unknown reasons.
Other Information
The flying island/city Laputa is based on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, though the two stories are not related in any other way. The name of the movie was changed in the USA (and UK) to Castle in the Sky because "la puta" means "the whore" in Spanish. Swift undoubtedly knew this, but Miyazaki probably did not.
Many believe that the characters of Miyazaki's 1978 series Future Boy Conan were the prototype of the characters in this film.
The Laputan robot design in this movie is identical to the robot that appeared in the Miyazaki directed 1981 Lupin III tv episode Farewell, Lovely Lupin.
