Castle in the Sky

• 1. Introduction

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  Castle in the Sky opened in 103 Japanese theaters on the 2nd of August 1986, carrying on its shoulders the future of a brand-new animation studio that had been in existence for barely a year. The film was the first production to bear the Studio Ghibli name. It was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by Isao Takahata, and distributed by the Toei Company. At its center are two orphans, Sheeta and Pazu, pursued by a government agent named Muska, a pirate gang led by Dola, and the army itself, all racing toward a mythical flying castle called Laputa. The questions hanging over everything: what is Laputa, who really controls it, and what does any of it cost in human terms? The answers arrive in layers across a two-hour film that drew on Welsh mining villages, nineteenth-century adventure literature, and an elementary-school idea Miyazaki had never forgotten.

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• 2. Origins and Studio Ghibli's Birth

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  After Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind succeeded in 1984, Miyazaki turned down Tokuma Shoten's request to produce a direct follow-up. Instead he sketched a film set in the city of Yanagawa, tentatively called Blue Mountains, which he pitched to Tokuma Shoten in June 1984. He admitted in a later interview that he "wasn't in shape to direct" at the time, and the project stalled. What rescued the situation was an accidental chain of events: Takahata, inspired by Yanagawa's canals, proposed making a documentary about them rather than a feature film. Miyazaki financed that project through his personal office, Nibariki, using profits from Nausicaa. Takahata spent the money rapidly on research. To recover the expense, Animage editor Toshio Suzuki recommended that Miyazaki direct a new feature. According to Suzuki, Miyazaki immediately agreed and reached back to an idea he had conceived in elementary school. Suzuki later said that "if Takahata had made his movie on schedule, Castle in the Sky wouldn't have been born."

  Miyazaki completed a project proposal in December 1984 under the working title Young Boy Pazu. Animation scholar Seiji Kano described its ideas as a "direct rebellion" against popular trends: instead of a superhuman protagonist in a futuristic setting, the proposal offered an ordinary child in a fantastical nineteenth-century world. Tokuma Shoten approved the project immediately. Meanwhile, the company that had animated Nausicaa, Topcraft, went bankrupt. Takahata, Suzuki, and Tokuma Shoten searched for a replacement studio and found none. They decided to build their own. Studio Ghibli opened on the 15th of June 1985, as a Tokuma Shoten subsidiary, hiring former Topcraft collaborators and colorist Michiyo Yasuda. Miyazaki began the first script draft on June 17 and finished it before the month ended.

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• 3. Wales and the Miners' Strike

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  In 1984, Miyazaki visited Wales and witnessed the 1984-1985 coal miners' strike against Margaret Thatcher's government's push to close many mines. Takahata suggested a return visit for location scouting, so in May 1985 Miyazaki traveled there alone. The Big Pit Mine, by then converted into a museum, shaped the film's opening scenes in the mining village. Cardiff Castle and similar Welsh structures provided references for Titus Fort.

  The miners' defeat left a lasting mark on Miyazaki. He later told The Guardian in 2005: "I admired those men, I admired the way they battled to save their way of life, just as the coal miners in Japan did. Many people of my generation see the miners as a symbol, a dying breed of fighting men. Now they are gone." Animation scholar Kano speculated that the miners reminded Miyazaki of his own time in a labor union at Toei Animation. This sympathy surfaces in several supporting characters in the film: ordinary workers in the mines who, despite impoverished lives of hard labor, enthusiastically protect Sheeta and Pazu from multiple aggressors. Miyazaki made one further trip to Wales in 1986, ahead of the film's release.

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• 4. Animation Craft and Scale

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  Castle in the Sky was animated by hand using at least 69,262 cel drawings. The studio aimed for a "manga-like feel" with a limited color palette, but ended up using over 300 shades. Colorist Yasuda attributed this to the varied lighting conditions across the film; Nausicaa had used only around 250. Lead animator Yoshinori Kanada was hired in August 1985. His first assignment was to figure out how to animate the flaptors, the insect-winged flying machines used by Dola's gang. After multiple approaches, he settled on drybrushed strokes to imply rapid motion.

  Some sequences required techniques that went beyond standard cel work. The opening credits used "transmitted light" techniques, deliberately overexposing the film so that light bled into adjacent image sections, conveying the luminance of Sheeta's crystal necklace. Certain scenes used double exposures to create the effect of semi-transparency, which depicted Laputa's holograms. The studio also employed the Harmony Process, a technique that involved cutting cels into custom shapes, painting them in the style of a background layer, and moving them between frames like stop-motion animation. This allowed foreground elements to carry high detail without being redrawn on every frame. An early shot of the Goliath airship was among the sequences that used Harmony elements. By January 1986-33 people were working on the project in total.

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• 5. Joe Hisaishi and the Score

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  Joe Hisaishi, who had composed the Nausicaa score, returned for Castle in the Sky after Miyazaki personally requested it, even though Hisaishi was already committed to composing for Arion (1986). He joined the project in February 1986 and began with an image album, a set of demos based on concept materials that serve as a precursor to the finished score. Takahata acted as music supervisor. Each image-album track was then extended and arranged for full symphony orchestra.

  Hisaishi aimed to synchronize the music precisely with the on-screen action. Digital playback advances allowed him to compose while watching the animation and compare timing directly. The result was lengthy sequences with uninterrupted background score and pieces that dynamically shift between motifs to match the scene's perspective. The image album leaned toward electronic textures, but the finished film used Fairlight synthesizers alongside a 50-piece orchestra for a more "acoustic" sound. Disagreements between Miyazaki, Takahata, and Hisaishi over which scenes needed music caused delays; the score for the opening scene was written less than a month before release.

  Castle in the Sky was among the first Japanese films to use quadraphonic four-channel sound in theaters. Sound director Shigeharu Shiba avoided using the extra speakers for dramatic panning effects, which Miyazaki felt became too artificial, and instead focused on preserving a "natural sense of space". For the 1999-2000 English dub, Hisaishi rewrote the entire soundtrack in what he called a "Hollywood method," this time assigning musical themes to individual characters. The new version was roughly 90 minutes long, compared to just one hour of music in the Japanese original. It was performed by the Seattle Symphony, recorded in a local church in Seattle in late April and early May.

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• 6. Laputa's Dual Nature

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  The island of Laputa takes its name directly from the flying island in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Film scholar Cristina Cardia argues that, like its namesake, the island is introduced with benign intentions but is ultimately "exploited for perverse ends, in this case war." The film presents Laputa first as a deserted, overgrown place tended by a peaceful robot caretaker. It is only when Muska seizes its ancient knowledge and weaponry that the island's oppressive underside emerges. Literary scholar Anthony Lioi interprets Laputa as an ecological utopia demonstrating that peace between nature and advanced technology is possible, but one that also criticizes modernity when "the peace is shattered by human violence."

  The robots of Laputa crystallize this ambiguity. They appear first as violent instruments capable of extreme destruction, then as peaceful garden caretakers. Lioi argues that they are caretakers by default and become destructive only in response to human brutality. Animation scholar Helen McCarthy frames it differently: "this is not a comment on technology but on man's inability to use it wisely." The giant tree rooted in Laputa's center functions, in McCarthy's reading, as a metaphor for the reviving and life-giving power of nature. Critic Susan Napier notes that the film closes on an "unsettling view" of the castle drifting away, implying that humanity may not deserve to coexist with the natural world. The film's ecological ambiguity would find a starker expression in Miyazaki's later Princess Mononoke (1997).

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• 7. Legacy and Influence

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  Castle in the Sky underperformed at the Japanese box office in its initial 14-day run, attracting 774,271 viewers and earning roughly two-thirds of what Nausicaa had made. It recovered through television broadcasts and rereleases. Nippon Television screenings from 1988 to 2004 drew viewership rates between 12 and 22 percent. The 1998 VHS reissue in Japan sold around 1 million copies, and two DVD collections in 2002 sold another 500,000.

  Over time, audiences elevated the film well beyond its opening-week returns. It was named the best animation of all time in a 2008 poll by Oricon. On the 9th of December 2011, during a Japanese television broadcast, fans posting to Twitter set a platform record of 25,088 tweets per second. That record was surpassed during an the 2nd of August 2013 airing, when the figure reached 143,199 per second. Several major filmmakers and studios have cited the film directly. Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno drew on a Miyazaki concept when creating Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990). Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell, 1995) and Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, 2016) have named it among their favorite animations. John Lasseter, former chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney Animation, called Miyazaki his "greatest inspiration" and said at the 2014 Tokyo International Film Festival: "Whenever we get stuck at Pixar or Disney, I put on a Miyazaki film sequence or two, just to get us inspired again." The Iron Golem from Minecraft (2011) was designed after the Laputan robots, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) features a flying castle with thematic parallels that critics have traced back to Laputa.

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