Miyazaki Marathon Day 2: Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Name: Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Type: Movie
Rating: Any Age
Runtime: 124 min
Directed By Miyazaki Hayao
Produced By Studion Ghibli
Year Produced: 1986

The To Aru Kagaku no Home Theater Miyazaki Marathon... and then some... continues, despite public protest!

This is a "festival" where I sit down at spend about a week and a half watching all of the Miyazaki movies that I want to.  I didn't mention this last time, but I don't have any particular interest in Ponyo.

What's still to come are:

Wednesday - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Thursday - Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
Friday - Porco Rosso (1992)
Saturday - Whisper of the Heart (1995)
Sunday - Princess Mononoke (1997)
Monday of Next Week - Spirited Away (2001)
Tuesday of Next Week - Howl's Moving Castle (2004)


I've already reviewed Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa yesterday, so if you're interested in that, then check it out... back there.


Set in (again, no name) what appears to be a coal or other fuel mining town, Laputa is a magical story about a young girl... actually, I don't have any idea how old the two main characters are.  About 12?

This is Sheeta, the main character.  You try and guess her age!

She is being held captive by a group of strange, suit-wearing men... gentlemen (not), for reasons unknown (I love that word... that phrase).  Suddenly, from out of the clouds comes...

Mutant... dragonfly things.

Well, you explain it!  I don't think that this could work, even in fantasy... especially not with two people riding...

PIRATES!!

And guess what, they've come for Sheeta (of course.  If you can't predict these kinds of things yet, you need to leave.  I actually think that a story about the hero's friend would be awesome.  Yeah, probably slightly boring, but it'd sure as hell be different).  Actually, they didn't come after her, but rather the jewel that she is carrying.

Doom.

So Sheeta brains her guard and escapes through the window.  She's just forgotten one vital thing...

Oh dear...

The fact that she's really high up.  She's above the clouds, for God's sake.  Looking back on it, she probably regrets her choice to brave the outside of the ship, but then again, hindsight is 20x20.

Sheeta manages to crawl along the hull of the ship until she gets to the window in the above picture... then she slips and falls.

If she died, then that would make it impossible to make the joke that I always do, but since she didn't, and I'm getting tired or being predictable, I'll just say this.

She flies away...

...

... no, seriously!  I'm not the boy who cried wolf, dammit!  She actually flew... not away, but she sure as hell floated!

Woah...

She floated down to the surface of Earth... or wherever, where she is spotted and then "caught" by this guy, Pazu.  The guy from Ghost in the Shell SAC before he grew up.  Not.

Pazu...

"Catch".

Actually, in all fairness, that's not what happened.  This is what it looked like (since it is a freaking screen-shot).

Yes, girls are heavier than they look (not intended to be a derogatory remark of any kind).  I can attest that you are not one of those heroes out of any number of B action films.  Neither are those heroes, actually, if you look, they're straining.

Anyway, now that everybody's after them, they've got to get away... naturally.

Okay, I watched this twice, and I have to say that I liked it a lot better the second time.  It had one of the best scenes in it, involving idiotic American-Style fighting!  No spins or twirls or anything, just punch as hard as you can.  It's pretty awesome... actually the whole scene was awesome...

POP YOUR BUTTONS, BOSS!!

WOOT!!

The characters were fun and awesome, and nobody that you cared about died, which was cool.  By the way, the above two characters (especially the second one) are among my top-ten favorites right now.

The music must have been good for the show because I don't remember it at all!  If I had particularly liked it though, it would have stuck in my memory.  I do get the feeling that it was a lot of light, probably woodwind instruments.

Both the English and the Japanese were good, and Mark Hamill makes a comeback as the bad guy.  What's going on there, man?  Am I going to see him in My Neighbor Totoro too?

 Mr. Skywalker?

Check it out, it's good fun.  "Clean" if that's the right word, though I'm not too thrilled about the term "Good, clean fun".

Laputa: Castle in the Sky Minitheatre

Ghibli 13 Movie Collection (Dual Audio) Nihonomaru

Coming up next!

Day 3: My Neighbor Totoro!

 

Alert!

If you don't like spoilers, or still want to watch the show now, you'd better stop reading!

Well things couldn't get much worse for them.  Sheeta's the princess of the castle in the sky, an invention that used to be all over the place before they... crashed because of internal struggle.
What's more is that jewel that she's always carrying around is a rock of pure Laputa, some kind of mineral that was used to power the castles and allows Sheeta to fly.

The two of them evade capture for a while until... well... they get captured, and not by the pirates, but rather the army and Mr. Hamill.  They are taken away and Sheeta is shown some kind of... robot thing.

They convince Sheeta to tell Pazu to go away, and then he gets thrown into a fit of remorse, staggering back home where he finds... the pirates... eating all of his food, dammit!

He tells them where Sheeta is, and then convinces them to take him along.
 
Meanwhile, somethings going on at Fort... wherever.  That asshole Muska is trying to get Sheeta to tell him all sorts of top-secret info about the castle in the sky, and when he crosses the line and touches her, she shouts "Rape!", smacks him, and then sues him for Sexual Assault.

What she's keeping from Muska, aside from her virginity, is the fact that she figured out where the castle was by saying a spell that her grandmother taught her (along with several others including one of death!)

Too bad Muska was such a dick, because now that Sheeta's freaking out, the robot's awake.  Basically, to robot creates an exit for Sheeta, and then proceeds to torch the entire castle.  Like... hundreds of soldiers here getting owned by an amputee robot, how weird is that?  Even the freaking cannons can's stop it!

Pazu and the pirates come in just in time to pick her up, and then they fly out of there, but in the chaos, Sheeta drops the jewel.  When things have calmed down, Muska finds the jewel and it shines the path to the castle once again.  Muska and the General get in their ship and take off.

Sheeta and Pazu, with their food supplies demolished, have nowhere else to go, so they tag along with the pirates, serving aboard the HMS... Chicken Ship.  On their way to the castle (using Sheeta's memory of the path), they run back into Muska, and since their flying in pretty much a tin can, they decide that flying into a massive hurricane is better than standing and fighting.

Pazu and Sheet were up in a kite to check the wind levels and keep a watch out, but now they're screwed.  Snapped, actually, from the main ship, and they sail into the middle of the storm.

But wouldn't you know it, inside that hurricane is the castle, and they make a crash-landing on the castle.  Yay.  Once there, they find a bunch more of those robot things, only most of them are shut down since they ran out of power.

I just love that idea of how the robots won't be lonely because they've got all their animal friends there (Teto makes a cameo appearance).  No, of course they won't be lonely... because they're freaking robots!!

Muska lives through the storm and crashes into the side of the castle, unloading a crap load of soldiers and with them the pirates who are sentenced to be executed, so Pazu goes to save them.

During their search of the castle, the soldiers find gold, treasure, and Sheeta, who, like a dumbass sacrifices herself to save Pazu, who would have been just fine if he moved an inch or so.

Pazu frees the captive pirates and then dashes after Muska and Sheeta, until he hits a wall that only they can go through, so he finds another way.  Now the entire army is after Muska because he's going off on his own and frankly... the general doesn't like him very much.

At the center of the castle is a vast library of knowledge and even what I think are computers.  The whole thing's been overrun by the rouge roots of the great tree that's taken over since all the humans died, and that pisses Muska off.

Muska wants the castle because it's a weapon which he can use to rule the world.  He's also a member of the same royal family as Sheeta (her brother, I think... something like that).

Muska activates the weapon and then demonstrates his power on the foolhardy, pudgy general and his troops.  All attempts to stop him are foiled and then destroyed.

Sheeta ambushes Muska and steals the jewel (which is like the key to the car of death), running away from him to... pretty much nowhere if you think about it.

Pazu manages to get inside and finds Sheeta on the other side of a wall.  He takes the jewel that she gives him and hides it before blowing through to the other side.

Pazu and Sheeta then confront Muska, then kill him using the spell of death.  Hot damn!  Actually, the whole fucking castle crumbles, and Pazu and Sheeta escape on the kite, meeting up with the pirates again, who've made off with a good portion of the loot inside the castle.

Happy end.

There are a couple of things in this movie that are noteworthy.
I'm not sure if there's any kind of internal logic behind it, but I noticed that the soldiers that appeared inside the movie were... strangely 1914 German...

"Yavol, mein commandant!"

Also, I totally don't get Pazu's father.  The dude just happened to have one of these freaking bulky-ass cameras in the middle of a storm?

No wonder people didn't believe him.  If I'd been there, I'd have ditched that piece of shit the minute I felt an odd wind.

And that's about it, so I'll just wrap this up and go to bed.

Oh Yeah!