A girl just fell from the sky, boss

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2013)

"Laputa: Castle in the Sky" is a 1986 feature length animation by Japanese master director Hayao Miyazaki. The film opens with an exciting battle on-board a bulbous airship, in which a band of bumbling sky-pirates attempt to apprehend Sheeta, a little girl who possesses a stone with remarkable powers. Assisting Sheeta is Pazu, a resourceful kid who lives in a ramshackled mining community.
Miyazaki's plot's frequently sound silly on paper. On screen, though, they're brimming with neat little details and passages. "Laputa's" packed with one cool sequence after the next, some interesting airship designs and several action sequences guaranteed to make live-action directors jealous (James Cameron, Brad Bird and Spielberg are self-professed Miyazaki fan-boys). And as is typical of Miyazaki, the film boasts another enchanting score by composer Joe Hisaishi, alternates between kinetic moments and poetic, Ozu-like postcard images, and is positively in love with aircrafts, flying and wide open skies. The film's eco-sermon is also less heavy-handed than some of Miyazaki's other works; here an ancient civilisation collapses when it symbolically loses all ties and connections with the natural world, a lesson which a new militaristic superpower fails to learn.
Miyazaki directed "Nausicca of the Valley of the Winds" in 1984. Like that film, "Laputa" takes place in a steam-punk world which mixes high and low technology. This is a contrast to most science fiction animes, which take place in dystopian, cyberpunk futures. Of course Miyazaki is as anti-militaristic and techno-wary as his contemporaries (Satoshi Kon, Isao Takahata, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mamoru Oshii etc), but he's also far less pessimistic and far more romantic. They're about steel and concrete. He's a wood and chlorophyll guy. Miyazaki's steam-punk approach also tends to result in a number of unusual machines, many of which are evocative of Albert Robida, a French artist who was popular in the late 1880s.
"Laputa" is arguably the only film in Miyzaki's oeuvre with a conventional villain. His other films tend to have no clear distinctions between the "bad guys" and "good guys". At its best, the film conveys an incredible sense of place, with leafy cloud cities, subterranean mining towns (Laputa's mirror image), and turbulent skies which buffet flimsy airships. Unfortunately, after a strong first three acts, the film degenerates into clichés, with conventional light shows, damsels in distress and a obligatory "temple collapse" sequence (ancient temples always collapse RIGHT AFTER they've been rediscovered). Still, it's one of Miyazaki's coolest adventures.
8.9/10 – The similarly themed, though cyberpunk, "Akira" would be released 2 years later. See "Nausicca of the Valley of the Winds" and "Only Yesterday".