He Shot That Poor Girl's Hair Off!!!

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2010)

PLOT IN A NUTSHELL: A young miner boy named Pazu, who dreams of proving the existence of the Castle in the Sky known as Laputa, a small part of which his father photographed many years ago, finds his life turned upside down when a mysterious girl named Sheeta (Shita in the original Japanese version) literally falls into his arms with an even more mysterious crystal hanging around her neck. Two factions are after her - a family of goofy pirates led by the elderly yet energetic Dola and government agents led by the sinister Muska allegedly on behalf of the military. But what is Muska truly after?
Hayao Miyazaki's second full length animated feature has all the abundant energy and miraculous flying machinery one has come to expect from his colorful and seemingly boundless imagination. Lush, beautiful animation brings a miraculous story of good vs. evil to life in a way that few films can.
I have never heard the original English language dub, but from what I've read it was assembled very quickly and was quite poor as a result, with its cast (which included Barbara Goodson and Lara Cody as the child leads) settling for just reading the dialogue without actually performing it. The Disney re-dub, recorded in 1998 but not released until 2003, is very good and will make the adventure enjoyable even for most subtitle purists. The only voice in the English version that doesn't quite work is Anna Pacquin as Sheeta. Anna is not exactly a great actress to begin with, but it doesn't take someone with Katherine Hepburn level talent to maintain a consistent voice, but this is something Anna herself is not able to do in this feature. Her voice is ultimately all over the place, sounding American one moment and then sounding like a British teenager in other parts and sadly not fitting the appearance of Sheeta at all. As Pazu, James Van Der Beek sounds more like a teenager than a little boy, but at least his voice is consistent and even his detractors would have a hard time denying that he brings a lot of energy to the role. However, the real stars of the English dub are Cloris Leachman as Dola and Mark Hamill as Muska. Leachman has plenty of fun with the wily pirate mother, while Hamill delivers a brilliantly sinister and cold blooded performance as Muska, arguably the only real villain Miyazaki has ever featured in any of his films. While Miyazaki's other films feature antagonists who have some redeeming qualities, whether it's showing kindness to the less fortunate (such as Lady Eboshi in "Princess Mononoke") or turn around and become somewhat better people (Witch of the Waste in Miyazaki's adaptation of "Howl's Moving Castle"), Muska has none of these sympathetic qualities. He's not fallen, he's not misguided, he's just bad, I mean he is just plain BAD, a power hungry tyrant who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants, including shooting a little girl's hair off one pigtail at a time (that image is burned into my memory, for better or worse, as one of the most disturbing acts of violence I've ever seen in a film), and Hamill plays him with just the right amount of flamboyant relish. At times the former Star Wars hero's Joker voice (from the various DCAU projects he was a part of) creeps in, but there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
But no matter which language you watch it in, "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" is easily in the top 5 of must see Miyazaki films.