Your Space Program is in Another Castle
By: Adeene Denton
Tags: Anime, NASA, Space, Space Exploration, Movies

Like many Studio Ghibli films, the actual plot of Castle in the Sky is deceptively simple. It follows two children, Sheeta and Pazu, on a seemingly impossible quest to find Laputa, a wondrous city hidden in the clouds whose existence has seemingly passed into legend. As the story unfolds, character after character projects their desires onto Laputa: Pazu longs to prove his family’s worth by confirming that the floating city is real; a troop of rambunctious sky pirates look to it as a treasure trove; various factions of the military plan to exploit it for wealth, power, and dominance. Is the castle a haven, a cache of riches, or a weapon of mass destruction? Unfortunately, Laputa turns out to be all three at once, and it’s this impossibly contradictory existence that leads to its ruin.

Castle in the Sky, despite (or maybe because of) its child protagonists, wrestles with difficult themes about the double-edged nature of power, flight, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth in a more direct way than is typical for Ghibli. It’s also unusual within the Ghibli oevre in providing an overtly evil, irredeemable antagonist as a direct vehicle for the studio’s anti-military and anti-imperialist themes. The military and its scheming Colonel Muska very clearly and explicitly state their desire to use Laputa as a gateway to a higher form of war. This directness in tone, combined with the fantastic Ghibli worldbuilding, gives the film its unique power — it’s why it stuck with me as a kid, and why, twenty years later, I’m coming back to it now.

When watching the movie unfold as a child I believed, as children often do, that something as wondrous as a castle in the sky could only be a force for good. After all, why else would it exist? The role of air and sky in many stories, and particularly stories aimed at children, is one of freedom — so I was absolutely convinced that a castle in the sky represented the ultimate idyllic refuge, full of wonders beyond imagining. Castle in the Sky, of course, turns this expectation on its head. The film drops hint after hint that things are not as they seem. The robot fallen from Laputa, with its cute yet unsettling design, reveals immense destructive powers. The castle itself is hidden in the eye of a hurricane, requiring immense sacrifice and pain to breach its walls.

What Sheeta and Pazu find when they reach their destination is a ruined citadel slowly being overtaken by nature, with a horrible secret at its center. Laputa’s sweeping towers, flowering gardens, and serene reflecting pools are all a veneer for something else entirely: built into the foundations of the city is a high-tech command center designed for airborne warfare. The key to Laputa’s fantastical existence, it turns out, is its capacity for destruction. Here, Castle in the Sky presents its thesis — that beauty and violence are two halves of one human whole. Laputa could be a paradise, but only for those who lived in it; its rulers literally held a gun to the rest of the world so that their city could take flight.

What happens next is only natural: the two children, those with the clearest view of (and the most at stake in) humanity’s future, destroy the command center that controls Laputa, ensuring that it can never again be used as a weapon of mass destruction. And in so doing, the city, and all the good and bad that it represents, is lost forever.

It took me years, and multiple viewings, to process my own strange heartbreak as I watched Laputa crumbling, perplexed by my intense reaction to the loss. Why did it hurt so much to realize that Pazu’s dream of a floating castle full of adventure was completely incompatible with his reality? Why did it hurt so much to understand that the best thing for him to do, the only way to move forward, was to let that dream go? Of course, I didn’t want Laputa to rain hellfire down upon the Earth with its robots and laser guns. I just wanted a version of the city that was what all the myths said it was: all wonder, and no pain.

But that’s the secret of most Ghibli films — sometimes, things are beautiful are also rotten. And we don’t get to turn our faces from the bad to enjoy the good.

A robot looks off towards the flying city from when it came. Image: Studio Ghibli