Are Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky from the Same Universe ? | SOTM 08/2024
So much for a regular series, huh? At least we can call it a series at all.
Welcome back to Stories of the Month, a series that has always gone by that name and always will unless I decide to retcon that again. This week, I’m beginning to create a strange precedent for myself, because between this post and last December’s review of Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron, we will be four for four on Japanese movies, with three of those being from Studio Ghibli. I know I’m not beating the weeb allegations here, but I promise you, this is all just a suspicious coincidence—Emily and I have been doing a Miyazaki marathon this summer for the fortieth anniversary of Studio Ghibli and it’s really all that’s been on my mind movie-wise. So yea, I promise whenever the next Stories of the Month happens (certainly next month), it’ll be something different entirely—maybe not even a movie. That is, after all, why I’ve switched to the Stories of the Month moniker—as someone who consumes far more TV shows and comics than movies, I didn’t want to limit which niche opinions I was able to spout off about. I can’t keep my disappointment in Chip Zdarsky’s Batman run contained forever…
As for those who’re here for the hook of this month, that title’s not just clickbait. First, I’m going to review both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky separately to provide some context, but if you’ve already seen both and are looking to cut to the chase, scroll down to the Synthesis section. Okay, that yapping’s past, let’s actually talk movies.
Stories of the Month
NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984) | Written & Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 (9/10)
Non-Spoiler Review: If your naïve conception of Studio Ghibli, like mine, is limited to curious, wide-eyed (or mouthed) kids, dumpling-shaped spirits with doughy personalities, Pinterest-fit food spreads, and aesthetic countrysides, get ready for Nausicaä to knock your fucking socks off. Holy shit. While Ghibli’s output that skews towards slice-of-life magical realism is still wonderful and worth your consumption, director Hayao Miyazaki’s first film kicks things into twelfth gear with this sci-fi fantasy bizarro-quest. While it may not be layman’s Ghibli, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is undeniably, unabashedly Miyazaki. From the very start, it flaunts future directorial staples like a nature guardian warrior-princess protagonist, Dougal Dixonian speculative ecosystems full of fungal forests and creepy-cute creatures, the resurgence of self-destructive technology that marks industrial mankind’s folly, and a spiritual connection between said mankind and its mother Earth that nevertheless prevails. I can’t micromanage how everyone finds this film for the first time, but I feel like I’ve already said too much—if you haven’t seen it, please go in blind like I did. Its omnidirectional boldness can cause some awkwardness as it rushes to explore so much of this world without screeching the plot to a halt and this over-ambition may date it to some, but to me, its earnest voice far and away justifies any pitfalls in the product of manifesting this untamed imaginal beast. Even if it’s nothing like other Ghibli media you’ve seen, I can guarantee that this earnestness conveys perhaps the most important Ghibli signatures: a deep-cutting fairy tale that’s proud of the human artistry behind it.
Oh, and cartoonishly deformed old people. Ghibli characters look pretty normal from ages 10-50, but after that, frog mode.
Spoiler Review: If that last paragraph feels like I’m overhyping Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind… my man, you could not be further from the truth. Holy shit, I love Nausicaä so much. I had to wrangle my rating down from a full 10/10 for reasons we’ll get into later, but this movie, dude, this movie fucking rocks. Okay, while this is certainly my authentic reaction, it might not be everyone’s, because Nausicaä felt like it was a movie written for me, ripped right out of my brain—like, my first thought coming out of the theater was, “why didn’t anyone tell me about this sooner?” It’s a feat and a tragedy that I went twenty three and a half years bumbling about on our good lord’s Earth without Nausicaä in my life.
Okay, we’re getting a little hyperbolic here. My Miyazaki glazing is a little much, but it might also be because Emily and I began our Miyazaki marathon at a fortieth anniversary showing of Nausicaä without knowing anything about what was to come. Having seen Princess Mononoke many, many years ago and Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron (you can read my review here) more recently, I wouldn’t say I was unaccustomed to Miyazaki’s sensibilities, but as I said in my non-spoiler review, I thought I knew what to expect by now—curious, wide-eyed (or mouthed) kids, dumpling-shaped spirits with doughy personalities, Pinterest-fit food spreads, and aesthetic countrysides. Hard cut to: a wasteland smudged by low-hanging spores and framed by jagged ruins, all surveyed by a lone scout—covered head-to-toe in hat, poncho, and a mustache-like gas mask—atop his mount, a stocky, horse-sized parrot like the terror birds of old (yes, the bird also has a gas mask—expect no less from Nausicaä). The man dismounts, cautiously stepping through stone foundations of structures as unrecognizable as the ashen skeletons of their long-dead denizens. The only semblance of a colorful face—a doll, discarded—disintegrates in his gloved hand. The man sighs, dismayed, and the bladders on his mask slump—“Another village destroyed.” Then, to his horseclaw steeds—“Let’s go. Soon, this will also be consumed by the Toxic Jungle.” Kicking up a cloud of spores and debris, the rider and his birds disappear over a desolate horizon as we pan up to text reading:
“A thousand years have passed since the collapse of industrialized civilization.”
WHAT?! Sorry, I interrupted. Keep rolling.
“A thousand years have passed since the collapse of industrialized civilization. A toxic jungle now spreads, threatening the survival of the last of the human race.”
Yea, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Cut to expositional opening credits stylized like the mytho-historic documentations of fallen kingdoms—flourishes of egyptian, mesopotamian, and mesoamerican art—depicting the next fall that, inevitably, claimed our own modern kingdom. Skyscrapers falling under the feet of towering silhouettes—militant Godzillas of our own perverted creation—give way to unfurling hyphae and fruiting bodies while multi-eyed arthropods patrol the fringes. Bridges have been burned, partners have been spurned, and a now calloused nature has sealed itself to heal away from those that drained it. That’s just the first five minutes—god damn.
There is world building and plot galore to come—rich speculative ecosystems, interspecies communication, intra-species miscommunication, war, sabotage, nation-touring, oh me, oh my—and as much as I love these potential prospects, they’re also the source of Nausicaä’s greatest weakness. Like humanity’s relationship with nature, such ambition comes at a cost, and one which is the only reason I can’t give this movie a full 10/10: stretched so thin with expositional duties, the dialogue is atrocious. I normally address criticisms only after discussing the positives (because who wants to have that negativity hanging over the rest of the review?), but this weakness strikes mere moments after the opening credits, and if you’re gonna rock with Princess Nausicaä, you’re gonna get used to how she talks—without an ounce of subtlety. Some of my favorite lines from just after the credits speak for themselves:
“It's so beautiful. It's hard to believe these spores could kill me. Five minutes without a mask and I’d be dead.”
“It even chipped a Xerconian ceramic sword! This should make the people of the valley happy. They won’t have to worry about finding materials for making tools for a long time.”
“There they are! Look at that cloud of spores. […] An Ohm! It must be the one that shed that shell. Whoever it’s chasing will never escape that way.”
“My heart is beating like crazy!”
And look, I know I can’t call my own writing king of subtlety or brevity (that’s because I am insecure in my abilities despite a college education at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I studied under published authors the in the heart of the rockies, jewel of the American west because of their staggering height exceeding fourteen thousand feet), but in the words of seasoned writing tutor Emily: “girl, say less.”
At first, I figured this was a byproduct of the English dub—surely, it can’t be easy to not only translate sci-fi speech, but fit it to the contradictory movements of characters’ mouths—but after a second watch, Nausicaä’s dialogue seems to me more a victim of underestimation than any language incongruences. In sci-fi writing, there’s a notoriously difficult hump for audiences to overcome before they can enter a richly-detailed world, and it’s rare for anything in this genre to scrape by without heaping one too many fantasy Proper Nounisms (“Treknobabble,” if you’re a nerd) on listeners. I’ve often fallen victim to under-contextualizing hyper-detailed settings, as I’m a fan of stories that throw me into lived-in worlds where context will be my only guide going forward. Miyazaki, it seems, fell victim to over-contextualizing instead, telling viewers everything they need to know at the cost of dispelling most everyone’s immersion with a leaf blower. I’m being pretty harsh here—especially towards someone with way more academy awards (and, uh, you know, finished movies) than I currently have—but it’s because his apparent lack of faith in his own visual storytelling is sort of heartbreaking to me, considering how honestly, earnestly excellent it is. Every over-written line listed above is spoken between beautifully rendered scenes of silence—scenes that spend ample time just observing this strange scenery like a naturalist, allowing audiences to soak in artfully-placed visuals and sounds that clue us into this world’s not-so-mysterious mechanics. Even if some viewers might be left momentarily lost amidst this alien jungle, one would hope they’d be as charmed by the authentic, earnest craftsmanship that is just oozing from every aspect of this perfectly imperfect film. Truly, I love this movie for its exposed seams, because it can barely contain the contagious creativity squirreled away in every corner. Even if I have gripes with the dialogue, then, it is still redeemed by its sincerity, too, no matter how hard of a time I gave it. For example, Nausicaä remarking “what an amazing Ohm,” as it chases down Lord Yupa in a predatory frenzy says a lot about her wonder and compassion for the natural world even when she’s rescuing companions from its peril. At the risk of explaining subtext just like her, that’s why I started with the so-called negatives—to frame exactly why the positives shine so bright. The clunky dialogue, along with an undeniably dated score and overzealous acting, makes for a veritable vat of queso dip, but god damnit, it’s all still heartfelt at its cheesiest. I’m genuinely moved by such effort, and I’ll take it any day over sacrificing real story to seem less silly.
So, in order not to spend another seven(-teen? -ty?) paragraphs singing praises for every detail I love about Nausicaä, I’ll simply examine what in all this soul resonated with me, and what all this soul is trying to say in the first place. This movie has been called magical by many, and minus its meaning, there’s enough wild and weird imagery to burrow into anyone’s subconscious undergrowth. Speaking purely stylistically (and what’s so bad about that? Oh. Longlegs, that’s what), this movie’s atmosphere is truly like no other I’ve encountered, though I think many have taken direct inspiration. While it probably wasn’t the first movie to dip its toes into speculative evolution (which, as we’ve spoken about before, is a genre where the rules of evolution and precedents of prehistory are ideally used as a scaffold to imagine how life could develop in new scenarios, e.g. 100 million years in the future, if an asteroid had never wiped out non-avian dinosaurs, or on a planet in the Alpha Centauri solar system), Miyazaki’s vision for a (mostly) post-human Earth is unlike any that came before, featuring a drastic dominance shift from vertebrates to gargantuan arthropods. Though they’re referred to as “insects” in-universe, whichever creature designers were involved in no way took the easy way out by simply scaling up extant insects. In fact, even calling these “insects” arthropods feels like a stretch, as beyond their exoskeletons, these colossal, tentacled, and often asymmetrical creatures are Cambrian in their abstractness and alien in their complexity—more properly alien, I think, than most actual aliens in pop culture can pull off. While their look alone (and lack of a clear ancestor) isn’t itself necessarily futuristic, their symbiotic integration into the Toxic Jungle is—the armored, knightly protectors of a larger and keenly regulated superorganism attuned to purifying pollution more than any organism that’s come before it. Though that nagging evolutionary biologist in me is obviously skeptical of both the absurdly small time frame for such radical change and the (perhaps not unfounded) personification of nature’s will, I love this vision of evolution’s shifting focus towards planetary homeostasis in the wake of anthropogenic destruction. This tendency has actually been given a scientific name—the Gaia Hypothesis—and while it’s heavily criticized, I don’t find it to be particularly unfounded (and spiritually, it seems pretty obvious). This personification, too, works irrefutably in the movie’s favor—not only thematically, but also when there are so clearly human hands behind every animated movement. When the giant Ohmu’s segments move like a paper puppet or a cheap Monty Python animation, I only love the movie more, especially with the backdrop of Joe Hisaishi’s truly bananas score. While Hisaishi’s serene piano has become the Ghibli standard, his work here is day-and-night different, with balls-to-the-wall synth, sitar, and shredding electric guitar, the latter of which actually does double duty as the Ohmu’s piercing bellow. Of course it’s campy to some degree, and more so undeniably dated, but wow, what a performance nonetheless, right? The contrast of such human sounds and movements miming such inconceivably alien creatures to me makes this creative feat all the more endearing—we cannot escape our humanness, yet our empathy for the other can take us so far into uncharted territory.
Of course, the humans and their unchanging ways is also the source of conflict in this movie, as for better and for worse, humanity has remained unchanged a thousand years after the apocalypse. In the world of Nausicaä, nature has set a resounding boundary with its silliest apes—as clear a line in the sand as can be—but our dwindling population has done little to change its ways despite a thousand years to reflect. At their worst, the imperialist Tolmekians patrol for fledgling factions to subsume into their militant, deforesting machine, while the equally aggressive Pejites fight back by committing ecological crimes that turn nature’s wrath on their territorial competitors. Even in the best case, the pacifist Valley of the Wind still operates with a selfish, survivalist pragmatism, burning toxic spores on sight. Of the characters we encounter—hero, villain, or anywhere in between—only Princess Nausicaä herself remains firm in her conviction that the jungle, though untamed, can be trusted, and that cooperative pacifism is the only way forward. In my research, it seems that Nausicaä’s unwavering values have been both widely applauded and acutely critiqued. Many in the movie’s favor vocally appreciate Nausicaä as a character whose pacifism and compassion is not founded in naïvety—she is a warrior who, for example, offs four Tolmekian soldiers with no hesitation after they’ve killed her father and cornered her. Aside from this moment of violence, however—one which Nausicaä almost immediately mourns—her compassion-based approach to solutions is always demonstrably superior to violence for every conflict in the movie. Some, in my reading, feel that Nausicaä’s ideology is never challenged by the plot, making her writing seem uncritical and preachy. While I’d call this an astute observation of the plot’s mechanics, I could not disagree more with its conclusion. Of course Nausicaä’s pacifism uncritically works—like the natural world around her, she has moved from the old ways, but humanity remains stuck in a greedy, competitive societal framework. Like the incorruptible goodness of Superman, it isn’t the inner conflict that defines her character—it’s that her goodness remains incorruptible as long as humanity still has something to learn from it. Textually, this lesson even predates Nausicaä in a dismissed prophecy whispered by the Valley of the Wind’s elders of a figure clad in blue who will lead humanity into a new era of prosperity. Though this may not have been the authorial intent, the fact that Nausicaä’s pacifism is the clear way through and has even been codified in centuries-old oral history perfectly mirrors our current climate crisis. Not only are specific solutions and renewable energy sources being discovered every day, but the answers for how to live in harmony with the Earth have always been there in the form of ancestral knowledge—the solution to anthropogenic climate change isn’t a matter of solving a mystery, but convincing those who cannot relinquish their greed to listen to a lesson that has been repeated since time immemorial. Of course this movie’s message seems like a cliché environmental rally, as some critics have suggested—it’s cliché because it must be repeated as many different times and ways as it takes for its target to listen. Nausicaä knows the answer, as do we all, deep down—we are just afraid of the radical selflessness coexistence requires.
Though I haven’t always been a fan of hackneyed “the legends were true” trope, there’s a reason I was truly moved when, surprise surprise, Nausicaä fulfills the elders’ prophecy after sacrificing her life to stop the Ohmu’s raging stampede. Resurrected by the golden glow of the Ohmu’s telepathic tentacles, Nausicaä’s figurative return from death suggests a latent forgiveness in nature, though again, that word might be too personified. Obviously, our needs as individuals are important, but until we recognize ourselves as one unique, integral piece of many in the delicate balance of the biosphere, we cannot function harmoniously with nature. Nausicaä is as strong-willed and individual as they come, but her insistence on basic, selfless empathy to the very end demonstrates what has always been true to the very end—that life, that existence, is give and take, and one cannot exist without the other. For the Valley of the Wind’s elders watching humanity repeat its mistakes—watching endless, warlike extraction met by nature’s ruthless retaliation time and time again—of course it can be easy to give into cynicism that prosperity and peace are foolish fairy tales. For as much of a fairy tale as Nausicaä is, it sincerely believes that “the legends [ARE] true” when we choose for them to be, and when Princess Nausicaä makes that fateful choice which lifts the cynicism from her community, it’s hard not to be moved. What really got me, though, was the last of the “happily ever after” stills that play over the credits—a slow zoom under the Toxic Jungle, where pollution is being purged from the Earth’s soil, leaving a layer of clean air in the fossilized trees’ understory. There sits Nausicaä’s gas mask, and out from it sprouts a single, green sapling—the beginning of something new. On the first viewing, my reaction was instant—the second I saw it, I got it, and where are these tears coming from? To me, it’s a sign that, at least for now, The Valley of the Wind and their surrounding nations have learned a lesson from Nausicaä’s sacrifice, and are entering a more mature age of ecological coexistence in nature’s new, healing womb. One can only hope, but I believe we, too, can find such a future if we look within ourselves as Miyazaki has.
For now, Nausicaä alone certainly hasn’t stopped climate change or capitalist consumption, but its unmistakable soul lives on in a surprising number of equally radical offspring, and as an epilogue, I’d like to briefly touch on these (it’s my blog, I’ll do run-on reviews if I like). One of the most original books I remember devouring as a kid (and one which to this day remains one of my sister’s favorite books of all time), Tony DiTerlizzi’s WondLa trilogy, suddenly makes so much sense in context with this movie—it’s certainly not a ripoff, but with its plucky, blue-clad protagonist, post-human forests of giant (pan)arthropods (tartigrades are close enough cousins), and airships galore, it’s clear where DiTerlizzi’s well drew from. In the wake of Skydance Studios’ abysmal minion-washing of Wondla in their Apple TV+ adaptation (read my sister’s medievally brutal review here), it was really comforting to see that something as weird as Wondla could have, at least in a bygone age (the eighties), been adapted faithfully. I’d even be willing to bet, however, that even some decidedly science-based works of speculative evolution drew direct inspiration from Miyazaki’s whimsical and sometimes twisted world. I mentioned, for example, similarities to grandfather of speculative evolution Dougal Dixon’s After Man: Zoology of the Future—a book which, coincidentally, received a truly bizarre Japanese TV treatment—but given that After Man predates Nausicaä’s release by 3 years, if there was any inspiration between the two, it would have to be the other way around. To be honest, though, this similarity might just be superficial—both happen to take place after man and were written in the early eighties, so of course there is going to be some crossover. I’d say their equal agedness, actually, might be an incidental contributor to their similar vibe. More surprisingly, however, I found that these decidedly non-mammal future creatures in conjunction with Joe Hisaishi’s bonkers score echoed the atmosphere of 2001’s speculative miniseries The Future is Wild, where composers Nicholas Hooper and Paul Pritchard were similarly unafraid of interspersing deeply cheesy synths with beautiful orchestral compositions in their score (which, by the way, appears to be lost by all accounts and I would give an arm and a leg for the original recordings. Well, maybe just one or the other, but flesh would be shed). A Hisaishi track that’s shockingly ascended to my most played of 2024, “Stampede of the Ohmu” (particularly from 0:32 to 1:43), could just as easily overlay, say, the Carakiller chase in TFIW episode 4, “Prairies of the Amazonia” (from here to 7:12, but I won’t complain if you watch the whole episode). Everybody’s got a different tolerance for this sort of thing, but personally, I’m eating up the goofy synth and marimbas in TFIW just as much as I am the goofy synth and sitar in Nausicaä. No matter how goofy it gets, it’s the genuine dedication to the concept that hooks me—and in a media landscape so lacking in sincerity, I’m thankful we have works like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to look back on.
Oh, and there was nowhere else to put this, but what on Earth was going on with Kushana’s zesty evil advisor in the English dub?? Every line read was like that freaky weasel from the Barbie Rapunzel movie. Wait. You’re telling me that was Chris Sarandon? JACK SKELLINGTON Chris Sarandon?! Dial back the horny, dude, you’re desiccating my childhood.
Pairs Well With: Wall-E (Directed by Andrew Stanton, Written by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon), Princess Mononoke (Written & Directed by Hayao Miyazaki), Castle in the Sky (Written & Directed by Hayao Miyazaki)
LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986)
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑 (7/10)
Non-Spoiler Review: If you’re headed into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, expect your Ghibli expectations to be upset. If you’re headed into Castle in the Sky, however, expect both a little more of what you expected and a little bit of what made Nausicaä special—two wide-eyed children from a cliffside village not so unlike our own discovering a wondrous, flying world from secret civilizations past. Laputa: Castle in the Sky ironically anchors its wild whimsy in a found family that, while not quite as memorable as that other Ghibli castle movie, still wins its way into your heart. Unfortunately, this means that the unbound creativity in Nausicaä is somewhat grounded here, ultimately diluting its similar themes to a less powerful point. While still an absolutely worthwhile watch with a wonderful story, score, and animation, I left Castle in the Sky somewhat disappointed that it didn’t pack more of a punch.
Spoiler Review: “Laputa?” You’re sure you wanna go with that, Señor Miyazaki?
My sincere apologies that we’ve come this far without the promise of this post’s title, so let’s keep this one shorter—not just because I feel guilty, but also because I have genuinely fewer thoughts on Castle in the Sky. That’s because, I think, much of what I love about Castle in the Sky is stuff I’ve already praised about Nausicaä—the premise, animation, concepts, machines, and themes of Castle in the Sky are all heartily Miyazaki. The details may differ vastly, but it’s hard not to sense the spirit of Nausicaä in a movie about an airship-based, proto-industrial society’s race to discover the lost technology of a prior, far more advanced civilization that fell to overexploitation of nature. This all makes sense because, since it released in 1986, it’s no leap to realize that Castle in the Sky was early in development while Nausicaä was being finished, which likely lead to a lot of the crossover that we’ll be discussing momentarily. The last thing I’d want would be a rehash of Nausicaä, so let’s make one thing crystal clear: for me, Castle in the Sky disappoints not because it fails to be Nausicaä, but because it fails to be as faithfully soulful as Nausicaä.
Once again, I’m going to break my rule and begin with the negatives, but I promise, I’ll come around! Castle in the Sky, like Nausicaä, is a story of overcoming mankind’s prior folly, but the folly in question is here subtly different. While Nausicaä is about overexploitation and conquest, its ambitious subtext also touches mankind’s unreadiness for power beyond our comprehension with the symbolic God Warriors—comparing them to Godzilla, and therefore the nuclear bomb, was something I’m confident Miyazaki had in mind. Considering Godzilla himself, however, this is a concept that could carry a whole movie, which is exactly what Castle in the Sky brilliantly does. Though the very idea of a city in the clouds is about as magical and whimsical as it gets, it can be easy to lose sight of the implication that this high-flying society is quite literally ungrounded. It is implied that losing sight of its roots, its sustenance, and therefore its reality is what lead to the mysterious disintegration of Laputian society seven hundred years before the movie—if our villains are consumed by a false sense of godhood mere moments after ascending to this domineering vantage point, imagine the collective arrogance that festered in its original inhabitants. So, the central question that I think Castle in the Sky poses is “are we ready to wield nature’s power,” and though the answer is a resounding “no,” the movie spends far less time addressing it than you’d think.
While I love the hook of Castle in the Sky—who is the girl that fell from the clouds? (oh, and a white-knuckle airship hijacking that had me automatically invested)—its plot seems largely distracted after Sheeta is rescued by Pazu and the two get to know each other. I’m not about to tell you that these kids aren’t incredibly sweet together, or that the village rallying to protect them against a two-pronged ambush by warring pirates and military, or even that I don’t love Pazu joining the pirates in a bid to rescue Sheeta, but assuming I’m reading the movie as intended, it all just feels… distracted from the driving soul of the movie. This swashbuckling first act has some seriously engaging action and enough goofy antics to fill the Disney quota, and if Miyazaki’s goal here was to help audiences settle in with this lovable cast, then this fast-paced first and second act accomplish their mission. However, through all of this back and forth, I never felt like the world these characters were chased through was nearly as fantastical or even simply as fleshed out as anything Nausicaä accomplished in similar scenes, especially scenes which felt thematically linked. I wonder, perhaps, if this layer of separation from Miyazaki’s soul is thanks to the fact that Castle in the Sky is a loose adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic Gulliver’s Travels (or at least a location within it), with Laputa and its unfortunate name (perhaps due to Swift’s satirical leanings) being ripped straight from the book. Having never read Gulliver’s Travels, I’m uncertain of exactly how similar these are, but I think this might account for the distance I’m sensing. So many scenes, then, while well-executed, feel almost almost detached from whatever themes must have caught Miyazaki’s eye, and without a thematic spine, Castle in the Sky at times goes limp.
Of course, this is a silly thing to fixate on—it’s a kids’ movie, and in terms of being entertaining, it’s checking almost every box, so what’s not to love? This, however, is such a classic underestimation of both kids’ content and animation in general, and I usually refuse to engage with it, but here I am, so we might as well get into it. Castle in the Sky works great when it’s not trying to say anything (as far as I can tell), but there’s a marked difference when Miyazaki’s soul shines through—the emotions sink deeper, the plot flows freer, and for lack of better phrasing, the images and scenes are simply stickier. The parts of the movie I remember most—Sheeta’s prison break with the Laputian guardian robot and the entire third act exploring (and destroying) Laputa—are those which cut straight into the meat of the movie. This isn’t to say they’re heady, but artfully crafted—just as fun as anything that’s come before, but their meaning echoes long after they’ve happened. For example, the way this movie plays with airborne action—from the height, to the scale, to the speed—was expertly engaging, and had me on the edge of my seat no matter how many times someone dangled over a ledge or plummeted past the point of no return. Aside from being thrilling to my reptile brain, the disconnection that height brings and the sheer power of this airborne technology both tie directly into the themes, especially when Muska, the power-hungry government agent aiming to reclaim his Laputian heritage, begins comparing the Castle’s weapons systems to Krishna or the Old Testament God. I’m not saying that surface currents are bad and deeper currents are good—rather, it’s the surface and deeper currents flowing in tandem that makes the magic happen.
In these moments, I am struck by not just the beauty of Castle in the Sky, but its potential for even more impactful storytelling. Moments like the caretaker robots (shown to be capable of laying waste to entire legions of soldiers) simply tending to the Castle Gardens or, in the movie’s final moments or when Sheeta commands Laputa to self-destruct and its computerized foundations crumble away to reveal the roots of the tree holding it all together—simply put, that’s the stuff. While I understand that the intrigue and exploration that seeking out this lost, Laputian treasure provides, I’m honestly somewhat baffled that this movie didn’t opt to spend more time in its titular castle. Granted, Laputa’s contrast with Pazu’s ground-bound village and his Skywalker-esque dreams of life in the sky is very important, but I wonder if this theme could have been illustrated more effectively by glimpsing life in a still-thriving Laputa—how this paradise might seem alluring to the point where our protagonists and their reluctant pirate friends might briefly consider staying or even becoming new Laputians before Sheeta’s ultimate refusal. Instead, we are shown from the outset that those who seek Laputa’s power are evil (cartoonishly so), and they meet their comeuppance as expected. I realize, here, I’m mirroring the criticism I just debunked about Nausicaä’s pacifism—why shouldn’t there be examination of Nausicaä’s pacifism if there should be examination of Sheeta’s primitivism? The difference, I think, is that Laputa is clearly presented as a lost paradise by dreamers like Pazu just as much as by war hawks like Muska. We viewers are being purposefully misled as part of a later lesson—Castle in the Sky isn’t a story about listening to what we’ve always been told, but rather recognizing the dark side of temptation to power. Additionally Nausicaä externalizes an inner drama; Castle in the Sky, I think, had potential to internalize and external drama—to have these characters reflect on the hubris Laputa represents much as we should reflect on nuclear weapons.
I’ll admit it—both my expectations and my criticism seem a little heavy for this movie, and that might’ve been because it came after the triple threat of seeing Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, and My Neighbor Totoro virtually back-to back—I was bound to personally resonate less with a Miyazaki movie eventually. However, I really can’t stress enough that my criticism doesn’t come from a place of dislike or even indifference towards Castle in the Sky—this isn’t the American school system, and a 7/10 is far from a bad score. By this metric, I really enjoyed the movie—you could read it like I connected 70% of the way with it, but this review is mostly magnifying the 30% I wish I’d also plugged into. Outside of my own resonance, not only is Castle in the Sky tighter than anything I’ve ever written (and, arguably, even tighter than Nausicaä’s plot), but it elicited many emotions from me—mostly nail-biting at the gravity-defying stunts (in a weightless cartoon, no less), but I “aw’ed” when I was meant to “aw,” and I laughed when I was meant to laugh, and in the aforementioned Iron Giant-esque robot sequence, I even came close to choking up. Unlike so many kids movies I see flit past year after year, I think Castle in the Sky is worth just as much a parent’s time as a child’s, and it’s not lost on me that that’s because Castle in the Sky is speaking to the child in everyone just as much as it is warning about hubris. Often, I conflate touching on a greater truth with the meaning I find in my own inner child, but in this case, I recognize that that child just didn’t resonate with everything here, and that’s okay—I’ve seen enough from Miyazaki to know that, at least when it comes to creative direction, the child in him is always at the wheel. As far and away my favorite moment in Castle in the Sky illustrates, even the Earth’s rocks speak—perhaps the elements we’re made from speak from their core, too.
Pairs Well With: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Written & Directed by Hayao Miyazaki), The Iron Giant (Directed by Brad Bird, Written by Brad Bird & Ted Hughes), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Directed by Terry Gilliam, Written by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown)
SYNTHESIS: ARE THEY CONNECTED?
SIMILARITIES From their synopses alone, it’s clear that these movies share a common thread—common enough that I’m far from the first person to write about this. In my own experience, from the opening scene of Castle in the Sky, my MCU-washed brain went into overdrive connecting thematic similarities and Easter eggs until I realized there were too many coincidences to ignore—certainly even more than I’ve seen discussed online. To give you a good idea of what I’m talking about, though, check out how many I was able to spot:
Before learning anything about its world, Castle in the Sky features a dieselpunk airship dogfight featuring whimsical, propeller-plastered dirigibles ripped straight from Nausicaä’s Tolmekian army. The flagship airship is boarded by pirates wearing red aviator caps that have a yellow, beaklike nose—exactly the deign used as the Tolmekian footsoldiers’ helmets.
The opening credits of Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky both serve as stylized expositional recaps of their respective worlds’ histories that I have yet to see in another Miyazaki movie (though, to be fair, I haven’t seen all of them). Nausicaä’s credits recap the fall of industrial civilization during the infamous Seven Days of Fire in the aforementioned mashup-style resembling egyptian, mesopotamian, and mesoamerican art. Meanwhile, Castle in the Sky’s more vague credits hint at the rise and fall of an air-faring civilization with floating islands that come toppling down, animated like aged roman frescos or Da Vinci sketches. Even if they’re stylistically different, they’re paced, composed, and themed very similarly to achieve essentially the same purpose.
Castle in the Sky makes reference to a higher civilization lost some seven hundred years in the past, its only remnant being the fabled Laputa, a castle in the sky (hey, that’s the name of the movie). Nausicaä, as previously mentioned, takes place one thousand years after the collapse of industrial civilization.
In Castle in the Sky, it is revealed that the same government forces that are chasing Sheeta have captured an ancient robot from the time of Laputa (and at this point in the movie, I was like, okay, come on, how is this not in the same universe?). Though its design is far smaller and friendlier than Nausicaä’s apocalyptic God Warriors (responsible for the fall of that movie’s previous civilization), its arthropod-like shell and fleshy wiring are uncannily similar to the Tolmekian God Warrior that Kushana discovers.
Much of the physics-breaking flight in Castle in the Sky (other than the, you know, “if you stick more propellers on it, you can probably lift anything” airship design principle) can be attributed to Aetherium, a crystal from Laputa that Sheeta has inherited. This might be a stretch, but a lot of Nausicaä’s technology—particularly the airships found in the Valley of the Wind—has a similar glow when it accelerates in flight, like Princess Nausicaä’s kickass glider. I’ll for sure admit this is probably the most tenuous link.
Finally, the damning fox squirrel: taking place over a thousand years in the future, Nausicaä’s world is so fascinating because it features some (ambitious) speculative evolution from a time when the genre was at its infancy (at least if we’re considering Dougal Dixon its founder). Even the obligatory cute animal mascot, Teto, is a creature called a fox squirrel—the very same species which scurries over a Laputian robot’s shoulder as it tends to the garden in Castle in the Sky.
INCONSISTENCIES In isolation, a list like that can look pretty conclusive, but let’s not forget that all of those similarities stand in opposition to… you know, the rest of the movie… and while there are plenty of differences that are easily reconcilable, a few seem totally incompatible to me. Let’s take a look:
There are no signs of Nausicaä’s toxic jungle anywhere in Castle in the Sky. Disregarding the fact that it takes some ten thousand years for tree trunks to permineralize (and yet the toxic jungle’s understory is composed entirely of fossilized trees less than one thousand years after its inception… I can let this go, I promise, I have far more whimsy than Cinemasins), if we assume that a) the apocalypse in Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa is one and the same and b) it took one thousand years or less for the toxic jungle to be established, then it would make sense that we’d see signs of it in Castle in the Sky a full seven hundred years into its growth.
Though we compared the flesh robots of both movies, there’s a pretty critical difference: the Laputian robots are servants of their respective civilization, but the God Warriors bring about the destruction of theirs. I’m adding this to the list for completion’s sake, but with the stipulation that we don’t know why the God Warriors destroyed the world—considering the climax of Castle in the Sky, I see no reason why these robots, if they are one and the same, couldn’t have been turned against their makers.
While we get the gist of the apocalypse that claimed industrial civilization in Nausicaä, the end of Laputian civilization is far more vague, and we have no reason to believe these are the same event. All that is shown is a crashed sky-castle streaming out survivors onto the Earth, reminiscent more of WALL-E than of anything remotely related to Seven Days of Fire.
POTENTIAL TIMELINES With all of this in mind, I’ve put together a few potential chronologies in which both movies can occur. Because I’m a recovering STEM major, they’re arranged from least to most parsimonious—in other words, the most complex series of events is considered least likely under this framework, because oftentimes, it’s safe to assume that the simplest series of events is most likely (which, of course, is a gross oversimplification, but you get the gist). I don’t want to end up with another convoluted fan theory, but for now, let’s hear out every version of events, starting with:
Apocalypse, Nausicaä, Apocalypse, Castle in the Sky: In this scenario, our modern civilization is actually the earliest point on a sprawling timeline that spans at least 2,000 years into the future. It begins, however, at some point in the very near future, when humanity as we know it is destroyed by its own technology in an apocalyptic event known as the Seven Days of Fire. One thousand years later, the world has been all but overrun by a highly integrated mega-ecosystem known as the Toxic Jungle—the biosphere’s evolutionary attempt to purge the Anthropocene’s pollution. In a desperate bid to push back the encroaching jungle, three warring nations—the Tolmekians, the Pegitians, and the pacifist Valley of the Wind—find peace only when Princess Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind realizes the jungle’s purifying powers and initiates an age of coexistence between man and nature. Society rebuilds, with the airships of Nausicaä’s era evolving into an entirely airborne infrastructure that floats far above the temporary toxicity of the forest. Even the remaining God Warriors, once terror incarnate, have become servants of balance. After an unknown stretch of time, however, this society—known now as Laputia—vanishes, and seven hundred years later, the survivors begin a third civilization that has begun the cycle of industrialization anew, during which time Castle in the Sky takes place.
I don’t hate this option, but the length of that explanation alone should highlight its biggest cracks. I began this section with Occam’s razor for a reason—as much fun as it is to speculate that the sky castles of Laputa were built to keep humanity safe while the Toxic Jungle purifies the Earth’s surface (or even that the Pirate’s aviator caps are relics from the long-gone Pegite footsoldiers), this explanation requires a lot of assumptions that simply don’t hold up to scrutiny. If, for example, the toxic jungle existed before Castle in the Sky, then where is it now? While I can imagine its fossilized roots dissolving away into dust once the Earth had been purified, I’m not sure where that would leave its insects—some must be extinct after such a swift environmental shift, but one would think the biosphere would look very different on a post-Nausicaä planet, no? I’ll admit it, too: a big part of why I don’t love this is because it implies that Nausicaä’s efforts to begin an age of coexistence between man and nature ultimately came to a close. Like we’ll speak about later, maybe all things end—especially golden ages—but it sort of sours the beautiful final frame of Nausicaä’s credits. Ultimately, I don’t love this one because it implies the loss of so much change that Nausicaä’s world propels forward—change that shouldn’t be undone even if humanity is doomed to learn its lesson over and over again.
Apocalypse, Castle in the Sky, Apocalypse, Nausicaä: This chain of events follows our own world history more closely, albeit only if you subscribe to the foolproof doctrine of Ancient Aliens, Hyperborea, Lemuria and the like. Okay, maybe a little bit of hate.
In this scenario, a prehistoric human civilization beyond even our modern technological capabilities—Laputa—rises and falls due to mysterious circumstances likely to do with their disconnectedness from the Earth. In the wake of Laputa’s fall, another human society rises up, eventually reaching an industrial era analogous to our own, during which Castle in the Sky takes place. Though Sheeta, Pazu, and the Dola gang are successful in thwarting the government’s attempt to commandeer Laputa’s all-powerful technology, their larger struggle against keeping godlike power out of self-destructive human hands is ultimately futile, and humanity’s God Warriors destroy civilization in the Seven Days of Fire. One thousand years later, a toxic jungle has overtaken the Earth as the biosphere works to exfoliate human pollution, during which Nausicaä takes place.
This is firmly my second-favorite explanation, but it comes at the cost of both simplicity and Castle in the Sky’s themes. Cut by Occam’s Razor once again, it seems like somewhat of a stretch to assume this connected story relies on the collapse of two post-industrial human civilizations prone to overconsumption and callous disregard for nature, even if that cycle is historically inherent to our human civilization so far. What’s worse, though, is the fact that it essentially flattens Sheeta and Pazu’s historic victory if, somehow, humanity was able to re-create Laputian techno-organic juggernaut robots that, just as Sheeta warned, eventually raze the Earth. A simpler explanation that I’ve run across is that Nausicaä takes place in a dark timeline where Sheeta and Pazu lost to our villain, Muska, and I like that idea to an extent. While it simplifies the chronology, though, it way overcomplicates the overall universe by implying branching timelines, and that’s just too much for fan speculation to ride on, in my opinion. Occam’s Razor.Apocalypse, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä: While I’ve seen both of the previous timelines roughly discussed on Reddit (shudder, shudder) or other fan forums, one I never quite ran across in my research is one that I like the most—that Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky both refer back to the same apocalypse. Alongside being the most parsimonious series of events, giving both movies a single historical reference point also immediately suggests a chronology, with the seven-hundred-years-later Castle in the Sky portraying a fledgling society that eventually leads to the geopolitical landscape of the one-thousand-years-later Nausicaä. In this scenario, a medium-near future from our modern world—one with floating cities like Laputa (there’s the medium) and approaching-omniscient computers therein (there’s the near)—leads to the God Warriors annihilating industrial civilization in the seven days of fire. As the toxic jungle begins to purify the Earth’s surface, survivors furthest from its borders begin to restart society, developing airships to traverse the vast wastelands where cities once stood (wastelands which can be seen in both Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, if memory serves). Some seven hundred years after the Seven Days of Fire, the events of Castle in the Sky take place, with Sheeta and Pazu destroying what they believe are the last plans for assembling a God Warrior in the Laputian central computer (but, as Nausicaä will prove, there are more out there). Some three hundred years later, the toxic jungle has overtaken even the nations seen in Castle in the Sky, which leads directly into Nausicaä’s more desperate land management disputes (enthralling, I know). What happens afterwards is surely chronicled in the manga (or, fingers crossed, in Miyazaki’s very rumory rumored sequel movie), but I’m satisfied with knowing that, at least for now, Princess Nausicaä’s bridge between wayward man and our spurned family amongst the trees marks the turning of a new leaf for civilization’s relationship with nature.
Sorry, that almost devolved into hippy-dippy flower-power hocus-pocus bullcrap. Wouldn’t want anyone to start getting comfortable beneath the cold slab of facts and logic I’m about to lay down. I’ll admit my biases flat-out—alongside passing our parsimony test, this timeline preserves the ending of Nausicaä while still keeping Castle in the Sky’s conclusion part of a larger continuum back towards nature, which makes it my favorite of these three possibilities. It’s even got some cool world building implications! If the anti-government pirates are the earliest Pejites, for example, then it makes sense why The Valley of the Wind thinks of them as less imperialist than the Tolmekians three hundred years later (even if they are tragically wrong, in the end). I also think it evolutionarily tracks that the fox squirrel which appears in both movies is an animal that evolved well after our society has fallen. However, I can’t help but notice some pretty huge holes even here—in particular, the notable lack of a toxic jungle anywhere in Castle in the Sky some seven hundred years into its advancement over Earth’s surface at first seems like a headshot for this theory. Even if the jungle grows exponentially, I’d expect to at least see traces of it some 70% into its wholesale coverage of all habitable land, right? This could reasonably be hand-waved away by the idea that Castle in the Sky takes place on a more remote landmass, although given the ubiquity of airships in their society, I’d expect the jungle’s spores to spread faster there, if anywhere.
So, as much as I like the idea of a secret thread between these worlds, no scenario I can puzzle out makes sense without leaps in logic or crucial fanon embellishments (and I’ll admit it—I’m rarely a fan of those, even if they’re not hurting anyone). If I can’t reconcile fanon embellishments, however, I most definitely can’t reconcile Pejite helmets and squirrel-foxes showing up in unrelated universes made by the same, notoriously meticulous creator—why not connect them if the similarities are already there? Why not differentiate them if they’re meant to be separate?
…WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Oh. It’s money… again.
As much as I was curious about finding some symbolic motif or other hidden message here, what little turned up in my research revealed less about these separate story worlds and more about Miyazaki’s process, and the corners every creative has to cut when limited by factors like funding and technology. A commenter on this stack exchange thread suggests the best explanation I’ve heard from evidence gathered at the Studio Ghibli museum in Japan: that, much like Disney’s famous recycling of Baloo’s designs and animations as Little John in Robin Hood, many of Miyazaki’s easter eggs are simply economical filmmaking. By filling out backgrounds with recycled characters, Miyazaki saved valuable budget and time while still filling his worlds with the fantastical faces that make his movies immersive. Unfortunately, however, some of those faces are so fantastical that they’re memorable, and when they’re out of place, it breaks my immersion.
Perhaps my hottest take on all this, though, is that I’m okay with having my immersion broken by the craftsmanship on display in either film—just as long as I can sink back into both worlds in the end. Aside from the obvious joy it brings me to see a glimpse of humanity in these hand-drawn myths, I think the initial “what is this fox squirrel doing in an unrelated movie” impulse that broke my immersion brought me closer to the movie than I would’ve been without it. These two movies may not piece together like the coasts of South America and Africa, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bridge between them—especially considering that Miyazaki was (if I understand correctly) finishing Nausicaä while Castle in the Sky was in development. My family has often discussed how some of our favorite artists are those that are, essentially, just telling the same story over and over again, all the while refining their vision as they move ever inwards towards their personal thesis statement. Totally contrary to the corporate drive to endlessly reboot franchises, Miyazaki’s recycling—like that I’ve noticed in Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and even someone like Tim Burton—is an archetypal, analytical process of clarifying the artist’s understanding of their own psychological landscape, and with it, understanding the world outside it. Though I’d hardly call their plots alone linear, Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky represent a lineage of Miyazaki’s attempts to capture an ephemeral truth of the human spirit, and it only seems right that these attempts bleed into one another. Whether or not their worlds’ borders are open, their characters will always cross-contaminate in Miyazaki’s psyche, and bleed into our collective consciousness, too. This is a another truth I think copyright keeps us from: the membranes between stories, like cells, become semi-permeable in our psyches, and in dreams—the storytelling engines within us—any cast of characters and continents can assemble to transmute the compound wisdom within them.
Oh, you thought I was done with the hippie-dippy bullshit? I’m going to grad school for this stuff. You have no idea what’s coming.