Castle in the Sky Review

Nausicaa gets the studio built and this is the first film produced under the Ghibli name, which shows in every frame that costs money. Miyazaki spends it on flight. The opening airship raid, the glider chase through the canyons, the slow reveal of Laputa sitting inside a storm: the film treats moving through air as a physical problem with weight and wind and consequences, and very little animated since has bettered it.

The machinery is drawn by someone who loves machinery, down to the rivets on a mining elevator and the way a dormant robot unfolds its arm before it kills. The story is a straight adventure serial and Miyazaki runs it at a pace that never sags across two hours. Muska is the best villain he ever writes, a bureaucrat who wants the weapon rather than the wonder, and the last act states the argument the director spends his whole career on.

Technology cut loose from the people who use it becomes a machine for killing, and a civilization that forgets the ground it stands on falls out of the sky. Sheeta and Pazu are where it gives a little. They are brave, decent, and thin, archetypes doing what the plot needs, and the pirate matriarch Dola takes every scene she is in because she is allowed to be complicated. Joe Hisaishi's score is among his best work. This is the film to put in front of somebody who has never watched anime.