Castle in the Sky

I watched this the same week that I saw The Return of the King. Enduring Jackson's bastardized Tolkien was a grim duty. Watching Castle in the Sky was a pleasure. One of Miyazaki's earlier films, it's set in a world in which aircraft developed differently than in ours and in which exists the flying island of Laputa (aside from the island and its name, there are no other obvious Swiftian elements; Miyazaki is a storyteller, not a satirist).
Sheeta, a young woman trying to escape both air pirates and a creepy government official, falls from an airship. Instead of plummeting to her death, a jewel she wears magically slows her descent so that she floats to the ground, where the young man Pazu catches her. Lots of stuff happens: Sheeta and Pazu flee pirates, travel through a mine, are separeted, get captured, join forces with the pirates, and so on, and so on, until they finally defeat the power-crazed Muska on the flying island.
Castle in the Sky is probably Miyazaki's least representative movie and his weakest. It has an unequivocally evil villain, unlike any of his other studio Ghibli releases (I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet). The plot is excessively complicated, and there is more fighting and destruction than necessary. Sheeta and Pazu never become as real as, say, Nausicaa or Marco. Nevertheless, Miyazaki's worst is still better than most other auteurs' best. Although the principal characters are not as well-developed as they should be, they are still attractive, and the secondary characters are colorful. There's plenty to please the eyes, from the mining town where Pazu lives to the flying pastoral paradise.
Incidentally, if you wonder what Luke Skywalker would have been like had he gone over to the dark side, you can find out by listening to the quite tolerable dub. Mark Hamill has a grand old time as the smarmy, menacing Muska.

Update: I finally saw Howl's Moving Castle, and I can state that Castle in the Sky is now Miyazaki's second-weakest film.

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