Castle in the Sky (1986)

Inspired by a passage in Gulliver's Travels about a floating castle, Hayao Miyazaki created the myth of Laputa for Castle in the Sky. Well-suited to younger audiences, it's a fast-paced adventure story filled with many daring chases, captures, and escapes. One of the first feature-length animé films from Japan to receive international distribution, the setting has a strange Western feel to it with Industrial Revolution-style machinery and Caucasian-looking main characters. Being an aviation adventure, a lot of the action takes place in the air, with wildly contrasting flying machines and thousands of propellers. The design is especially notable when they all get to Laputa, which has a futuristic structure amazingly in tune with the natural surroundings. In this film, it seems that Miyazaki is developing the ecological themes, morally complex characters, and fantastic settings that he often returns to. For instance, the lovingly grotesque pirate mom Dora (excellently voiced by Cloris Leachman in the English-language version) manages to stride the line between good and evil like the characters in his subsequent works. Even the robots of Laputa are simultaneously creepy, destructive, and amazingly gentle beings. Though it's visually proficient and contains an expertly re-recorded musical score by Joe Hisaishi, some of the dialogue in the English version is corny and inconsistent with the original images. The story still delivers a standard fantasy adventure with glimpses of the director's trademark humanism and whimsy. Assembling the production team for Castle in the Sky led to the formation of the successful animation company Studio Ghibli. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide