The anime or animation film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, is one of Hayao Miyazaki’s film launched in the United States in the 80s; the film takes its distant inspiration from a novel by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, where the flying city of Laputa depicted in detail. The story of this castle in the sky reminds once more that people have a fascination for the sky and what is out there so little accessible to us without the intermediary of technologies. The plot follows the search for a hidden flying city rising behind clouds; to some characters this remains fiction, while others seek to find the secret fortress. Laputa: Castle of the Sky has to reveal its secrets!
A parallel Earth with a different history is the setting for Laputa: Castle in the Sky, as none of the geographical data presented in the movie can be matched with our reality. The time of the action is sometime between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The documentation for the history of Laputa as the castle in the sky is pretty elaborate given the fact that it is pure fiction. Thus, there are hegemonies over other aerial cities, then, the royal family of Laputa abandons the castle in the sky several times, not to mention that details about the connections between Laputans and earthlings abound.
The creator of Laputa: Castle in the Sky says to have been greatly influenced by the architecture of a mining town in Wales, and this model was used for the design of the buildings of Laputa. Although the film dates back to 1986, the DVD and video release was postponed until 2003. Once on the market in this new format, Laputa: Castle in the Sky became the second-best selling DVD distributed by Disney after Spirited Away.
There are several discrepancies between the original and the English dub, but the effect of Laputa: Castle in the Sky was not lower by such differences. The music in the film sounds different and it was modified for the very purpose of rendering the anime more popular to the Western public who is normally used with very serious musical support. Moreover, the producers of the film agreed with the changes although some fans criticized some of the decisions. In Japan, Laputa: Castle in the Sky got numerous awards among which Best Film of the Year as well as Best Anime at the 9th Anime Grand Prix.
