Hayao Miyazaki
Il castello nel cielo

Miyazaki's fortune was the success that "Spirited Away" (2001) achieved by crossing the borders of Japan and, in fact, paving the way for an entire genre of Japanese animation that was almost unknown in the West (in our country, with a few exceptions, we were stuck with Holly and Benji and Mila and Shiro, so to speak, but very few knew "Akira" by Otomo, just to name one). And so all of Miyazaki's films were distributed in Italy, and we discovered the existence of Totoro, who had been a well-known character in Japan for at least twelve years, along with other masterpieces from the master of Tokyo. Of course, everything arrived very slowly, and "Castle in the Sky" reached Italy on April 25, 2012, despite being a 1986 film.

This is his third film, the first signed by Ghibli, a confirmation of Miyazaki's artistic greatness after the excellent "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984). What perhaps made "Castle in the Sky" not become a fan-favorite work as much as other films (woe to touch "Mononoke", but this film surely) is the fact that it's seen as a more childish movie and, nevertheless, a transition between two memorable works, the aforementioned Nausicaa and the subsequent Totoro (1988).

In reality, "Castle in the Sky" is, in every sense, the foundational work on which the entire narrative and visual imagination of Miyazaki's thought is based. It is true that the story of little Sheeta, who doesn't know she's descended from the kings of Laputa, a semi-legendary flying island, and who comes into contact with an earthbound boy with whom she bonds strongly, so much so that together they fight the fearsome air pirates and the ruthless agent Muska, who want to seize a magical crystal she holds, possesses overly marked childish traits especially in the first half. The figure of Sheeta, moreover, is one of the most monotonous in the entire Miyazaki filmography: at the mercy of events, she allows herself to be carried, literally, by the wind in every situation, and is very far from the warrior Mononoke or the tenacious protagonist of "Spirited Away". However, I believe this is the only real criticism that can be made of the film, which proceeds briskly and tightly, especially in a magnificent second half where, like a dream, the nostalgic ecologist robots coated in moss appear, now abandoned to themselves, a mix of nature and technology made by Miyazaki.

Then there's Miyazaki and his style. Exploiting the reminiscences of some episodes from "Gulliver's Travels," he creates a visually stunning, imaginative, and colorful Europe, "adorned," let's say, with flying machines that seem to come out of a distant era. The themes are more or less the usual ones, here unfolded, even more so than in Nausicaa, in an incredibly convincing way: ecology; pacifism and the critique of the stubbornness of the military upper echelons; childhood as an extension of dreams and life; flight, freedom par excellence; the fight first against one's own demons and then against those that are all too visible (many harmonies with "Kiki" (1989) and, above all, "Porco Rosso" (1992), of which this film is, in some way, a progenitor).

References also to Sodom and Gomorrah and, as Miyazaki himself explained in an interview, to the Welsh miners' strikes. Read to believe: "I went to Wales right after the miners' strike ended. I really admired the way the miners' unions fought to the end for their work and communities, and I wanted to reflect the strength of these communities in my film," he admitted to the Guardian in 1989. But there is also a meticulous writing effort reminiscent of a famous late-70s TV series which, in our country, was broadcast by Fininvest almost a decade later, "Conan, the Boy in Future," with many affinities with the reviewed film, starting from the idea of two very young children forced to face a hostile and unknown world, not being, indeed, adults and thus prepared to face it.

A truly schizophrenic Italian distribution. The rights were acquired by Disney in the USA and by us by Buena Vista (which was still Disney) and they released a DVD version in 2004, with a dubbing that was, among other things, questionable. It was removed from the market almost immediately with no apparent reason and reappeared mysteriously, with different and better dubbing, in 2012 following the theatrical release. Lucky Red took over from Disney as the distributor. Moreover, the 2004 release was hastily concocted to capitalize on the release of "Howl's Moving Castle," presented in September in Venice and Miyazaki's first film to have a uniform distribution across Europe.