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CaptainAvatar
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 381
Location: Saint Louis, MO
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 12:14 pm
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Coincidentally, I just ordered this on Blu-Ray, although I already had the DVD release. The Disney Movie Club was running a sale on Ghibli titles, so I grabbed everything I didn't have on Blu-Ray already.
Last edited by CaptainAvatar on Thu Feb 11, 2016 2:25 am; edited 1 time in total
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louis6578
Joined: 31 Jul 2013
Posts: 1866
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 12:52 pm
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Am I weird for having this as my favorite Ghibli movie ever. Would be my favorite Miyazaki movie behind Castle of Cagliostro too.
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SnowyLightning44
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 1:15 pm
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Yeah although I must admit this isn't my favourite Ghibli movie ever (definitely amongst my top 5 though) it feels like a lot of people underrate it
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Zin5ki
Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:29 pm
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I shall say this much about the film. It was one of the first examples of 'proper' Japanese animation, as vulgar as such a turn of phrase is, that I remember seeing. It was also televised, a testament to its industrial favour if not its formal merits. All I recall disappointing me was the seeming flatness of the antagonists—there seemed less to extract from them as characters than, say, the robots. In the sake of charity, it is presumed that the island itself, amongst other things, was of greater thematic importance than anything a villain of a family-friendly adventure film could aspire to embody.
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EricJ2
Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:29 pm
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SnowyLightning44 wrote: | Yeah although I must admit this isn't my favourite Ghibli movie ever (definitely amongst my top 5 though) it feels like a lot of people underrate it |
Not my favorite either (they just won't end the movie until they show us EVERY BRICK FALLING!), but one of those good vintage Miyazaki's when he made it up himself, rather than any source material.
The opening half in the mining village has that same Verne-steampunk kids-on-the-run quality some of our generation liked when the Nadia series first appeared (granted that that was a complete CitS plagiarism to begin with); it's only after they find what they're looking for that the movie slows down to a crawl.
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tcdelaney
Joined: 05 Oct 2011
Posts: 169
Location: Mittagong, NSW, Australia
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 3:15 pm
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CaptainAvatar wrote: |
Ironically, I just ordered this on Blu-Ray, although I already had the DVD release. The Disney Movie Club was running a sale on Ghibli titles, so I grabbed everything I didn't have on Blu-Ray already. |
I hate to do this, but that would be coincidentally. It's one of my personal bugbears.
I'm a little unusual in that my own favourite movie is Kiki (animated, live, Ghibli or otherwise). Laputa, Totoro and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi are right up there too.
I enjoy Nausicaa, but feel that the movie is way too truncated if you've read the manga (understandable since he continued working on the manga long after the movie was released).
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walw6pK4Alo
Joined: 12 Mar 2008
Posts: 9322
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 4:37 pm
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Laputa's a masterpiece, not much to add there. The only thing I wish I could have seen, and wish to see generally more in anime, is exploration of ruins be a central tenet of a story. The floating castle itself seemed ripe for hours of just exploring and seeing the beauty of things, but of course that's not exactly why both parties got themselves up into the clouds.
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Harleyquin
Joined: 29 May 2014
Posts: 2872
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:00 pm
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This was the first Ghibli movie I saw, I've seen others since (but not the most recent works) but this, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away remain the three Ghibli works which always come to mind whenever I hear Miyazaki's name.
The themes today appear both archaic and relevant at the same time, what with a changing and uncertain world today and the struggles which Miyazaki depicted in this film set in the midst of the Cold War.
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vonPeterhof
Joined: 10 Nov 2014
Posts: 729
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:03 pm
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louis6578 wrote: | Am I weird for having this as my favorite Ghibli movie ever. |
I'm not sure if I'd call it my favourite, but it's most likely the one I've re-watched the most, and the one that I always try to catch whenever there's a one-off Anime Night screening at a local cinema. It might not be the most thematically complex of Miyazaki's movies and later ones do outshine it on the technical side, but I've always considered this one to be the best showcase of Miyazaki's love of flight, heights and the skies. The high speed railway chase over a giant chasm, the pirates' flimsy-looking flying machine cutting its way through the stormy clouds, Pazu skipping and climbing his way up to the castle trying not to fall from the skies to certain death - the raw excitement of watching all that on the big screen gets me every time.
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Sacto0562
Joined: 12 Jun 2010
Posts: 288
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 7:51 pm
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I totally love this film because the backgrounds they used are just STUNNING even by 2016 standards. I remember seeing it the first time on a VHS rental from a store that specializes in Japanese videos and even at the limited resolution of VHS, the details of the backgrounds was just astonishing.
And how can you forget the great Joe Hisaishi score, too?
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Vibrant Wolf
Joined: 07 Feb 2016
Posts: 109
Location: Canada
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 9:40 pm
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wow
hard to believe one of my preferred animated movies is already thirty years old.
then again, i could say the same thing about Toy Story being twenty.
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relyat08
Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 4125
Location: Northern Virginia
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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 12:53 am
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Zin5ki wrote: | I shall say this much about the film. It was one of the first examples of 'proper' Japanese animation, as vulgar as such a turn of phrase is, that I remember seeing. It was also televised, a testament to its industrial favour if not its formal merits. All I recall disappointing me was the seeming flatness of the antagonists—there seemed less to extract from them as characters than, say, the robots. In the sake of charity, it is presumed that the island itself, amongst other things, was of greater thematic importance than anything a villain of a family-friendly adventure film could aspire to embody. |
That was my biggest complaint as well. It is a great film, but the villains felt pretty one-dimensional. They were there to serve a purpose, rather than actually being people.
Sean Bell wrote: | Castle in the Sky preceded the great Steampunk boom by several decades |
I'd say more like one decade. It has only been three decades since it came out and it feels like the Steampunk boom pretty much happened between 1995 and 2005 to me.
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koinosuke
Joined: 24 Sep 2005
Posts: 271
Location: Fukushima, Japan
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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 1:55 am
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Castle in the Sky is one of the most perfect adventure movies ever made, in my opinion. It may not be Miyazaki's deepest film, but it's so ridiculously fun, thrilling, and inventive. The imagery is both boisterous and somehow even melancholic. It is strange how a movie as good as Castle in the Sky somehow gets a bit lost when people talk about Miyazaki's creations - it deserves more recognition, for sure.
Funnily enough, I'd actually put Castle of Cagliostro up there as another one of the best adventure movies ever made.
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Hiroki not Takuya
Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2528
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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 2:27 am
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While intellectually there is much to criticize Laputa for as some here have done, especially incomprehensible to me was 'Sheeta's speech to Muska about how a folk saying from Gondor made everything about Laputa clear (the world can't live without love(???)) it remains a special film in my opinion. The details make it and I have re-watched it literally dozens of times over the last decade. I really love the opening animation which tells a "visual story" about the history leading up to Laputa and where 'Sheeta fits. My favorite moment has always been when Pazu and 'Sheeta recite the "spell of destruction" which I'd recite in unison when watching and now I find people celebrate "Bals Day"!! I'll have to see if I can get in on it next year, though I'll say "varus" with Latin pronunciation which I think is what it sounds like and is cooler anyway. Really glad to see it is as special to others.
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Shiflan
Joined: 29 Jul 2015
Posts: 418
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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:51 am
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louis6578 wrote: | Am I weird for having this as my favorite Ghibli movie ever. |
I don't think so. While I loved just about every Ghibli film that I have seen I tend to prefer the earlier ones to the later. My favorite is a tossup between Nausicaa (OK, technically it pre-dates Ghibli) and Laputa. After that my personal preference is pretty close to the order in which they were released.
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