What Castle in the Sky is based on, in Miyazaki's own account of the film's origins
Studio Ghibli's first release began with a comic Hayao Miyazaki read as a schoolboy, a satirical novel from 1726, and a research trip to South Wales. Where each piece of Castle in the Sky came from, in the director's own account — plus the four titles it nearly had.
Studio Ghibli's first release opened in Japan on 2 August 1986, ran 124 minutes, and was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by Isao Takahata and scored by Joe Hisaishi. Its origins run back roughly thirty-five years, to a comic.
There are three distinct sources, and Miyazaki has named all of them at different times. One is Japanese pulp from the 1950s. One is an English satire from 1726. One is a coalfield in South Wales in the middle of an industrial dispute.
The comic he read as a schoolboy
Tetsuji Fukushima's Sabaku no Maō — roughly, Demon King of the Desert — ran in the magazine Bōken Ō from January 1949 to February 1956. Fukushima drew it in a style copied from American comics his editor had picked up from occupation troops. Miyazaki read it as a boy and kept one episode.
"There was an episode about a gemstone that gave you the power to fly." — Hayao Miyazaki on Sabaku no Maō
He has said he reread it with his heart pounding, and that it made him want to make a film about a magic stone. Sheeta's levitation crystal is that stone, arriving about three and a half decades late.
Fukushima's influence also shows up earlier in Miyazaki's own work. His first original manga, People of the Desert, ran under the pseudonym Akitsu Saburō in 26 weekly instalments in the Japanese Communist Party's Boys and Girls Newspaper between 12 September 1969 and 15 March 1970. Part of it is set in a fortified city called Pejite — a name he would reuse in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Swift's flying island
Laputa comes from the third part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, where it is a flying island of theoreticians so absorbed in abstraction that they are useless at everything practical — Swift's joke at the Royal Society's expense. Miyazaki kept the name, the flight and the detachment from the ground, and discarded the rest.
The film acknowledges the theft directly. Pazu tells Sheeta that Laputa is a legend, that Swift wrote about it, and that Swift's version was only a story — but that his own father photographed the real thing.
Miyazaki did not know the word means something obscene in Spanish, which is why the film goes out internationally as Castle in the Sky.
Wales, 1984
Miyazaki first visited South Wales in 1984, during the miners' strike, and returned in 1985 to research the film, by which point the dispute was lost and the pits were closing. Pazu's town, Slag Ravine, is built from what he saw there: terraced houses following the contours of a hillside, a working pit, a community organised around it.
"I admired the way they battled to save their way of life." — Miyazaki, quoted by Dazed in 2016
He drew the parallel with Japanese coal-mining areas going through the same closures, and put the miners in the film as the people who get Pazu and Sheeta out of trouble. The castle design came from the same trip — Caerphilly, Caernarfon and Powis all fed into it.
The titles it nearly had
A project proposal dated 7 December 1984 lists the alternatives Miyazaki was weighing:
- Young Pazu and the Mystery of the Levitation Crystal — the closest to the Fukushima origin.
- Prisoner of the Castle in the Sky — Sheeta's version of the story.
- Flying Treasure Island — the boys'-adventure register he was aiming at.
- The Flying Empire — the one that sounds most like the film he actually made.
Why it got made when it did
Takahata's documentary about the canals of Yanagawa had run badly over budget, with Miyazaki funding it out of his own Nausicaä money. Takahata's solution was that Miyazaki should direct another feature to pay for it. Ghibli was formally founded in June 1985; Laputa was what it made first, released on a double bill with two compilation films cut from the Sherlock Hound television series.
For the record: over 69,000 drawings were made for it, all by hand, from Miyazaki's designs — for a stone he'd been carrying around since primary school.
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