Just finished Laputa, Castle in the Sky again. It may not have the strongest plot out of all the Myazaki films, but it does have, in approximate order of appearance:

  • Crazy awesome airships
  • Mysterious crystals
  • Flying pirates
  • Bad guys who wear dark glasses at night, inside and underground
  • Pseudo-Welsh miners
  • A hermit who talks to rocks and has a beard
  • Robots. Lots and lots of robots. One of them looks after birds nests and picks flowers. Others destroy things with their crazy laser vision.
  • Stylised lightning which looks like dragons
  • And at the end: a flying island which looks like a giant jellyfish, floating gracefully into orbit

The robots look like this:

My point being that anyone who demands any more than this from a film probably doesn’t deserve it.

updated: