“No matter how many weapons you have, no matter how great your technology might be, the world cannot live without love.”
Though Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro are frequently crowned as the pinnacles of the impressive Studio Ghibli canon, Miyazaki’s lesser-known Castle of the Sky has always been the film that’s stuck with me, ever since I first watched it as a kid. Not only is it the signature of the breathtaking Ghibli art style, and of course features a beautiful score by Joe Hisaishi, but Castle in the Sky stands apart for me as simultaneously one of Miyazaki’s most simple yet profound and important films, preaching an invaluable message about living with the land and a cautionary tale of man’s technological arrogance.
Castle in the Sky tells the story of a young girl named Sheeta, who is the last descendant of Laputa, a floating and now abandoned kingdom in the sky. After falling from an army airship, Sheeta teams up with a boy named Pazu in a race to find the lost city before the pirates and corrupted military that pursue them every step of the way, who intend to use the power of Sheeta’s mysterious crystal for themselves.
The floating city of Laputa represents a utopian fantasy that was just that—a fantasy. Overwhelmed by the Aetherium crystal’s power and its potential for destruction when put in human hands, the people of Laputa abandon the city and what could have been a civilization powerful enough to take over the world.
However, it is when the people desert the kingdom that the city’s utopian possibilities are truly realized. The technology the Laputians invented—the robots, artificial lifeforms that fundamentally defy nature—actually evolve to take care of the garden and safeguard the environment. Here, the natural and built environments coexist. Without the corrupted influence of man and his lust for power, the technology evolves to protect Earth rather than to destroy it, proving that it is mankind, not the technology, that ultimately drives the destruction of the natural world. Technology is inanimate—humans are the ones that wield it for ill means.
As such, when Muska seizes control of Laputa, he uses the robots as weapons of war and destruction, bastardizing what would have been their otherwise peaceful purpose and only destroying the already crumbling city even more in the process. All of this is to the effect of demonstrating that greed and power lust are no foundation for a civilization, and the city responds accordingly.
Throughout the film, the fundamental difference between Sheeta and Muska, and why Muska is ultimately doomed to fail, is their radically different representation of what it means to be a ruler. As the wise miner Uncle Pom tells Sheeta and Pazu, “that stone was made by human hands.” The crystal, at its core, represents the destructive potentialities that occur when man attempts to master nature. Although they are both descended from the same line, Sheeta and Muska understand the power of the crystal in radically different ways. Muska blindly and violently seeks out its power by whatever means necessary, destroying the land if he must do so. This is most telling in the scene where he literally rips through the roots and vegetation that have grown in the throne room in order to get to the crystal, physically gutting nature in his conquest for power.
Sheeta, however, respects nature and knows how to live with the land, and for this reason, she understands the danger of the crystal—and Laputa itself—in a way that Muska does not. Having grown up on a farm, Sheeta is attuned to the natural world, even saying at one point that, before she was kidnapped, “the only thing that brought me joy was the farm and taking care of the animals.” As such, by the end of the film, Sheeta tells Muska, “a king without compassion [for the natural world] does not deserve a kingdom” and that she understands now why the people of Laputa vanished. “There is a song from my home in the valley of Gondua that explains everything,” she says in the climactic scene. “It says, ‘Take root in the ground, live in harmony with the wind, plant your seeds in the winter, and rejoice with the birds in the coming of spring.’” The people of Laputa left because they realized they had violated nature and that they must instead return to the ground and “live in harmony with the wind”—with nature—rather than trying to wield it for their own ends. Like Uncle Pom, Sheeta understands the supremacy of the earth that must be respected.
Conversely, the entire conquest of Muska is a perversion of nature, trying to revive something that has long since died. Muska asserts, “Laputa will live. I will return it to life. Laputa’s power is the dream of all mankind.” But once again, this is an arrogant attempt to defy nature itself. You cannot return to life what has died, no matter, as Sheeta says, “how many weapons you have” or “how great your technology might be.” This is why, in the climactic confrontation in the throne room, Sheeta recognizes that “this is no longer a throne room. This is a tomb.” If Laputa is an organism, it is long since dead and returned to its place within the natural circle of life, a state of order that Sheeta understands must be respected.
In the end, all of the technology falls away from Laputa, leaving only the roots that formed the natural foundation of the city. The civilization floats off into space, returned to its purest form—what it was meant to be in the first place. As Sheeta says as the roots save her and Pazu from falling, “The tree! We protected it, so it protects us!” The same sentiment is reflected in the robots, which have the potential for destruction in the hands of greed and selfishness, but when led by stewardship of and respect for the land, coexist peacefully with the natural environment. In the end, Sheeta and Pazu are rewarded by nature because they recognize that a society founded on greed is no society at all, whereas Muska is ultimately doomed to fail for his hubris. Civilizations and individuals alike can only bloom and prosper when they understand this reciprocity of living with the land.
Castle of the Sky is a beautiful story inviting all viewers to similarly “take root in the ground, live in harmony with the wind,” and condemn ecological conquest as the dead end of a civilization. The next time that you are searching for a Ghibli film to watch, I highly recommend this underrated masterclass of storytelling in the hopes that it will inspire you to live as characters like Uncle Pom do and listen to the earth—the true ruler of us all—letting its wisdom be your guide.