What inspired Laputa: Castle in the Sky?

A novel from 1726, and a miners' strike from 1984.

Hayao Miyazaki's original project proposal (December 7, 1984) names the flying island's source outright: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), whose third voyage visits Laputa, a castle-island floating on magnetism. The same proposal builds its story's foundation on Treasure Island: a boy, a map-shaped secret, and pirates worth rooting for.

Then the real world added the film's heart. On a 1985 research trip to Wales, in the middle of the coal miners' strike, Miyazaki watched mining communities fight the closure of their pits and their way of life. He told The Guardian: "I admired the way they battled to save their way of life, just as the coal miners in Japan did."

The mining town of Slag Ravine, its soot, solidarity, and stubbornness, went straight into the film. Swift supplied the island in the sky; Wales supplied the ground worth returning to.

THE FILM

Castle in the Sky, 1986

Theatrical poster · 1986

Sheeta falling out of the sky into Pazu's arms: Swift's island above, and below it a Welsh mining town drawn by a man who had walked the picket lines' streets a year earlier. Ghibli is a headline SOJ lane, tickets, phone cards, and a Laputa PSA 9 on the shelf.

What inspired Laputa: Castle in the Sky?

THE FILM

THE FIRST WORD