Showing posts with label Hiyao Miyazaki. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hiyao Miyazaki. Show all posts

Thursday 12 May 2016

Laputa : Evoking and engaging with our sense of wonder

This is an accreting review of Laputa : Castle in the Sky (1986)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 May

This is an accreting review of Laputa : Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) (1986)




Film references (identifying other films directed by Hayao Miyazaki¹) :

* Akira (1988)

* Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) (2004) [Hayao M.]

* Jupiter Ascending (2015)

* Princess Mononoke (1997) [Hayao M.]

* Spirited Away (Sento Chihirono kamikakushi) (2001) [Hayao M.]

* The Iron Giant (1999) [based on The Iron Man : A Children's Story in Five Nights, a novel by Ted Hughes, first published in 1968]



* The Matrix (1999)

* The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013) [Hayao M.]


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End-notes

¹ The following list is of motifs that will be familiar from these films (it is given non-exhaustively - simply to show that, as directors Wes Anderson or Woody Allen, for example, might have penchants or pet-themes that run through their films, even more so does Miyazaki, almost as if they are, as the case may be, running jokes, or leitmotifs) :

* Appearances / things not being what they seem (e.g. Princess Mononoke)

* Clouds / cloud formations (e.g. The Wind Rises)

* Flowers / blossoms (e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle)

* Flying-machines (e.g. The Wind Rises, and IMDb (@IMDb) lists Miyazaki's short film called Imaginary Flying Machines (2002))

* Gluttony (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Helpful eccentrics / outsiders (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Literary adaptation (e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle and the novel by Diana Wynne Jones)

* Noble blood / nobility in disguise (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Orphans (e.g. The Wind Rises)

* Powerful older women, behaving somewhat boisterously (e.g. Spirited Away)

* Railways (e.g. Spirited Away)

* The Industrial Revolution (in Western Europe) : factories, quarrying and the like (e.g. Princess Mononoke)

* Working / having to work menially to earn one’s keep (e.g. Spirited Away)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)