Mad Times

Castle In The Sky

Disney is finally releasing the various Hayao Miyazaki films whose US distribution rights they've been sitting on for years now. This one is set in a world where there are all sorts of surreal flying machines including an entire island complete with integral castle (hence the title). A young girl with a magic crystal discovers that her ancestors are from this flying island. She is being chased by some government agents who want the crystal as well as some pirates who want the treasure that's rumored to be on the island. This is all a little more linear than the actual unfolding of the plot, but this movie has an unusually linear plot as anime goes. The girl finds a boy whose father was obsessed with the floating island, and together they run from the various bad guys and towards the island.

As usual with Miyazaki, the visuals are top notch, and in this case, the imagined world is beautiful and cool.

The other thing Disney is doing with these releases is dubbing them with American actors' voices. The dubbing on this one is acceptable, but after watching a few minutes of the subtitled Japanese, it appears that they made major changes to the script (assuming that the subtitles are more faithful to the original, which could very well not be the case) which based on the small sample I read (had to get the DVD back to the library) were mainly intended to make the movie funnier in a pretty Disneyesque way. Bleh.