Term · Castle in the Sky
Laputa
A city of gardens and war machines drifting inside a permanent storm, held up by a stone nobody can make any more.
In Otakana the clue reads: The lost floating island of the title
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Castle in the Sky
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Laputa is the flying island at the centre of Castle in the Sky. Its builders left long ago. What remains is a tree the size of a district, a courtyard of graves, and robots that go on watering the plants and killing intruders because nobody ever told them to stop. Underneath the garden sits the machinery, and the weapon, that people below have spent centuries hunting.
Hayao Miyazaki took the name from Gulliver's Travels, where Jonathan Swift put a flying island of distracted scholars held aloft by a giant magnet. Swift's version is satire. Miyazaki's keeps the idea of a civilisation floating above the world it used to rule, and asks a fairly direct question about what happens to people who cut themselves off from the ground.
The film opened in 1986 as the first release made under the Studio Ghibli name, with Joe Hisaishi scoring it. Its English title dropped the word Laputa entirely, since the name reads as an insult in Spanish, so Castle in the Sky is a translation of a marketing problem rather than of anything in the script.
Spelling LAPUTA
LAPUTA is six letters, and the Japanese ラピュタ will mislead you twice. It opens with the R kana, since Japanese has no separate L, and the second character is a small combination reading pyu. The sound is closer to Rapyuta than to anything you would begin with an L. English keeps Swift's original: LAPUTA, one T, ending in A.