Spoiler warning for Studio Ghibli’s 1986 film Castle in the Sky. Please proceed accordingly!
For all that it’s a fun caper of a movie, filled with daring escapes, piles of treasure, and a literal floating palace, Castle in the Sky has always sat heavily on my mind. Like many Studio Ghibli films, it leaves viewers with a hefty blend of hope and melancholy. What sets Castle in the Sky apart is how it also forces the viewer to confront their own expectations for adventure stories; for me, it illuminates how those expectations have shaped much more of my life than I thought.
Castle in the Sky is all about exploration, of slipping the surly bonds of Earth for something wondrous and new. As a child, that idea was almost always on my mind; I grew up learning that exploration, while also a natural facet of human nature, was a specifically American inheritance. Air travel, then space travel, was as inevitable as destiny — a natural outgrowth of the American spirit, sending us inexorably onwards towards the stars. Castle in the Sky was the first piece of media to look me in the eyes and ask, “Are you sure about that?” At ten years old, I wasn’t quite up to processing the uncertainty such a question provoked in me, but I carried it with me all the same.
I’m now an adult who’s made her way into the world of space exploration, driven, at least initially, by what I’d been taught was a uniquely American legacy. I was convinced not just of the truth of that legacy, but also in its predictive power; I was certain that we would continue on towards some bright interstellar future. But that’s the funny thing about legacies — like physical monuments, a closer look at legacy often reveals cracks, imperfections, and pervasive, inescapable flaws. The reality of U.S. space exploration is much darker, with its roots in nationalism, colonialism, and exploitation. For anyone raised on stories that tend to elide this very real truth, comprehending what space exploration really means and what has been (and will be) done in its name can be a heady thing.
These days, I’m thinking seriously about what it means to ‘do’ space exploration. Why are we doing it? Who is it for? What version of humanity is it that can transform into a spacefaring civilization, and what is the cost?
I don’t have answers to these questions. My life as a planetary scientist would certainly be easier if I did — it’s much simpler to argue for the cause of space exploration (which will give me, personally, more data to study) when I’m certain my cause is just. But I am not at all certain! So, I’ve returned to Castle in the Sky, looking for answers in the Studio Ghibli film that first pushed me to look at my hopes and dreams a little bit differently.
The mythical castle as seen in the film for the first time. Image: Studio Ghibli.
Like many Studio Ghibli films, the actual plot of Castle in the Sky is deceptively simple. It follows two children, Sheeta and Pazu, on a seemingly impossible quest to find Laputa, a wondrous city hidden in the clouds whose existence has seemingly passed into legend. As the story unfolds, character after character projects their desires onto Laputa: Pazu longs to prove his family’s worth by confirming that the floating city is real; a troop of rambunctious sky pirates look to it as a treasure trove; various factions of the military plan to exploit it for wealth, power, and dominance. Is the castle a haven, a cache of riches, or a weapon of mass destruction? Unfortunately, Laputa turns out to be all three at once, and it’s this impossibly contradictory existence that leads to its ruin.
Castle in the Sky, despite (or maybe because of) its child protagonists, wrestles with difficult themes about the double-edged nature of power, flight, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth in a more direct way than is typical for Ghibli. It’s also unusual within the Ghibli oevre in providing an overtly evil, irredeemable antagonist as a direct vehicle for the studio’s anti-military and anti-imperialist themes. The military and its scheming Colonel Muska very clearly and explicitly state their desire to use Laputa as a gateway to a higher form of war. This directness in tone, combined with the fantastic Ghibli worldbuilding, gives the film its unique power — it’s why it stuck with me as a kid, and why, twenty years later, I’m coming back to it now.
When watching the movie unfold as a child I believed, as children often do, that something as wondrous as a castle in the sky could only be a force for good. After all, why else would it exist? The role of air and sky in many stories, and particularly stories aimed at children, is one of freedom — so I was absolutely convinced that a castle in the sky represented the ultimate idyllic refuge, full of wonders beyond imagining. Castle in the Sky, of course, turns this expectation on its head. The film drops hint after hint that things are not as they seem. The robot fallen from Laputa, with its cute yet unsettling design, reveals immense destructive powers. The castle itself is hidden in the eye of a hurricane, requiring immense sacrifice and pain to breach its walls.
What Sheeta and Pazu find when they reach their destination is a ruined citadel slowly being overtaken by nature, with a horrible secret at its center. Laputa’s sweeping towers, flowering gardens, and serene reflecting pools are all a veneer for something else entirely: built into the foundations of the city is a high-tech command center designed for airborne warfare. The key to Laputa’s fantastical existence, it turns out, is its capacity for destruction. Here, Castle in the Sky presents its thesis — that beauty and violence are two halves of one human whole. Laputa could be a paradise, but only for those who lived in it; its rulers literally held a gun to the rest of the world so that their city could take flight.
What happens next is only natural: the two children, those with the clearest view of (and the most at stake in) humanity’s future, destroy the command center that controls Laputa, ensuring that it can never again be used as a weapon of mass destruction. And in so doing, the city, and all the good and bad that it represents, is lost forever.
It took me years, and multiple viewings, to process my own strange heartbreak as I watched Laputa crumbling, perplexed by my intense reaction to the loss. Why did it hurt so much to realize that Pazu’s dream of a floating castle full of adventure was completely incompatible with his reality? Why did it hurt so much to understand that the best thing for him to do, the only way to move forward, was to let that dream go? Of course, I didn’t want Laputa to rain hellfire down upon the Earth with its robots and laser guns. I just wanted a version of the city that was what all the myths said it was: all wonder, and no pain.
But that’s the secret of most Ghibli films — sometimes, things that are beautiful are also rotten. And we don’t get to turn our faces from the bad to enjoy the good.
A robot looks off towards the flying city from when it came. Image: Studio Ghibli
“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it… I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens, someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and politics, is hopeless.”
There are two kinds of history when it comes to U.S. space exploration. The first is the kind that children are taught in schools, in which noble astronauts soared out into the stars, supported by brilliant teams on the ground. From then on, the story goes, the space program only improved, with more astronauts and newer spacecrafts all working in the peaceful spirit of ‘to boldly go.’ This first history, while nice to listen to, is in many parts a carefully constructed myth. The second, more difficult history is the kind that historians must painstakingly reconstruct from memos, notes, and interviews. The second history is the one that reveals how the space program willingly recruited ex-Nazis, struggled badly with integrating women and people of color into its astronaut corps, relied on cronyism, nepotism, and recklessness that resulted in multiple space shuttle disasters, and remained thoroughly intertwined with American military interests from its inception to the present day.
For me, transitioning from deeply believing in the first kind of history to truly understanding meaning of the second was a bit like watching Laputa crumbling before my eyes. After years of pursuing more and better information about the space program to sate my own curiosity, I was suddenly standing on a truth I didn’t want — and, like Pazu, I had to decide what I was going to do about it.
Talking about space exploration in this light makes folks uncomfortable. It’s easier to hope instead that space exploration can somehow maintain its status as an “objective public good” removed from the commercial and national politics in which it sits. But it’s not enough to cling to our vision of other planetary bodies as “neutral territory,” immune from nationalism, capitalism, and their compatriots. To fully address any issues we might have about the current trajectory of space exploration, we must admit that other, darker narratives have been traveling with us all along.
Today’s concerns about the militarization of space, for example, often bely the fact that the military has always been an interested party and frequent collaborator on NASA projects, from early proposals for moon bases to planned lunar nuclear tests to defense missions flown by the space shuttle. Those of us who are scientists and space exploration enthusiasts might look up at the Moon and see a scientific treasure trove, full of hidden knowledge about the origins of the Earth itself; however, we cannot ignore the fact that the military, from the very beginning of the U.S. space program, was considering how to deploy a “lunar-based earth bombardment system.” The very concept is almost funny in its technological impossibility; however, like Castle in the Sky’s bumbling, narcissistic military, to laugh at their folly is to minimize the very real danger that they pose.
Is the Moon, like Laputa, a wonderland or a weapon? With multiple narratives competing for dominance, narratives with real social and political weight, what will it become?
Sheeta confronts the apparently lifeless robot, fallen from Laputa. Image: Studio Ghibli.
Castle in the Sky has helped guide me in reconciling the varied histories of U.S. space exploration. It’s also allowed me to reconsider what I really want out of space travel going forward. Right now, discussions of the future of human-based space exploration are primarily rooted in the concept of humanity becoming a multi-planet species. Whether it’s bases on the Moon or longer journeys to Mars, the language of space’s future is one of colonization. Corporate space leaders like Elon Musk dream of terraforming Mars, making the planet habitable by force. But colonizing Mars means more than just making the planet livable for humans — it means building communities, and all of the societal baggage that comes with them. What kind of life will it be, living on Mars? Thinking that a martian settlement will thrive simply because all of us want it to is no better than Pazu’s dream of a floating city. It’s a hope that refuses to consider what making such a dream a reality will cost — not just in terms of engineering hardware, rocket fuel, or habitat design, but in human lives.
The relationship of colonialism and space exploration extends far beyond the proliferation of ‘Colonize Mars’ merchandise. Colonization as a process has always traded in utopia — the idea of building something anew and starting over. Modern space exploration has largely inherited this thought process. Colonizing Mars is an easy thing to spin wild ideas about, because it’s so far away from all our real-world problems, many of which were caused by European colonization itself. In viewing Mars as the next “terra incognita,” yet another empty land that’s not quite empty at all, many folks in the space exploration community can convince themselves that colonization is once again a good idea. More specifically, colonization of the Moon/Mars is rooted in overtly negative expectations about humanity’s future, while at the very same time confidently assured of future utopia. It lazily assumes that the Earth is doomed to fail from anthropogenic disasters; an earthen exodus becomes not just a possibility, but an imperative. Humanity might destroy this planet, but we can rebuild bigger and better on the next one!
The uneasy position of humans on a rapidly changing Earth is also a classic theme of many Ghibli films, including Castle in the Sky. Its world is defined by the stark contrast between the beauty of Laputa among the clouds and the ravaged land below. Mining settlements like Pazu’s hometown have torn the Earth apart in search of resources, with only a few miners left to realize, and regret, the irreparable harm done to their living space. Even the result of all that effort, Laputa, became a promised utopia only for those who lived in it. As Sheeta and Pazu wander the massive mining tunnels whose crystals powered Laputa, the children begin to wonder whether hollowing out the Earth in the service of isolated, flying fiefdoms was really such an achievement after all.
Much like living in Laputa, colonizing another planet to restart civilization is a concept that’s really only available to the privileged — those who can afford to sink time and money into a fantasy. Laputa’s rise and fall illustrates a hard truth: a utopia designed by the rich and powerful is one that inherently depends on subjugation. The Earth must be plundered so the city can rise, leaving destitute swathes of miners on collapsing hillsides behind. In other words, it’s not a true utopia at all. Many current plans for lunar and martian settlements don’t really do much better. Whether it’s Elon Musk’s plans to effectively reintroduce indentured servitude on Mars or the U.S. government’s ongoing support of private companies trying to exploit lunar resources, our bright space future is built on merciless extraction of human and material capital in the present.
For many folks in the space exploration industry, this mindset, and the material consequences it has both for humanity and for the planet(s) it intends to inhabit, are a reasonable outgrowth of that grand American legacy of space exploration. For me, however, the logical inconsistency is too much to swallow. After rewatching Castle in the Sky, I realized that I want desperately to hang on to the floating castle of space exploration I’ve built in my head — the version that’s all visionary developments of space technology and peaceful collaboration, and none of the ethical dilemmas about lunar strip mining or interplanetary militarism. Since that doesn’t exist, I’m now forced to decide what I want instead. I’m looking for a different trajectory for space exploration’s future, even if that means rebuilding our approach from the ground up. The alternative is to decide that we live in a world beyond saving, which allows space colonization hopefuls to sit happily in the flames of our destruction while dreaming about a utopia so distant for most of us that it’s barely worth considering. For Castle in the Sky, and for me, that alternative is unthinkable.
It’s Laputa, the castle in the sky! Image: Studio Ghibli
Where do we go from here, now that things are so complicated? For someone who still believes in the power of space exploration for exploration’s sake, as I do, there’s a lot more thinking to be done. Can the ethos espoused by Castle in the Sky, one that urges us to look down at the Earth before looking up at the sky, truly be reconciled with the existence of space exploration?
Yes. Yes, it can.
We are always, always going to dream of flying. Miyazaki’s works never deny this; in fact, they celebrate it. For all its pointed commentary on the dangers of technology, Castle in the Sky is also filled with miraculous flying machines that provide regular people freedom and independence. So, where is the line between individual exploratory drive and massive, militaristic imperialism? The nuance, Studio Ghibli answers, can be found in why we explore, the instruments we use to do it, and how we place our exploration into a global context. Do we see ourselves as having mastery, both over the Earth and the machines we’ve built to tame it, break it open, and leave it behind? Or, do we view ourselves as one small part of a very large planet, a thing far greater and older than we can ever understand?
When it comes to the future of space exploration, it might be time to move past gleaming silver cities sprawling across the martian surface, and think instead what a truly human-centric version might be. Maybe that means an enhanced robotic program while we turn our gaze (and our resources) to climate solutions for this planet, first. Maybe that means considering whether (and how) space exploration can be separated from its nationalist and capitalist entanglements at all. Rethinking space exploration will be hard, absolutely; but there is immense value in considering an alternative path forward. Regardless of where we end up, we absolutely can and should keep dreaming of the stars.
“[E]ven in the middle of hatred… there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation…”