Today we watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I had seen it before, but the girl hadn't (she thinks; she's not actually 100% sure). Before Nausicaä was grandfathered in, Laputa was the first official Studio Ghibli production, and while it is a well-made film, showcasing Miyazaki's greatness, it doesn't really do it for me. I don't hate it or anything, but I also don't think it's up there with the better Ghibli films either. It's very firmly entrenched in the middle.
Pazu and Sheeta are plucky kids who go on an adventure, running from pirates and the military, and then joining the pirates, and then finding an ancient, almost mythic castle in the sky. It's exciting, it's funny, and it's cartoony (making my assertion yesterday that Cagliostro was Miyazaki's cartooniest work a lie almost immediately), but it's also not particularly revolutionary. It feels too much like a Disney animated feature, and cementing this belief is Muska, the only outright villainous villain in any Ghibli movie (I sure hope I don't watch anything tomorrow that proves this a lie as well).
There are bad people in Ghibli films: Kushana in Nausicaä, Lady Eboshi in Mononoke, Yubaba in Spirited Away, the kids' aunt in Grave of the Fireflies, etc. But none of them are as irredeemably evil as Muska is. We may not agree with any of them, but we can kind of see their point of view, and they ultimately do some good stuff along with the bad. Muska spends most of his time hurting kids. He doesn't ever show a single shred of remorse, nor does he have any redeeming or exculpatory qualities. Dude just wants power, and he doesn't care how many people he has to kill to get it, their age be damned. He hits them, shoots at them, pulls them by their pigtails, and terrorizes them every chance he gets. And at the end, he forces the kids to use a spell of destruction to destroy the castle, blinding him and causing him to either be crushed by masonry, fall to his death thousands of feet below, or be cursed to blindly wander the halls of what remains of the castle as it ascends into orbit and he slowly freezes and/or asphyxiates. Whatever the outcome, his death is not pretty, but it is richly deserved.
(And before anyone starts yelling at me about Lord Cob, yeah, I know. But he's not a Ghibli villain as much as he is an Earthsea villain, so I stand by my statement.)
The pirates are pretty great, though, so it has that going for it 😃
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