Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Castle in the Sky
1986 · Hayao Miyazaki · Castle in the Sky on Sightlines
A robot stands in a garden near the end of this film. Moss on its riveted shoulders, one blank eye set in a rounded head, arms hanging too long at its sides. It was built to defend a fortress. The fortress is a tree now.
The body is borrowed. Miyazaki took the rounded torso, the articulated arms and the impassive single eye from the flying war machines of a 1941 Fleischer Superman short, The Mechanical Monsters, and kept every rivet. What he added was the moss. Hold that image, because the whole film is in it: enormous power, outlived by the roots growing through it.
Castle in the Sky opened in Japan in August 1986, the first picture from a studio that had not existed two years before. Gilles Deleuze had just finished his second volume on cinema, published in 1985, and its argument was that the classical adventure had run out of road. His two books cut film history roughly at the Second World War. Before it, the movement-image: a person sees a situation, acts on it, and the act changes the situation. Editing exists to keep that chain running. After it, the time-image: action stops working. Characters can only look at what has happened to them, and we feel time directly instead of as the measure of somebody's movement. Deleuze thought the shift was honest. The world had got too large and too compromised for anyone's decisive act to resolve it.
So what do you do with a 1986 film in which decisive acts work perfectly?
The easy answer is that it's a children's picture and doesn't count. The lens is worth applying precisely because it refuses that. Read through Deleuze, the film's classicism looks built rather than inherited: a reconstruction of a form live-action cinema had largely abandoned, executed by hand, one drawing at a time, and pointed at an argument the old form never made.
Deleuze's name for the big version of the action film is the large form. Situation, action, transformed situation. It needs an encompasser — a milieu so large it presses on everyone inside it and calls the action out of them. Here it's the sky, and what's buried in it. A legendary floating city, a lost technology, a pendant that levitates and carries a spell of destruction. Every faction is organized by that single encompassing fact. The government sends Muska. The pirates send Dola. The two children run. Inside the large form sits the duel, what Deleuze calls the binomial, force against force. The moral architecture here is deliberately more black-and-white than Miyazaki's later work, and that's a formal decision as much as an ethical one. A binomial has to be clean for the large form to close.
But a large form that only pressed would exhaust you in twenty minutes. Deleuze describes its rhythm as a respiration: the film alternates the vast space of the milieu with the taut line of the action, breathing out and in. Miyazaki learned this early, from the held beats and community-labour detail of Takahata's Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), where he did key animation and scene design. Japanese criticism calls it ma, the deliberate lull. You get a morning in Pazu's mining town. A quiet interlude in an abandoned mine with an old engineer, Uncle Pomme. The overgrown gardens of Laputa, serene, with the ruin under them.
Here's where the concept earns its keep. In a time-image film those stretches would be dead time: the everyday simply held, the character left watching. Miyazaki's pauses look identical and do the opposite. Nothing is pursued in them, and then the chase resumes carrying more weight than it had. The stillness feeds the action instead of replacing it. That is the difference between a film that has lost faith in acting and one that is pacing itself.
The flying is why people love this film, and Deleuze hands you a word for what it does. Borrowing from Bergson, he calls what cinema opens onto the Open: not a container of things but a changing duration, which a moving camera expresses every time it moves. Movement in this regime reports a change in the whole, not a change of address. Miyazaki has no camera. He has an animation stand, cels, hand-painted backgrounds, and the multiplane-style stacking of depth that Disney's Snow White (1937) invented, which he uses for cloud strata, haze, and parallax on the receding ground. The "aerial moves" tracking his ornithopters are drawn. They still open the whole, and they open it vertically: mine shafts plunging away, the fortress dropping, tiny figures against enormous sky, then the god's-eye reveal of the island.
His specific invention is legibility at that scale. The machines are staged so you understand them. You can see how the mine elevator lifts, how the flaptered wings bite air, how the fortress cannon loads. Bazin founded his realism on the photograph's physical trace of a world that was actually there. Animation has no trace; nothing stood in front of anything. Miyazaki substitutes function for the trace. You believe the ornithopter because you can see how it would work, and that credibility is what keeps the action readable once it gets fast. The vertical scramble he perfected in The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) is reused wholesale in the collapsing fortress here, and the climax never turns to noise because you always know which way is down.
The pendant is a symbol in Deleuze's sense: the one object condensing the film's organizing relation, passed hand to hand, wanted by everyone, holding levitation and ruin together. (His crystal-image is a different animal, about time rather than stones.) And the engine of the drama is what Deleuze, again after Bergson, calls the interval — the gap in a living creature between perceiving something and acting, which is where a self gets made. Two children who must choose what kind of power they will wield. The large form's decisive act duly arrives, and it is a renunciation: they speak the spell of destruction and bring the prize down.
That's what the film did to the adventure story. The large form classically ends by seizing the encompassing object. This one ends by unmaking it, and the anti-militarist, anti-hubris framework inherited intact from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is what makes the reversal structural instead of sentimental. The chain of action stays whole. Only its destination is inverted.
The rest of the DNA is on record. Future Boy Conan (1978) supplied the boy-hero-and-mysterious-girl pair and the elastic pursuit choreography of dangling, leaping, catching that Pazu and Sheeta reprise almost gesture for gesture. Nausicaä supplied the image-board-first world-building and the gliding flight. Forward, this is the origin point of everything Ghibli became: hand-drawn quality over volume, feature-length ambition, and Joe Hisaishi's score beginning a partnership that runs through nearly every Miyazaki film after it. It is also a founding text of the machine-romance the West would later name steampunk, arrived at through mining engineering and early aviation rather than any genre label.
So the significance. In the decade when serious cinema had agreed that action resolves nothing, Miyazaki showed the sensory-motor chain wasn't dead, only tired of what live-action could afford. Drawing let the large form breathe at any altitude. He rebuilt the machine and aimed it at the destruction of its own treasure.
Watch it again for the pauses. Count the seconds when nothing is chasing anyone: the town at morning, the mine, the garden. Then feel how hard the film hits when it moves again. And look at the robot with the moss on it. Somebody decided, drawing by drawing, that a war machine left alone long enough becomes part of a garden. Whether that's a consolation or a warning, the film declines to say.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — An intact sensory-motor chain from first frame to last: pursuit is perceived, acted on, and the act changes the situation, across town, mine, sky, fortress and Laputa — in 1986, a year after Deleuze declared the form historically superseded.
- action-image-large-form — Classical quest structure in which a global situation (Laputa's buried power, pursued by a militarized state and by pirates) presses until a decisive ethical choice at the climax transforms it — here inverted, the act destroys the prize.
- the encompasser — The sky and the legendary floating city function as the encompassing milieu organizing every faction's pursuit, right down to the great cyclonic weather system that hides Laputa.
- binomial — Muska as a comparatively unambiguous villain set against the two children; the dossier notes the moral architecture is deliberately more black-and-white than Miyazaki's later, more ambiguous work.
- respiration-space — Alternation of grand establishing vistas with intimate two-shots of Sheeta and Pazu, plus the *ma* lulls between chases: morning in Pazu's mining town, the abandoned-mine interlude with Uncle Pomme, the pastoral serenity of Laputa's overgrown gardens.
- line of the universe — A chase escalating across distinct, disconnected environments — town, mine, sky, fortress, Laputa — strung into one continuous trajectory.
- the Open — Sweeping imagined aerial moves tracking flying craft, multiplane-style layering for cloud strata and parallax, extreme changes of scale and altitude culminating in the god's-eye reveal of Laputa.
- the mobile section (plan) — The illusion of a mobile camera in hand-drawn aerial sequences — drawn movement, with no photographed world behind it, that still registers a change in the whole rather than a change of position.
- the interval — The dramatic engine is a coming-of-age partnership between two children who must choose what kind of power they will wield; the climax is that hesitation between perceiving and acting, resolved as renunciation.
- symbol — The levitation crystal and its 'spell of destruction' — the MacGuffin every faction pursues, condensing the film's organizing relation between power and ruin.
- montage-organic-american — A classical adventure rhythm of sustained, legible action set-pieces with three factions — children, sky pirates, government agents — racing convergently toward the same object.