Review of Castle in the Sky

Last night I watched Castle in the Sky with my club, and after having watched Spirited Away for the last movie night, I was excited for another Miyazaki film. I have to say though, I'm very disappointed. I want to start by saying that I didn't watch Ghibli movies as a kid. I know a lot of people who say they love Ghibli movies but I suspect that that was because of nostalgia, and they aren't realizing that each of these movies needs to be judged with a more critical, mature eye. I liked Spirited Away a lot, but Castle in the Sky is just worse itpretty much every way. But let's talk about the good first.

The music is fine. Good, even. It's not as good as Spirited Away's but the main theme is pretty good and helps make some otherwise awkward moments feel a bit more dramatic. And the art style, outside of some weird moments where it just changes for no reason, is really nice.

But onto the awful parts of the movie: there is not a single - not one - good character in this entire film. The best character is probably the robots, but they don't really count. The main characters are just dumb and naive, and its really annoying to watch them constantly fall for the villain's plan just to win off of deus ex machina or whatever. It's actually infuriating watching this movie, I swear.

The main villain is so annoying and mustache twirling that I can't take a thingle sing he does seriously. It's actually impressive how terrible this is. Pretty much nothing about him is interesting or unique or original, even back when the movie first came out. He's just... bad. Really, really, really, really, really, really bad.

The world of the movie is also just not interesting. It's so hard to tell what time period it's supposed to be set in, because you have clearly fantastical towns mixed with modern military and steampunk airships, alongside a magical floating castle and robots and whatever? It feels like Breath of the Wild minus any of the consistency of Zelda's world. Honestly just appalled at how fucking terrible this movie is made.

If you like Ghibli, watch this film and you'll probably like the art and music like I did. But if you just want a good anime movie, I would not recommend.