The architecture in the film ranges from Medieval European to early 20th Century British (Miyazaki was heavily influenced by a 1984 trip he made to Wales during the miners' strike), with technology that ranges from early steam to shiny futurism. The film - for those of you keeping track at home, Miyzaki's third feature - is set in an undefined era on what seems, from scattered references, to be our own Earth, but not an Earth from any particular time or place. And I suppose that if I was as fucking anal as the Disney executives, I'd be worried about that too, although it does make for a fun game while you're watching the film, to re-imagine scenes playing out with dialogue like, "That crystal must have been made by the Thewhoreans". The first Studio Ghibli feature released under that company's banner (before historical revisionism led the studio to claim Nausicaä as its debut work) was unsurprisingly written and directed by Miyazaki himself, Laputa: Castle in the Sky - more commonly known simply as Castle in the Sky, given an unusually absurd touch of bowdlerisation on the part of the Walt Disney Company, Studio Ghibli's official distributor in most of the English-speaking world they were concerned because " la puta" is Spanish for "the whore". Quality would be the watchword, not quantity. And if their focus on craft and process meant that Ghibli wouldn't be able to keep up with the output of their competitors, that was no matter. Ghibli would make its name with very high-class, artistically intensive features meant for the broadest audience possible: kid-friendly, but smart enough for adults, and beautiful enough for everyone. Miyazaki and Suzuki, along with Miyazaki's old collaborator, director Takahata Isao, were in agreement on few key points: Studio Ghibli would not be in the business of making quick and dirty television productions nor the hyper-violent and hyper-sexual films that would end up proving anime's first major "in" with Western audiences.
24 years and 16 films later, Studio Ghibli (its name referring to a type of wind blowing over the Sahara) has firmly entrenched itself as one of the premiere movie studios - not just animation companies - in world cinema, and Miyazaki and Suzuki's goal has been met with greater success than those men could have ever imagined.īut we're supposed to be in 1985 still. Following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, one of that film's producers, Suzuki Toshio, teamed up with Miyazaki Hayao to create a new animation studio, one that would release films boasting the opulence and epic scope of Nausicaä on a more or less regular basis.