I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986) the other day, and was struck by how much the 2003 anime series Last Exile borrowed from it. There’s a whole post on that topic, and fortunately Tasha Robinson already wrote it:
The series [Last Exile] and his movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky share many things, from the sweet-but-scrappy kid stars to the lost-girl-with-a-valuable-secret macguffin. But above all, both center on an almost fetishistic, nuts-and-bolts love of flight and flying machines. Last Exile reads very much like a modern-day update of Castle-the characters and institutions map over from one to the other on an almost one-to-one basis. (Claus for Pazu, Alvin and Lavie both representing Sheeta at different stages, the mysterious and dangerous ‘Grand Stream’ for Laputa itself, Sophia and the Silvana’s crew for Dora and her pirates, the Guild for the government, and so forth.) But where Castle is a kid-friendly epic adventure, Exile has a distinctly dark edge-particularly in its mocking depiction of war as a process in which the upper echelons prosper by casually squandering their underlings’ lives.
Meanwhile, Sleep is for the Weak has a useful (except for missing that whole Miyazaki angle) review of Last Exile.
