Laputa: Castle in the Sky/Headscratchers


 * Why did Disney change the name of the MacGuffin mineral from "Volucite" to "Aetherium" when dubbing the movie? I can sort of understand taking "Laputa" out of the title (la puta being a very vulgar Spanish insult), but that just baffles me.
 * I think that change was just made for the same reason that the Deer God in "Princess Mononoke" was changed to Forest Spirit. While some have argued that this change is just a case of rewriting, I think the term "aetherium" works in favor of the crystal, because I feel that it's true in spirit to the original and it works well. Purists may say otherwise, but "Nausicaa" also had its "Sea of Decay" changed to "Toxic Jungle" for similar reasons, too.
 * And the reasons were...?
 * Well think about if Volucite may have a word that means something else in Japanese. Most purists don't know that some things are changed due to the sole fact that a word won't mean anything. I remember someone was saying the dub was terrible due to the fact that they called the storm around Laputa a "Dragon's nest" in the original. Kind of odd considering that when you say "Dragon's nest" in most of the world people start looking for a dragon...
 * There actually WERE thunder dragons in that hurricane.
 * A pretty silly reason to dismiss the dub if you ask me.
 * Bonus points because Miyazaki actually approved the dub if I recall.
 * He did.
 * I understand why this is in the film, different culture, innocence, yadda yadda yadda. But it Just Bugs Me that the pirates seem to love the girl a little too much. I've never been able to thoroughly enjoy the film solely for this reason - which makes me feel sad.
 * If it makes you feel any better, I don't think they were perving on her; she was just the first female they'd seen in a while who wasn't Mom.
 * Cheer up-even if they love her a little too much, at least they're being gentlemanly towards her-after all, their most formative feminine influence has been their mother-imagine how much they must respect women!
 * At the end of the movie the Castle keeps floating up and up and up. The only place it can head to is space! All the animals will slowly die as the oxygen gets thinner. When the castle gets up into space there will be no air for that giant tree to use. All of the plant life on the castle will die. The entire castle will become a comet roaming around the universe with a lone working robot.
 * Maybe it's still heavy enough to stay grounded to Earth's gravity, but just rising higher so that human hands can no longer reach it?
 * "Right around the time we were trying to come up with a good ending, and we were afraid that if Laputa flew into the sky that children watching the film would be afraid that the little animals like foxes and squirrels would all die. So that settled how we decided to end the story the way we did. We told ourselves it was okay because the story is set in an age before people went into space in the Apollo program, so nobody really knew what the view would be like from what is in effect an artificial satellite." -Word of God
 * That robot won't work very well in outer space, will it? Wouldn't the energy required to move be gone in close-to-0K conditions? I ask because I genuinely don't know.
 * I can't speak for Laputan technology, but even if they escape Earth's orbit, the gardens are unlikely to drift very far from the sun. See Space Is Cold.
 * I just made my own fanon theory that the Aetherium / tree created Some Kind of Force Field to keep the atmosphere in. True or not, I can imagine it's a 100% happy ending. Because honestly, the though of everything on the floating castle flash freezing and then incinerating over and over and over as it follows the Earth's rotation is a little too dark for the movie's tone.
 * Maybe it's just buoyant, but not antigrav-y. Eventually, it would just kind of find a new floaty-spot, then stop ascending.
 * As the closing credits are shown, the garden is shown floating in the air at what seems to be a fairly steady altitude, and it still looks happy and healthy. I think we can happily suspend our disbelief and assume, based on this, that it rose higher, but not far enough to end up in the deadly void of outer space.
 * After Sheeta and Pazu destroyed Laputa, all the blocks fell into the sea. Good, right, it didn't fall on a town, no one was hurt...yeah, no. The next scene clearly shows an idyllic seaside town, not that far away from where all that stuff fell in to the sea. All that stuff falling in to the sea would create an enormous tidal wave, which can easily turn into a tsunami, which would likely crash straight in to that idyllic seaside town, where (presumably) Dola and the boys and surely a whole bunch of innocent civilians are. Really? Couldn't drop it on some uninhabited part of the world, where it WON'T create a tidal wave of mass destruction?
 * There would probably be no problem. A city falling into the ocean would cause waves, but their size depends on the height the impactors fell from and how large the pieces are, both size and weight. Compare throwing two boulders into a pool, one whole and the other crushed into gravel-they cause very different wave patterns, and the patterns created by the gravel will vary greatly depending on how it's dropped in. Only part of Laputa dropped into the ocean, and most of that was dispersed debris that individually couldn't put up much in the way of waves, and since there are so many impacts, the waves they create would interact with each other chaotically, canceling out in some ways and reinforcing in others, but very unlikely to build up into a damaging tsunami of some kind. If the whole city has fallen, focusing all its energy into the ocean in one burst, then there might be a problem, but even then the energy is far, far less than that unleashed by your typical tsunami-generating earthquake. They have to move entire continents, after all. If you're comparing Laputa to a meteor impact, your typical meteor is moving at a minimum of 11 kilometers per second, so Laputa would have to be falling from an enormous height to achieve comparable results-the same height meteors start from, in fact.
 * Okay, the dub. I can tolerate a lot of the changes, specially since they had the decency to fill the Lull Destruction with a good score and some funny quips. However, Sheeta's line during the final showdown is just too much. How the HELL can she say "the world cannot live without love" when the relevant theme is clearly earth/soil/nature? It doesn't even fit with the poem she recites just before that (which is unchanged), let alone with the rest of the movie. I thought that was completely nonsensical when I watched it for the first time, and then when I learned that the original line was something like "you cannot live, parted from the earth" or "you can't live separated from the ground", it made complete sense.
 * That's probably my only minor quibble of the dub as well; overall I love it to pieces, but I'm a bit iffy about that line change. (I'm also 50-50 about the sound design; I like most of the new sound effects, but others not that much.) That said, it's not like either drawback ruins the movie or anything.
 * It's nice that you agree, but please do not remove my profanity in the future.
 * Sheeta told Musca that "a king without compassion does not deserve to rule" and switching the line probably made more sense that way. Plus, we could always use another love-related Aesop...
 * A person cannot live without love, and a society cannot live without love for the Earth it inhabits. Laputa does work as a parcel of floating nature - the plants and animals are thriving - but it cannot work as a loveless militaristic city. I think it works.
 * Basically, everything Pazu does in Laputa after the army comes. He clings to surfaces that should have no handholds whatsoever and makes a dozen narrow, unlikely escapes. The worst is when he climbs up the chute the robots dropped out of even though it's completely slippery, apparently through sheer force of will. It always struck me as the cheesiest part of the movie. (Oh yeah, and he just barely escapes getting shot through the head.)
 * Indeed, it did beggar belief at several points, especially when he survived the grenade hit. He's been shown to be physically tough, but not particularly agile or fast. We'll just call it the sheer force of love and leave it at that.
 * Your last one can probably be explained by the fact that Pazu's head is so hard you could use it as a cannonball. With a bit of ISMA on the side.
 * Why is the forbidden spell of destruction less complicated than the one for protection? You would think that destroying the palace would require more chances to think "are you SURE you want to do this?" while protection wouldn't.
 * Maybe if one is desperate enough to even consider the destructionn spell, you've either though it through already or don't have time to.
 * In a way, it actually kinda makes sense. After all, it is almost always easier to destroy something, than to protect or make something.