Porco Rosso and Laputa: Miyazaki's Love Letters to Aviation

Porco Rosso and Laputa: Miyazaki's Two Aviation Films

Miyazaki's relationship with flight is not a theme or a motif. It's closer to a conviction - a belief, sustained across his entire body of work, that the act of flying carries moral and emotional weight that ground-level storytelling cannot access. Most of his films contain flight sequences. Two of them are built around aviation as their central subject: Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) and Porco Rosso (1992). They're very different films - one is adventure, one is elegy - but both require understanding Miyazaki's aviation obsession to read correctly.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Ghibli's first feature follows Sheeta, a girl who possesses the legendary Laputa crystal, and Pazu, a young miner, as they flee sky pirates and the sinister government agent Muska in search of the legendary floating city. The film draws on Jules Verne, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (from which the island's name comes directly), and the Welsh mining communities Miyazaki had studied through photographs and research visits.

Laputa is the most purely pleasurable of all Ghibli films. Its plot moves constantly; its action sequences are kinetic and witty; its villain is genuinely threatening. But underneath the adventure structure is a melancholy argument about the cost of power and the price of forgetting where you came from. The flying city is beautiful and dead. Its guardian robots tend the garden and protect Sheeta with fierce loyalty, but the civilization that built them is gone.

The destruction spell

The climactic sequence in which Sheeta and Pazu speak the destruction spell together - destroying Laputa to stop Muska using its weapons - is one of animation's most devastating moments. They are choosing the death of something extraordinary and irreplaceable to prevent something worse. Miyazaki presents this as the only correct choice, and he gives it the weight it deserves.

Our Ghibli gifts collection includes Laputa merchandise including the Miniatuart paper castle kit and Takara Tomy Tiger Moth diecast model.

Porco Rosso

Set above the Adriatic in the early 1930s, Porco Rosso is the film Miyazaki has described as being "for middle-aged men" - by which he means people who understand that something they loved is already gone and are still trying to figure out what to do with that knowledge. Its hero is Marco Pagot, a former WWI ace who has been cursed (or has cursed himself) to look like a pig, and who works as a bounty hunter against sky pirates while resisting pressure to return to military service under Italy's rising fascist government.

The film is about the interwar period's particular quality of suspended dread - the gap between one catastrophe and the next, filled with people trying to live well in a world they know is about to be destroyed again. Porco's refusal to fight for either the fascists or their opponents is not cowardice. It's the position of someone who has seen enough of what nationalism does and is unwilling to provide it with more material.

The planes in the film are historically grounded in the Italian Schneider Trophy racing seaplanes of the 1920s - see our article on the planes of Porco Rosso for more detail on the aviation history. Porco merchandise - including the S.21 seaplane diecast model - is available in our Ghibli gifts range.

What these two films share

Despite their tonal differences - Laputa adventurous and kinetic, Porco Rosso melancholy and reflective - both films argue that flight represents a kind of freedom that is always fragile and always worth protecting. And both, in their different ways, are about what we owe to the things we've destroyed through carelessness or ambition. Our guide to Ghibli model kits covers the aircraft and vehicle kits available across both films.