181. Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (Laputa: Castle in the Sky) - Ani-May 2020 (#---)

Summary: Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and with special guests Graham Day and Bríd Martin, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them. This year, we are proud to continue the tradition of Anime May, a fortnight looking at two of the animated Japanese films on the list. This year, we watched a double feature of Hayao Miyazaki's Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta and Hauru no ugoku shiro. We'll also be covering a bonus on a recent entry on the list, Naoko Yamada's Koe no katachi. This week, the first part of the double bill, Miyazaki's Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta, the first official Studio Ghibli film. Perhaps overshadowed by the movies either side of it - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind preceding it and My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies following it - Castle in the Sky is in some ways an archetypal Hayao Miyazaki film. What begins as a chance encounter between a lonely boy and a girl who falls to Earth evolves into a fable about the perils of militarism and the importance of environmentalism. At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.