Rating: 
Summary: A classic ruined
Review: This movie was released in Japan some 17 years ago, and I saw it in Japanese. You forget that you are watching an animated film.
So, the disappointment on hearing the new English version + the new music score is what you can imagine as lots of other people who wrote reviews on this DVD. But for your information, the new score is still by the great Joe Hisaishi, who did the original score and almost all other Miyazaki movies. I think Disney requested him that he redo the score upon U.S. release. There is a sound track CD that can be imported from Japan of this new score. This is acctually great. It's just that it doesn't go with the movie. The english version has music sounding almost through out even where in Japanese version intentionally made silence ( for example: where the kite that Pazu and sheet is on gets sucked into a thunderstorm and Pazu sees an illusion of his father), and it completely ruins the entire movie. I don't even wanna get into how bad a job the actors did on voice over. Watch this moive in Japanese with English subtitle, and get the sound track seperately.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Job, Miyazaki-sensei
Review: This movie was excellent. If you want something to show to your kids but you also want something to enjoy yourself, this movie would be a good pick. The artwork and storyline is beautiful. The dubbing is great. The subbing could have been better...but then, it could have been worse. Disney did a good job. I'm impressed with the work and I love the movie. It is a must buy.
Rating: 
Summary: Miyazaki, your'e the best.
Review: Castle in the sky is pretty much anything one would expect from a Miyazaki film. A great story and plot that's easy to understand, characters with unique personalities, and of course, major replay value. It wouldn't be Miyazaki without any of these features.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging
Review: Hayao Miyazaki's CASTLE IN THE SKY was apparently his third
full-length feature and the item that put him on the map, and
it's easy to see why.The story takes place in what appears to be the early 20th
century in an alternate universe, where the skies are full of
giant airships, ranging from luxury liners to flying
battleships. In the beginning of the film, a mysterious girl,
whose name is later revealed as "Sheeta", falls from the
sky from an airship, only to be rescued by the strange jewel
she wears around her neck. She floats down, unconscious, into
the arms of a lad named Pazu who works at a mine. From this start the two end up in a search for the long-lost
flying city of Laputa, pursued by an evil government agent
but aided by a gang of sky pirates who aren't as unpleasant
as they first seem, leading up to an apocalytic finale.
Along the way the Sheeta and Pazu have many adventures and
encounter many marvelous machines and places. While I have little familiarity with the Belgian cartoonist
Herve and his famous TINTIN series, from what little I saw
of it when I was a youngster it seems that Miyazaki took
Herve as a strong influence. In any case, CASTLE IN THE
SKY shows a strong European flavor in its design, and also
has a certain old-fashioned storyline for kids, with Sheeta
and Pazu jumping from one peril to the next. The story line, if not generally all that plausible, lends a
great deal of charm to this story, and Miyazaki's emphasis
on clever machines and inventions makes the whole mix very
engaging. (The opening credits are a particular exercise in
invention.) The artwork is very good and impressive, though
it might be argued that by modern standards it fails to
quite reach consistent perfection -- then again, it is
probably not fair to compare it in this regard to later works
like Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY. In any case, the end result is a fine work of craftsmanship,
though it is relatively lacking in the gentle parables that
characterize Miyazaki's more modern works. The only warning I can give, at the risk of sounding politically
correct, is that the end is violent by modern standards, with
the bad guys biting the dust in big numbers. This sort of
thing was admittedly more common in the past, but I have to
agree that it was good for it to go out of style -- this is
a gentle movie targeted for kids (that can be thoroughly
enjoyed by adults) where the violence is jarring. As the
story is a charming fantasy, there is no particular use or
purpose for brutal realism. That being said, I have to go back to the bottom line: this
is an excellent movie and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Power of Love
Review: What a wonderful movie. It has everything one could ask for in an action-adventure; legendary lands, pirates, a beautiful and mysterious heroine, gunfights, humor, honor, and human spirit. To those who worry about the technical aspects of the medium itself, let it go and let the flow of this film take you along. Thank God there are Hayao Miyazaki films like these to offset the unending flow of crudeness that is targeted at our children from every corner of their entertainment world. My two modern and jaded children still love his movies, because they are actually given a chance to draw their own conclusions about the themes and the characters' motivations, and because the power of Love always prevails.
Rating:
Summary: I Like it!
Review: Ok, so I heard of this movie when I was about...7 on a trailer on the movie 'Kiki's deleviery service" ( Great movie, I reccomend). I found this in the video section of Target for A suprising $14.00! anyways, I was left stunned when I saw it. It is a wonderful movie with even better animation. Good:
(1: Manga drawings (2:In the beginning credits, I like the animation there too (3:Overall story in general (4:Original story line (5:It's somthing I never would have thought of myself! Bad: (1:SHEETA'S GOD-AWFUL VOICE!!! You can hear Anna Paquin's accent in her voice. I don't think Japenese people are supposed to sound like southerners or what not..... (2:One word: GUNS! GUNS,GUNS,GUNS!!! O_O (3: the part where Uncle Pom gets all sad after seeing Sheeta's necklace. How can a rock get'Restless'?!?!!?! <_< Over all, I give it 4 and alot more than just 1/2.
Rating:
Summary: Disney spiraling out of the sky in a flaming airship
Review: I got the priviledge of viewing this Anime several years ago through a poor quality fansub that I received from a friend. I must say that this particular movie was the one that left the most indelible impression on my mind as to how Japanese animation is a completely different world than American. The story, visuals and music were all absolutely stunning when I saw this the first and subsequent times. My CD-R containing the fansub is quite beat up due to the repeated viewings, since this is my all time favorite animated movie) It was no surprise that browsing through the DVDs at a chain wholesaler, my eyes grew as big as saucers, my jaw dropped and drool began to appear at the corners of my mouth as this title caught my eye and BOOM, I instantly had to snap this one up above all the others (even Miyazaki's Spirited Away or Kiki's Delivery Service). As a huge fan of Miyazaki I was tempted to speed on the way home since I was as eager as a little child to pop this baby in the XBOX. I was absolutely in love with the remastered digital picture. The experience of hearing it in 5.1 surround promised to awe and inspire in a whole new way. Yet something was different about the English track. I couldn't quite pin it down. Then Pazu opened his mouth....OUCH! I couldn't believe the assault on my ears! Disney, couldn't you have picked a younger and better voice actor? Then I realized what was bugging me about the movie...THE MUSIC! They changed it! I flipped forward a few chapters to the part of the movie right where Pazu and Sheeta have crash landed on Laputa which IMHO has the best theme of the movie, and discovered that it was much slower and way too orchestrated for that entire sequence. Joe Hisaishi is one of the premiere and most respected and recognizable composers (along with Yoko Kanno in my book) in Japan, yet what on Earth happened with the English track? I read in an earlier review that Disney had ordered the entire English track rescored. WHY!?!? I can only imagine in my mind the debate by Eisner and ilk before releasing on us poor Americans: "What is with all this silence and blank space in the soundtrack? Music, we must saturate it with MUSIC! MORE MUSIC! I said MORE!! MORE MUSIC!!!!!" (this would earn the DVD only 3 stars) Disney, when will you ever learn not to tamper with a non-Disney work in an attempt to make it inferior to your own (inferior) movies? After about 10 minutes of frantically scanning the different chapters, I was disgusted enough to turn it off and go cry. It was then I found the most redeeming quality of this DVD. They included the ORIGINAL Japanese track with Hisaishi's ORIGINAL score. HOORAY! Who cares if it is not in the full 5.1 splendor, the movie would just not be the same without the original music atmosphere. As long as Disney continues to have the guts to swallow their pride and release the rest of Miyazaki's works with the ORIGINAL Japanese soundtrack, I will purchase every single one of them. 5 stars go to this movie, in spite of the English track's flaws.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: About 13 years ago I was amazed by my first Miyazaki film, which was Warriors of the Wind. A very edited version of one of his films. None the less, the movie stuck with me. So as soon as I saw that Disney was releasing more of his works, I had to see them. I started out with Spirited Away and I was amazed! So I went out and bought Castles in the Sky, which is one of Miyazaki's earlier films. I was happy with the movie but it didn't hold a candle to the other two I've seen. Castle in the Sky started off really slowly, it tells the story of Sheeta a long forgotten princess, and Pazu her hero. Sheeta has a strange necklace that the army and a band of pirates wants. Yet she has no idea as to why. Pazu helps Sheeta to escape the army and convinces her to join forces with the suprizingly kind pirates to look for her long lost homeland of Laputa a floating castle. I heard that this story was supposedly similar to Gulliver's Travel's, but I really could not see any resemblance between the two. But overall the story and animation made the movie worth watching. Just do not watch it thinking it is going to be on the same level as Miyazaki's other films.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, but . . .
Review: . . . childish. Compared to his two most recent films, the story line here is quite a bit less complex, and didn't really interest me. The animation is impressive as usual though, so it's worth a watch before you give it away to someone with kids. There is a fair amount of violence in this one though, including a few scenes involving deaths, so I'm not sure who the intended audience was.
Rating:
Summary: Genuine Anime Fans BEWARE
Review: First, I must say that I consider Tenkuu no Shiro Laupta one of the greatest anime features of all time and a long-time personal favorite of mine. However, Walt Disney has done an absolutely miserable job releasing it domestically, not that I expected much better from them. The timing for the subtitles was consistently off by a few seconds and entire portions of dialogue often remain untranslated. The english subtitle script is a very poor translation of the original japanese, full of grevious syntactical errors. This subtitle quality would be unacceptable for a bootleg or a fansub, much less from a major production company. In addition to all this, the digital transfer is terrible, the video appears choppy compared to even a VHS copy. I write this to dissuade people already familiar with Laputa from wasting their money on a third rate product. Laputa is still a phenomenal film and I highly recommend it, but only if you are able to overlook the domestic releases MAJOR production shortcomings.
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