Trivia for
Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (1986)

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• The name "Laputa" was taken from the flying city in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." It also means "the whore" in Spanish, hence the name change to simply "Castle in the Sky" for the Disney release.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Hayao Miyazaki] [flying] As the title suggests, the castle of Laputa flies. Numerous flying contraptions feature in the movie.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Hayao Miyazaki] [gorging on food] Dora eats greedily when she confronts Pazu at his house.
  
  

• Director Trademark: [Hayao Miyazaki] [Pigs] A pig is seen being shooed out of a little girl's house.
  
  
• Fox-squirrels, animals from Miyazaki's previous work, Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984), make a brief appearance in the city of Laputa.
  
  
• Hayao Miyazaki had said in interviews that he was ignorant that the word "Laputa" means "the whore" in Spanish. If he was aware of the word's meaning, he would had not used it in the first place.
  
  
• Dubbed in 1999, Laputa did not receive a home video release until four years later when Spirited Away won an Academy Award for Best Animated Film. During that time, it would be shown at the occasional film festival, and sell out with little word-of-mouth. Despite its limited success, Disney's official explanation for the delay was that Studio Ghibli wanted to avoid reverse-importation of the film in Japan and lose R2 sales. However, by 2003, Laputa had long made its money back in dvd sales in Japan, fueling fire to the long-held fan speculation that the company purchased the Ghibli library for the purpose of sabotaging its potential success in the U.S.
  
  
• 69,262 traditional "cels" were used for this film.
  
  
• 381 colors were used in this movie as well.
  
  
• The weaponry and mechanical settings in Laputa is a mixture of British and German designs. Miyazaki is a fan of German weaponry (he has manga works like The Return of Hans and Otto Carius - both about WWII German tank crews), so soldier's uniform, medals, and grenades (Stielhandgranate, the famous "potato masher" in WWII) are modeled after German design, not to mention the gigantic battle zeppelin "Goliath." However, since the town of Slag Ravine was modeled after a mining town in Wales, British-styled civilian clothing and British weapons such as Lee-Enfield SMLE Mk. III rifle (soldiers) and Webley top-break revolver (Muska and his agents) appeared frequently in the film.
  
  
• The robots in the film are inspired by the ones featured in the Fleischer version of Superman.
  
  
• The correct romanization of Sheeta's name would have been "Shita", but the producers of the Disney English dub changed the spelling for obvious reasons.
  
  

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