Castle in the Sky

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International

Details

Other titles

Laputa: The Castle in the Sky (International)

Channels

Cartoon Network (Toonami block)
TCM
Film4

Services

Max
Netflix

Release

1999 (unreleased)
February 2, 2000 (New York International Children's Film Festival)
April 15, 2003 (DVD and video)

Castle in the Sky (also known as Laputa: The Castle in the Sky internationally) is one of two English dubs of 天空の城ラピュタ. Recorded in 1998, it was planned for release on video by Disney in 1999, but the release was canceled after Princess Mononoke did not fare as well in the US as Japan, and so it's release date was pushed back; on occasion, the completed dub was screened at select children's festivals.

The film was finally released on DVD and video in the US on August 16, 2003 alongside a re-release of Kiki's Delivery Service and Spirited Away.

Although the plot and much of the script was left intact, Disney's English dub of Castle in the Sky contains some changes, including added background chatter and one-liners where dialogue was not originally present, and most notably an extended and partly re-orchestrated score by original composer Joe Hisaishi to fill in moments of silence. According to Steve Alpert's memoir Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man: 15 Years at Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki himself gave the go ahead for and approved of Hisaishi's reworking, but post-2010 releases of the film undo a large amount of these changes, including the music score and added dialogue. Recently, however, the film has been re-released by GKids with two different mixes of the Disney dub: one with the original score, and one with the revised score.

Cast[]

Character		Actor
	Sheeta	Anna Paquin
	Pazu	James Van Der Beek
	Dola	Cloris Leachman
	Colonel Muska	Mark Hamill
	General Shogun Muoro	Jim Cummings
	Uncle Pom	Richard Dysart
	Charles	Michael McShane
	Louis	Mandy Patinkin
	Henri	Andy Dick
	Mr. Duffi	John Hostetter
	Okami Duffi	Tress MacNeille
	Train Operator	Matthew Kermit Miller
	Pa Dola	Eddie Frierson
	Madge	Debi Derryberry
Additional voices		Corey Burton
John DeMita
John DiMaggio
Eddie Frierson
Susan Hickman
Tress MacNeille
Scott Menville
Matthew Kermit Miller
Andrew Philpot
Michael Sorich

Technical staff
Dubbing director Voice Casting		Jack Fletcher
ADR Voice Casting		David H. Kramer
Adaptation		Jack Fletcher
John Semper

Dubbing credits[]

Theaters/Digital/DVD/Blu-ray[]

Netflix[]

Trivia[]

Most releases in America drop "Laputa" from the title. Although meaningless in Japanese, the name "Laputa" comes from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. English language dubs of Laputa have been released under three different titles by three separate distributors, which is largely because it is identical to the Spanish rude term "la puta" (lit. "the whore").
Some changes in this dub include;
- Pazu and Sheeta are made to sound several years older, placing them in their mid-teens rather than their pre-teens.
- Several modifications were made to the Dola gang's dialogue regarding Sheeta, including a declaration of love by one of the pirates. In the original Japanese version, the dialogue presented Sheeta as a potential mother figure to the pirates, rather than a potential romantic interest.
- References to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels were removed, the latter of which had also been removed from the original Magnum dub.
Both of Magnum and Disney’s dubs feature identical dialogue in certain scenes, most notably The General’s congratulatory remarks towards Muska in the finale and Charles’ line “All good pirates listen to their mom!”. Possibly due to Disney using the original dub’s script as a basis for their dub script, as a similar situation occurred with Kiki's Delivery Service, though this has never been confirmed.
Eddie Frierson is the lone voice actor to be in both dubs.