The Hayao Miyazaki Film Too Risky to Keep Its Own Title

If you have ever wondered which Miyazaki movie caused a title panic and a full-on localization makeover, it is Castle in the Sky. The trip from Japan to the English-speaking world was not graceful: titles got tweaked, characters sounded older, the score ballooned, jokes vanished, and quiet scenes were treated like a problem to be solved. It is a fascinating mess, and the movie is still a classic.

The title that tripped a wire

In Japan, Miyazaki named the floating city Laputa, pulling straight from Gulliver's Travels. Literary, clean, no issue. Then you hit Spanish: 'la puta' means 'the whore.' Not great for a family movie. Different territories scrambled:

• UK and Australia kept 'Laputa: Castle in the Sky'
• The U.S. went with the safer 'Castle in the Sky'
• The Spanish dub even renamed the city itself to 'Lapuntu' to dodge the accidental profanity
• Late 1980s: an early English dub made for Japan Airlines flights slipped into U.S. circulation via Streamline Pictures; even founder Carl Macek later admitted it was not exactly their finest hour
• 1998: Disney recorded a new, higher-budget English dub
• Release got delayed until 2003 after Princess Mononoke underperformed in U.S. theaters, so Castle in the Sky ended up with two entirely different English casts out in the world
• The original Japanese score runs about 39 minutes; for the English re-release, Joe Hisaishi came back and expanded it to roughly 90 minutes with a sweeping orchestral redo

Two English dubs, two personalities

That first late-80s English track was basically a stopgap for airline use that leaked into home video life. It was enough to get the movie seen, but it did not have the craft you want from a flagship Ghibli title.

Disney's 1998 recording (finally released in 2003) is the polished one most people know in English. It is also where a lot of the big changes land.

The music got super-sized

Miyazaki's original cut leaves space to breathe, with about 39 minutes of score. The Disney version brings Hisaishi back to layer in a 90-minute orchestral blanket that rarely lets up. Some fans love the bigger, grander feel; others miss the quiet and the negative space the original uses so well. Either way, it is one of the most dramatic musical overhauls in Ghibli history.

Ages, dynamics, and tone quietly shifted

In Japanese, Sheeta and Pazu are preteens. The English dub casts them to sound more like older teens, a move aimed at U.S. sensibilities. That single choice ripples elsewhere: the goofy, harmless crushes some of the sky pirates have on Sheeta in the Japanese version suddenly read weird in English, so Disney rewrote the dynamic. Instead of being the target of dorky affection, Sheeta plays more as the warm, responsible center of the group. A few jokes got trimmed, and the heavier score smooths over moments of silence the original lets linger.

The literary references were scrubbed

Miyazaki packed this story with nods to Jonathan Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson, plus references to the Bible and Hindu texts. Most of that gets dialed way down or removed in the English dub, likely because distributors did not want real-world literature popping up in a fantasy world and confusing younger viewers.

What you get now

The good news: modern releases keep the history intact. DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming versions include both approaches, effectively turning Castle in the Sky into a time capsule of how localization used to be done and how Ghibli fought its way to global comfort-film status.

If you want to revisit it, Castle in the Sky is currently streaming on Max.