Every generation should go through at least one war. - Hitler
War is an eternal topic in the process of human civilization, and from the beginning of myths and stories, large and small scale battles have emerged. With the rolling of the wheel of history and the advancement of science and technology, the attributes of war are also constantly upgrading, from individuals to groups, from regions to countries, from bare hands to aircraft cannons.
These endless wars seem to be a natural order, and the countless beings who are trapped in them are also doomed, large areas of land are burned out, towns are reduced to ruins, and the smoke of death fills the air, covering the sky.
The impact of war is enormous, and the higher the demand for the destruction of the enemy, the higher the level of industrialization and the more developed science and technology. Born of this is the increasingly fanatical war machine.
The animation predecessor We are familiar with, Mr. Hayao Miyazaki, depicted countless cross-era super war machines in his early work "Castle in the Sky".
Released in 1992 in Chinese mainland, Castle in the Sky is a rough story of Laputa, a huge flying island that has been uninhabited for a long time, and contains great wealth. Therefore, both the military and the air thieves are looking for this legendary floating island.
Baloo, an orphaned miner boy, accidentally meets Hilda, the heir of Laputa, and the two are involved in the adventure.
The story is actually very simple, there is no controversy, but the humanistic factors and practical significance behind the story may not be understood by many people: loneliness, faith, war, freedom, land, desire, these grand philosophical elements are covered in it, constituting the complete "Castle in the Sky"
However, we are going to leave all these topics behind today to analyze the shocking war machines in this classic "Castle in the Sky" in the history of anime one by one.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > "Sky City" is a huge super weapon in itself</h1>
At the beginning of the film, the history of the Sky City is taken in the form of a background animation (the opening of the film that many people do not understand), accompanied by the goddess of the wind breathing in the sky, and the ancestors of the Laputa people used windmills to refine metal in a small furnace.
Their costumes also matched the color of Hilda, and the position they stood in corresponded to the later Hilda, so they should be the earliest Laputa people.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line">1</h1>
Hilda later said that the Kendya Valley was singing the song "Roots should be rooted in the soil and live with the wind". It was from the simple windmill that the technological transformation of mankind began.
The small windmills that followed became huge metal windmills. Humans began to dig deeper and deeper, and huge furnaces and projects rose from the ground. Dissatisfied with the status quo, human beings want to conquer the sky, large and small aircraft occupy the sky, and science and technology are constantly advancing and innovating.
Finally, the first Sky City composed of propellers and windmills appeared, and mankind completed the transformation from land to sky, and then more and more Sky Cities appeared, forming an ancient and prosperous sky era in history.
At the moment when everything reached its peak, lightning bolts fell from the sky and shot down all these air fortresses, and the human race had to return to life on the ground and develop deeper into the ground.
There is a detail here that corresponds to the lightning that fell from the sky in the opening animation, and near the end of the film, the villain Musca, who is also a descendant of Laputa, mentions that in the Old Testament of the Bible, The Lord fell sulfur and heavenly fire from the sky and destroyed the ancient cities of Sodom and Gothma.
The powerful lightning in the film is owned by Laputa, who uses the ultimate lightning in the flying stone weapon to shoot down all the cities in the air.
We can also see that when Muska showed the world the great power of the Laputa weapon, lightning struck the huge mushroom cloud that appeared on the surface of the sea, more like an atomic bomb explosion, and here it is also a metaphor for the two nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the side.
Miyazaki also used this ultimate weapon of Laputa to explain: it is not a god or a heavenly fire, only humans can slaughter humans.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line">2</h1>
Similar products can be found in the Valley of the Wind.
Unlike Castle in the Sky, the Giant God Soldier in the Valley of the Wind is more direct. It is an artificial creature with ultimate destructive power and high intelligence. After the decline of human civilization from its peak, the "fire of seven days" destroyed the old human world, and then lay down underground.
Recorded in Castle in the Sky
Like the setting in the comics, the Giant Soldier represents more destruction, disaster, and doom, and it has the power to take the place of God in controlling the fate of mankind. This image was used until 2012, when Hideaki Anno used CG technology to shoot a short film "Giant God Soldier Appears in Tokyo".
"The Giant God Soldier Appears in Tokyo"
Among them, the destructive power of the giant god soldiers is more comprehensively and truly restored, the small human beings have no ability to resist in front of the huge giant beasts, and the city of Tokyo, which symbolizes modern industrial civilization, is also swallowed up in the sea of fire under the laser.
In fact, whether it is the Giant God Soldier or Laputa, what they represent behind them is a machine that can destroy human civilization overnight, and it is made by human hands.
Miyazaki did not skimp on his own kung fu in this, portraying the appearance of the giant god soldier and Laputa in detail, and the ugliness and paleness of human nature were also revealed with the help of such a war machine.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > postmodern style aircraft</h1>
This refers not only to the Sky City of Laputa's ancestors, but more to the planes and airships.
Probably unnoticed, Miyazaki's family runs an aircraft factory for a military-industrial enterprise. As a result, even in the Great Depression after Japan's defeat, Miyazaki was able to maintain food and clothing, and he was very interested in airplanes and became a lifelong hobby, and the concept of flying was repeated in many of his later works.
1. In Castle in the Sky, the most eye-catching thing is undoubtedly the huge flying battleship under the fat general, which appears in a world-class image in the middle of the film, and in the dark night sky, the huge roar is accompanied by beams of light that break through the clouds, and the flying battleship slowly docks at the top of the fortress.
The army used to search for The Huge Flying Battleship of Laputa, a large weapon that General Muro requested from the Military Headquarters using military radio codes, and a tool used by Romuska and General Muro to search for Laputa.
The name comes from the Old Testament Philistine giant Goliath.
It has a total length of 312 m, a total width of 84 m, a maximum speed of 98 knots (about 181 km/ h), a cruising speed of 58 knots (about 107 km / h), a range of 16,000 km (when cruising without wind), and a crew of 360 people.
Zeppelin Airboat
The shape of this flying battleship may be somewhat familiar to everyone, but it was based on the German spaceship designer Ferdinand von Zeppelin, which was further developed in the early 20th century based on the airship designed by David Schuvaz, that is, the Zeppelin we have all seen.
In the game "Red Alert", there are also similar settings such as Kirov airboats.
2. In addition to the flying battleship, there is also the Tiger Moth on which the Dora clan rides.
There are a total of six propellers on the bird-like hull (1 at the end of the left and right wings and 4 below the center rear end of the hull), and the concatenated propellers on the wings can be adjusted horizontally and nearly vertically by manually.
The front end of the aircraft is the cockpit and air walkway, and the lower end of the ship outside the living room where Dora and her party are equipped is the storage garage for small aircraft drum wings. The second observation deck above can be detached into glider mode.
In-ship communication is mainly based on the use of microphones, but when using glider observation, the use of in-ship telephones is used instead.
Because the hull of the ship is not loaded with any anti-air weapons, it is mainly used to flee quickly when encountering the pursuit of the enemy.
3. The small aircraft drum wing aircraft that the male protagonist once sat on.
The appearance is a flying machine with insect-like flying wings, which uses four symmetrical thin film flying wings made of artificial tendons and meat as raw materials to carry out all-round aerial movements, and can perform various maneuvers such as rising and falling.
The lower part of the fuselage is equipped with two small jet engines that can be accelerated without any movement of the wings, and the smoke casting function can be used to interfere with the field of view, and can maintain a silent flight state for up to 6 minutes when using the jet engine.
Because the pilot is directly exposed to the fuselage during the flight, a belt buckle is provided at the console to avoid the pilot being blown off by strong winds during the flight.
In addition, we can also see the Transport Aircraft of the Dorumechia Army based on the German ME-323 transport aircraft and the Do217 bomber in "The Valley of the Wind".
Miyazaki has placed great hopes on these machines he wrote that can carry human dreams of flight, and the plane he imagines is not a weapon that brings war and killing to mankind, but a spaceship carrying dreams to soar freely in the sky, a soul boat that merges with nature, crosses the clouds, and overlooks the beautiful natural world.
But at the same time, because of the needs of the background of the story, they have mostly become destructive war machines, steel monsters born to destroy human beings.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > silent robot</h1>
There are two kinds of robots in Castle in the Sky, one is Laputa's gardener robot, covered with green moss, and the task is to prune and clean the lush plants in Laputa Castle.
The second is the battle robot, which can fire a powerful linear laser from the head, can destroy buildings several kilometers away in an instant, can spread their arms into wings, and then fly with the help of rockets in the chest cavity, their task is to protect Laputa and destroy all enemies.
Gardener robot
In the setting of the work, the robot is 3.44 meters tall and weighs 238 kilograms. The head is equipped with two beam cannons of different sizes. The material of the whole body is ceramic clay armor, which can resist the blows of general weapons such as pistols.
On both sides of its thorax are equipped with jet propulsion devices, and the tip extension of the posterior end of both arms can extend a membrane similar to artificial tendons to serve as wings when flying, and transform the body into a round ball-like storage standby form.
In addition to the robots for combat purposes, Lapudari also has robots made for different tasks such as caretakers and gardeners, and combat and non-combat robots will have different appearances in terms of arm appearance.
Originally a robot character in the script of Hayao Miyazaki's final anime script for the second episode of the 1980 TV edition of Lupin III, he was re-adopted in Castle in the Sky because of Miyazaki's love.
Battle robots
If the gardener robot represents peace, protection, and serenity, then the battle robot is a symbol of Laputa's evil side. We can see that the huge flying battleship is vulnerable to the siege of countless robots, and soon turns into a fireball and falls into the sea.
The story of the robot is not mentioned in detail in the background of "Castle in the Sky", but in the official data, it is not difficult to find that the robot here has a high similarity with the giant god soldier in "Valley of the Wind".
From the appearance point of view, their heads are all inverted triangle shapes, the arms are long enough to drag to the ground, and from the weapon point of view, they can fire an incomparably powerful laser from the face.
Robots, the existence of such humanoid intelligent beings, are themselves at the service of human needs and desires. But because it is able to move autonomously. Therefore, unlike those iron sheets without emotion, the robots in "Castle in the Sky" are more carrying Miyazaki's beautiful yearning for the lack of human beings.
Whether it's faithfully protecting Hilda, removing a bird's nest held down by a kite, or everything about Laputa, the quiet guardian, robots are unique. Even if it had no thoughts, he knew better than humans the meaning of loyalty, protection, and peace.
< h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > fanatical weapon is an infinite reflection on war and human nature</h1>
Although we see countless huge and absurd images of war machines in Miyazaki's works, the emotions behind this are more of an indictment of war and a critique of human nature.
After Hilda finishes reciting the Destruction Spell, Laputa in Castle in the Sky disintegrates in the air, while the remaining Tree of Life carries the robot and continues to fly into space, where the huge Tree of Life represents the beauty, purity, sacredness and inviolability of human nature.
Similarly, in Miyazaki's pen, the army and the government seem to be an extremely ugly object, and the generals in Castle in the Sky, Muska's gang are portrayed as extremely obscene, evil and greedy and blind, they are the embodiment of militarism, the spokesmen of war.
Overall, Miyazaki's animation carries too much grand philosophical language and warnings to humans.
"Castle in the Sky" tells us that no matter how advanced the technology and how powerful the weapon, as long as it leaves the ground, it cannot survive, and it must be rooted in the land, breathe with the wind, spend the winter with the seeds, and accompany the birds to sing the praises of spring.
"Valley of the Wind" tells us that the existential crises of modern people, such as environmental degradation, resource depletion, and human indifference, are all caused by human beings themselves, and only through human self-redemption can these disasters be completely resolved.
"Princess Mononoke" tells us that in the struggle between man and nature for thousands of years, human beings have never been the winners, nature does not need to be saved, only human beings themselves need to be saved.
Baloo's dove of peace
In this case, there are many more. In his works, he has always guided these ideas, and through the portrayal of these machine elements, the world understands the horror of war and the preciousness of human nature.
There is never a victor in war, only death and destruction, as well as the pain of losing loved ones.