Utopian views in literature and cinema: Laputa as depicted in Jonathan Swift and Hayao Miyazaki

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Cláudia
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/24668
• topic: Utopia; Dystopia; Laputa; Jonathan Swift; Hayao Miyazaki

The Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for his ability to build up imaginary worlds bound to make us fly by the seat of our pants, often based on existing books. These are the cases of “Howl’s moving castle” (1986) by Diana Wynne Jones and “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726) by Jonathan Swift: the former gave rise to the film bearing the same name dated from 2004 and the latter is entitled “Laputa: Castle in the sky” from 1986. Our attention will be focused on Laputa, the flying island that was first devised by Swift in the 18th century and an icon in utopian studies. Following Plato and his republic of philosophers, as well as Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516), the search for the ‘no place’ or ‘paradise on earth’, as some authors uphold, is the underlying background for Swift’s book, whose main character encounters several fictional societies in the course of his travels. Swift set a society of scientists and social planners in Laputa, who end up disregarding the needs of those who lived underneath, on firm land, and setting out the model for dystopia, i.e. the ‘bad place’. Our aim is to compare Laputa as it was depicted by Swift (literature) and Miyazaki (cinema), bearing in mind this dialectic interaction between utopia and dystopia, so as to attempt to reach tentative conclusions.