Laputa: The Castle in the Sky

Lots of people argue over which Miyazaki movie is the greatest. For me it's a tie between this, "Kiki", "Totoro", "Mononoke," and "Whisper". But if you were to hold a gun to my head, I'd choose this as the one with the most rewatch appeal. Although it's more "archetypal" than most Miyazaki features, "Castle in the Sky" has all the hallmarks of the director's classics: breathtaking animation, check. Loveable characters, check. Fantastic music, check. Another great dub from the folks at Disney, check. It's also one of the few works of his to have a totally irredeemable villain. That he's voiced by Luke Skywalker makes it even better.

"Castle in the Sky" is also notable in that it, like "Kiki", "Totoro", and "Porco Rosso", has a preexisting dub. That particular older version from the '80s, hastily made for airflights and picked up for distribution for Streamline, is a seriously horrible, lifeless, stale, robotic trainwreck which qualifies as one of the absolute worst dubs of all time: choppy scripting (despite being more "accurate"), wooden, lifeless performances across the board, sloppy synching, and poor recording quality. It's no wonder Carl Macek thought it was so terrible.

Now Disney's version isn't without its faults either: the leads, aside from sounding a bit more mature than their Japanese counterparts, are probably the least excellent (but not terrible) of the cast, and there's a fair smattering of extra lines. But on the whole, the Jack Fletcher-directed, Joe Hisaishi-rescored revamp by Disney is the better of the two: the performances are all around lively and spirited, the script, although looser than one might expect from a Disney dub, is well-written and smoothly executed, the lip sync is spot on, and while the leads are somewhat eccentrically cast, everybody else, especially Muska and Dola, is excellent. Very underrated in the Disney Ghibli dub canon IMO.