I always find the “How did you get into anime?” discussions fascinating. Way before my first proper anime experience I watched an obscure animated feature film that gave me great memories. I mentally filed it under Something I’ll Never See Again and almost fooled myself into thinking I’d forgotten about it, so it was quite something when I spotted a familiar-looking image on the front of a DVD case over a decade later and bought the thing on the spot. The DVD in question was Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which I later bought again on Japanese import because that was the edition that contained the older English language dub I remembered so held the real nostalgia value.

I wonder if the quoted value of 5cm per second for sakura petals is altitude-dependent

While I normally blog from the point of view of the cynical 27-year-old I am today the reason why my opinion of it is the way it is stems from experiencing it through a child’s eyes; it is after all a kids’ adventure story so that tack makes more sense to me. I’ve done a very simplified run-down of my favourite bits from my original viewing, with numbered annotations to include the benefits of hindsight. It’s an unusual approach for me, so I hope it works here.