Laputa: Castle in the Sky on Blu-ray is an absolute feast for the eyes, sharp, clean, full of detail and, providing you weren't excessively attached to the grain, a great visualisation of a Ghibli classic on a home format. It is hard to find fault with such a uniformly capable display, perhaps if splitting hairs one might argue that a couple of pans aren’t as smooth as butter, but that would be unnecessarily picky. It would have been easy for such a combination of foreground and background styles to have ended up with a less than strong contrast ratio but quite the opposite is true – blacks are nigh on flawless, with the outer frame from Dola’s telescope merging nicely with the 1.85:1 border.

Primaries such as red have a healthy punch to them, but even when the artwork gets more complex and the bold colours overlay fine linework and delicate backgrounds there are no indications of colour bleed. The change from the pastel and saturated backgrounds to the key figures in the foreground also helps emphasize just how stable the reproduction of colour is. I’d call it clean, others might say DNR-ed to death. The upside is that the filter applied to keep the grain under control on the Japanese release, that resulted in some less than even grain structure, is obviously not a problem.

Some high frequency detail has been lost, but it is nowhere near as pronounced as some screencaps doing the rounds might indicate and it hasn't smothered the finer edges. The subtle gradation and shadowing on the great cumulous puffs is positively exquisite to behold and the gentle shift in tone of the pastel blues across the horizon that could easily have highlighted banding remains without a hint of such blights.Įnthusiasts will likely cry foul that DNR has been applied and the grain largely taken away (evoking comments that it looks too Disney), but as ever in the age old argument of whether a restored animation should be closer to the 35mm source or push for cel-like authenticity it’s really a matter of taste. The clouds and sky behind – so often a stumbling block of animation – show no signs of banding. Once up into the heavens things stay at a similarly flawless level, and the level of depth this 1080p transfer is capable of evoking is brought to the fore. The first shots are a great litmus test for the visuals on this disc, the opening credits with their multitude of browns and moving mine machinery show off the crisp line detail and subtle colour palette.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky comes to UK Blu-ray courtesy of Optimum Home Entertainment with a 1080p resolution encoded using the AVCcodec and framed within a 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

Castle in the sky animation screencaps