The boy hero Pazu has his origins in ancient mythology, and in true Miyazaki fashion, it has to do with the wind. In the last of our 3-part mini-series on Castle in the Sky, we explore how the film connects the mythologies of wind, earth and sky, and then look at how Pazu’s story is the classic Father Quest that Hollywood has horribly overdone but it’s so fresh and interesting when Miyazaki does it. And finally, we’ll go into the big questions: What is Laputa? Why is it important that all of these people end up there? And what are the Buddhist spiritual teachings hiding in plain sight as Miyazaki wraps up his story?

Sheeta is Miyazaki princess who defies the common story tropes of what a princess normally is, especially in the classic Disney sense of the word. In the second of our three-episode Castle in the Sky mini-series, we unravel how this film’s Sheeta is partly based on Sita, the Hindu Goddess featured in the epic Ramayana, and we also take a look at how Miyazaki portrays all the different groups of men in this film, and how this makes Muska a much more complex villain than he is often said to be.

Castle in the Sky is often waved away by Western film critics as simplistic and not nearly as polished as later Miyazaki films - but that's a huge misconception. In the first of our three-episode look into this raw, early Ghibli masterpiece, we'll explore the origins of the film's story, how a scouting trip to Wales and the South of England influenced the film's landcape and characters, and we'll also talk about the film's unique childhood lens and how it changes depending on whether you're watching with the English dub or the original Japanese voice acting.

One nuanced thing that connects Studio Ghibli films is the attention that the Studio’s two main writers and directors pay to the actual physical spaces that the characters move around in -- making landscapes and architecture characters in their own right. In this episode, we'll be talking about Studio Ghibli landscapes, from the vanishing scenery of My Neighbor Totoro, through Yakushima Forest that inspired Princess Mononoke, the exact building Spirited Away's bathhouse is based on, and how Studio Ghibli's focus on landscapes ties into Buddhist meditation practices.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, based on a 12th century Japanese folktale, is one of Hayao Miyazaki's most important films that a lot of people in the West haven't even heard about, including my guest, independent cinema expert Flick Beckett (who now loves it). In this episode we talk about how the the story flips the "prophecy" story trope it gets from Frank Herbert's Dune novel, and how the Nausicaä story itself has prophesised the climate movement of today.

Going into a dark space to watch moving images on the wall seems like a recent thing, but humans have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. In this first episode of the Moon Rabbit Podcast, I sat down with independent cinema expert Flick Beckett to discuss the mythological elements of the cinema-going ritual, and we talked extensively about how writer and director Hayao Miyazaki, founder of Studio Ghibli, has used mythology and symbolism in his films to bring a revolution to animation on the big screen.

Moon Rabbit is a new film analysis podcast on the intersection between modern mythology and the human psyche. In this introductory episode, I talk about how a unique book of fairy tales I had when I was 5 started me off on a journey that led me to film research and to starting this podcast about what's beneath the surface of modern film storytelling.