Recommended for teens and older. (Tenku no Shiro Laputa). Perhaps the best pure adventure story ever made in anime (although one could certainly also argue for the director's pre-Ghibli classic, 1979's The Castle of Cagliostro, available on video from Manga Entertainment), Castle in the Sky is a tale worthy of Jules Verne. In an imaginary Europe of a century ago, Pazu is a boy inventor who dreams of following the path of his explorer father who once sighted "Laputa," a floating island built by a vanished advanced civilization. When Sheeta, a mysterious girl bearing a pendant connected to Laputa, literally falls into Pazu's mining town, the children become caught up in a race against both good-natured aerial pirates and ruthless government agents to claim the secrets of the castle in the sky.-Carl Horn