Personal Statement

Hamilton O’Toole
Personal Statement




	It would really disappoint my five year old self to know that, after 17 years of life I have not joined a single superhero team, mastered the ninja arts, or saved earth even once, and I sympathize greatly with my five year old self, every day I look for my fated superhuman encounter, or the beginning of my comic book saga, despite the near certainty that they will never come.  The most apt description I could give myself is that of a teenager fully entrapped by his own romanticism,  waiting for that one thing that I think could make my life great, my origin story, my first issue, my Action Comics 1. But isn’t that selling myself short? Do I really have to be Superman to matter? The answer may seem obvious to you, but it took the films of a man named Hayao Miyazaki to arrive at my answer.

	Who is Hayao Miyazaki? If you polled all the film institutes in America his name would never be mentioned with the likes of James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, or Martin Scorsese, but upon a cursory examination of Japanese film his name would  be practically unavoidable. But I’m just spouting pointless exposition here, the point is Hayao Miyazaki wrote, animated and directed Laputa Castle in the Sky, an animated film, that showed me the things I could achieve as a human being, and not an X-Man, and all while on a sick day in ninth grade.

	Laputa Castle in the Sky is the story of a boy named Pazu, who saves a princess of an ancient airborne civilization from falling out of an enormous zeppelin, igniting a power struggle between his unnamed country’s government, populace, and pirates, for the ancient power of a mythical castle in the sky, containing unknown riches and military might.  Throughout the movie Pazu joins sky pirates, discovers ancient mysteries, and soars through a hurricane to an ancient civilization previously inaccessible to mankind, a flying castle, coated with beauty that could put Ancient Greece and Rome to shame, and all without superpowers or being able to kill a man with his bare hands.

	As I write this I have seen Laputa Castle in the Sky upwards of six times, and every time it’s solely to chase that magic of the first time I laid eyes on the beautiful hand drawn world.  Every time I put that DVD in I try to recapture a fateful sick day in 9th grade, where I saw Pazu reach the skies that I crave to soar through, without the aid of anything but human ingenuity and cleverness, and I think I could reach those heights one day. That maybe one day I could find my floating castle, that I could make that earth shaking discovery, that I could feel those heights that Pazu felt, that if he could reach his dreams through willpower, what’s stopping me.

	I am not ordinary. My worth does not stem from being able to save the world, to be the hero to all, or even just experiencing a science fiction lifestyle. My worth stems from my accomplishments and what I do in my limited time on earth, and I know this, when it’s my time to go I want the world to know that I found my castle in the sky, I just don’t know where, or what it is yet. However I do know that I won’t need to be Superman to get there.