Film · 1986 · Films · 1980s
Castle in the Sky
Scored from 227 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Sheeta, a girl who wears a glowing crystal pendant, falls from a government airship over a mining valley and drifts gently to earth, where she is caught by Pazu, an orphaned apprentice engineer whose father once photographed the legendary floating island of Laputa. The pendant is a levitation stone that can lead them there, which makes Sheeta the target of Dola's family of air pirates and of Colonel Muska, a government agent who wants Laputa's dormant ancient technology for himself. The two children run for the island with both parties in pursuit. Hayao Miyazaki's steampunk adventure was the first feature produced by Studio Ghibli.
Released in 1986, Castle in the Sky is an adventure, animation and family film. It plays in Japanese. It runs 2h 5m and carries a PG certificate. Its country of origin is listed as Japan.
3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3,898 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 227 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 245 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Castle in the Sky lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 227.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
