Laputa

The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on.

Steam did not overtake water and wind as a source of power until after 1830; in Swift’s Laputa, as in eighteenth-century England, steam power did not replace water power but supplemented it.

The town also had the fortune of resembling a dreamy world depicted in a Hayao Miyazaki anime film, “Laputa: Castle in the Sky.”

Together, the two set out to find Laputa, an island that Jonathan Swift described as floating above the earth.

Gulliver describes the aerial propulsion of Laputa in detail, even incorporating a force diagram that would not have been out of place in the Philosophical Transactions.