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nebroadwe[This is a slightly revised version of a review originally posted to rec.arts.anime.misc on June 12, 2005.]
Short take (no spoilers):
Howl's Moving Castle is highly enjoyable despite its imperfections. It's funny, dramatic and beautifully animated, though structurally flawed -- less polished than Spirited Away but probably more accessible to non-otaku.
Long take (spoilers for both book and film ho!):
Corral a friend, or a parent, or any but the smallest child, and rent Howl's Moving Castle if you missed it during its theatrical release.
Short take (no spoilers):
Howl's Moving Castle is highly enjoyable despite its imperfections. It's funny, dramatic and beautifully animated, though structurally flawed -- less polished than Spirited Away but probably more accessible to non-otaku.
Long take (spoilers for both book and film ho!):
Corral a friend, or a parent, or any but the smallest child, and rent Howl's Moving Castle if you missed it during its theatrical release.
It's funny and dramatic and beautifully animated, and if the rushed and confusing resolution of the politics disappoints you, the tender climax of the love story will not. (I've rarely seen so many kisses in an anime of this length; minute for minute, it's probably more promiscuous than Fushigi Yuugi. :-)
Some disclaimers at the outset: I've beaten the drum for Miyazaki ever since I saw Princess Mononoke on DVD, and I dragged many confused people to the theater to see Spirited Away and had a hard time understanding why they weren't as taken with it as I was. I've also been reading the works of Diana Wynne Jones, the author of the book Howl's Moving Castle, for something over twenty years now, and will buy her books sight unread in hardback. I've been following this project with great anticipation since it was first announced that Studio Ghibli had acquired the rights to this novel, but I did not expect either to see a slavishly faithful adaptation of the text or to be disappointed by the liberties taken with it. I'm not a text purist when it comes to theatrical adaptations, though I do demand that, if a film departs from its source, it remain true to its own logic and not become incoherent. I'm also an English major, so I watch films differently than many people. You Have Been Warned.
That said, while the title card reads "Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones" (and Miyazaki offers her a shout-out during Sophie's first trolley ride), the film Howl's Moving Castle takes the central events of the novel and uses them to tell its own story. Character as well as plot is reinterpreted. The wizard Howl's heartlessness is both novel and film's problem-to-be-solved by heroine Sophie, but Jones's Howl is primarily a commitment-phobe, "a slitherer-outer" who "hates being pinned down to anything". Miyazaki, on the other hand, portrays Howl's childhood bargain with the fire-demon Calcifer as arresting his development. Howl's heart remains "the heart of a child" and he is unable to mature fully until he regains it. He's not as badly arrested as J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, who famously doesn't even understand what a kiss is. Howl knows he's attractive and trades on it, but his self-confident intrusions into Sophie's personal space are poised between intimacy and "Mommy, Mommy!" sleeve-pulling enthusiasm. By contrast, Sophie's growing willingness to confront Howl in his personal space marks her transition into full adulthood. While not as inclined to leap before looking as her counterpart in the novel, Sophie does begin in the same place emotionally in both versions, trapped in roles she has not chosen (responsible eldest, then cursed crone) and finding unexpected strength in the disguise age offers her. The curse is not as impenetrable a shield as she believes it to be, however, which Jones reveals through dialogue but Miyazaki chooses to represent visually. Depending on who is looking and how Sophie is feeling, her appearance shifts up and down the scale from teenager to grandmother. Her character arc requires her to leave behind the mousiness with which she is taxed in the beginning, but also to build on her "pluck." That pluck and Howl's daring both grow into courage as their love motivates them to protect each other. By the film's end, the synthesis of Sophie's girlish stubbornness and reserve with her granny's decisiveness and lack of self-consciousness finds its visual correlative in a youthful face crowned with white hair ("like starlight," as Howl besottedly puts it :-).
The secondary characters deviate more from the source material than do the co-protagonists, because while this is Miyazaki's closest approach to a straight romance (as Castle in the Sky is his closest approach to straight-up Good Guys vs. Bad Guys), it's a romance pursued in the context of building a family, an element specific to the film. Jones's lovelorn adolescent apprentice Michael, Sophie's would-be brother-in-law, becomes Miyazaki's Markl, a child who looks at Sophie first as a slightly embarrassing granny and then as a mother. The Witch of the Waste remains Howl's antagonist and double, but the doubling is more metaphorical in the film than in the book, where the Witch's enslavement to her demon foreshadows Howl's fate if he cannot break his contract with Calcifer. Her protestations of love for Howl in the film, on the other hand, are true (to the extent she is capable of loving) where their equivalent in the book is a deception. The Witch's disastrous intervention during the climactic chase scene is thus good character logic; her subsequent reversal, however, seems rushed despite previous efforts to build a less adversarial relationship between her and Sophie. That said, the Witch's arrival at the moving castle just as Sophie is beginning to youthen consistently is precisely timed; she can take on the "outspoken granny" role in this multi-generational household as Sophie vacates it. When all the castle's inhabitants sit down to breakfast -- including the delightfully supercilious, wheezy, long-haired wiener dog Heen -- they are, as Howl says, a collection of misfits behaving like a family. With the breaking of their various curses and the abandonment of their disguises (by the end, Markl is no longer masquerading as a short grown-up and even Heen is rolling around in the grass rather than spying for Madam Suliman), they are freed to become a family in truth.
The family romance is handled so well, in fact, that its uncertain integration into the "political plot" -- the war, the lost prince, Madam Suliman's machinations -- is all that prevents this film from equaling Miyazaki's best work. It's not so much that the war seems pointless and inexplicable; the pointless and inexplicable (or at least largely unexplicated) background conflicts in Princess Mononoke or Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind forward those movies' anti-war themes by showing the effects at ground level without the clarifying lens of strategic or ideological justification. To be caught up in war is to be caught up in destruction, regardless of the reason. Howl's daredevil sabotage missions likewise have nothing to do with altering the balance of power on the battlefield: he's always shown to be outnumbered and never does as much damage as the armies he confronts, despite the fact that to do as much as he does all but destroys him. His actions are all about his character's childishness: he hates the burning and destruction, but his response is to try to destroy the destroyers; he decries the monstrous wizards who have allowed the state to co-opt their skills, but runs the same risk of dehumanization in his mode of resistance. His motives may be praiseworthy, but his methods are futile and dangerous. Nor is the lost prince treated as a serious geopolitical problem -- in that regard, he seems more a distraction than anything else. His best use is as a foil to the Witch of the Waste, allowing Miyazaki to avoid a common romantic cliche. We're used to seeing villains who mistake desire for love have their desires crossed, but how often does the happily-ever-after of a handsome, loving person fail to involve finding his beloved ready to receive him? Amid the swelling violins of love triumphant, the conclusion of Howl's Moving Castle interpolates grace notes of reality (probably from the oboes): hearts can change, but even a fairy-tale prince's true love might not find its fulfillment. I do wish for a few moments of direct confrontation between the restored prince and Sophie to bring these points out in a more skillful and balanced way, however -- the closing minutes of this film, as many critics have remarked, are uncomfortably rushed.
But the main difficulty with the political plot is clearly Madam Suliman's responsibility for the war, which, while not stated explicitly, is implied by her authority to stop the hostilities. This resolution is abrupt to the point of denying what has preceded it and therefore unique in Miyazaki's work: the closest analogue I can think of is the way in which Porco Rosso's epilogue elides World War II, but at least the existence of war and turmoil are acknowledged. More characteristic are the scenes of reconstruction in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind's credits or the discussion of unfinished business to be dealt with in Princess Mononoke. Beyond the structural problem, Suliman's casual calling-off of the dogs because "the game" is over replaces the question mark over her ethics with an exclamation point. In the scene where Sophie comes to confront her on Howl's behalf, Suliman appears to advocate for justice untempered by mercy toward evil wizards; in typical Miyazaki fashion, an unyielding commitment to a particular idea, however virtuous, becomes terrible. Her assertion that her ex-student Howl must either be cleansed of his demonic association or forfeit his powers so that he cannot misuse them has not-inconsiderable weight in the face of the Witch of the Waste's penchant for curses, not to mention Howl's own slow degeneration. But Suliman's inflexibly adversarial methods compromise her motives just as Lady Eboshi's strip-mining compromises her community-building in Princess Mononoke. The film's close, however, moves well beyond compromise: if Suliman could call off the war so easily, why didn't she do so earlier? The lost prince's narrative insignificance militates against his restoration as the precipitating factor; the timing suggests strongly that Howl's recovery is far more important. We are left with the impression that Suliman was using the war to prosecute her pursuit of Howl, her putative successor, which, coupled with Howl's accusation that she is responsible for the transformation of the wizards under oath to her into monstrosities, would make her as reprehensible a villain as Miyazaki has ever created. Yet the film does not otherwise mark her out as villainous. I'm not sure if Miyazaki has here attempted a character subtlety that failed or wound up the narrative structure too swiftly, introducing a character inconsistency. I would have preferred Suliman's war-making authority to be first cued earlier in the film, or her concern restricted to saving or destroying her student, with the war as backdrop (possibly to be exploited in a conflict of stances between those who place their powers at the service of a state which may not act wisely and those whose loyalties are more circumscribed).
The ending as it stands is a significant and disappointing stumble, compromising an excellent film which, despite its limited release, I'd think would have the potential to do better business in the U.S. than Spirited Away. When that film was being marketed, I found the constant comparisons to Alice in Wonderland to be specious and misleading. Lacking Alice's dream-logic, indulgence in parody and cruel humor, Spirited Away in fact bears a greater resemblance to Celtic legends of humans "away with the fairies," trapped in otherworlds ruled by beings who help or hinder their guests according to their own codes without reference to human ethics. But these stories are not common cultural currency in the U.S., so it was unsurprising that many viewers seemed to find themselves adrift. Howl's Moving Castle, on the other hand, in addition to reimagining a moderately popular children's novel, recalls material very familiar to an American audience: Cinderella, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast (or Cupid and Psyche), even The Wizard of Oz. I'm not arguing that Miyazaki deliberately tries to evoke any of these narratives, but that similarities of ideas and imagery between the film and these well-known stories may give American audiences an "in" they didn't have with Spirited Away so they can enjoy Howl's Moving Castle as more than sheer spectacle.
But, oh, what a grand spectacle it is! The opening scenes in which first the moving castle lumbers through a mountain mist, three-quarters visible, past a flock of indifferent sheep and a shepherd who might be waving a greeting or cursing the intruders off, and then a steam-engine down in the valley belches a thicker, darker cloud of smoke to obscure the town outside Sophie's workroom window -- that's practically Miyazaki in a nutshell. Quirky machines and early twentieth-century quasi-European cityscapes, the sun sinking or rising through bands of cloud behind a Turneresque vista of hills and forests: nature contrasted with culture, the virtues and flaws of each portrayed with loving attention to detail. The war scenes are hellish, fire and darkness and the slow rain of fish-tailed bombs -- too intense for small children. The blobby servants of the Witch of the Waste and Madam Suliman, dressed in boaters and tails until they attack, are creepily comic. And then there's Miyazaki's fascination with machinery. Katsuhiro Otomo's narratively flawed but visually exciting Steamboy gave us a wonderfully realized extrapolation of the tools of the Industrial Revolution, but alongside its own Stanley Steamers and coal-fired engines Howl's Moving Castle likes to throw in the weirdly organic: personal airships like elongated hummingbirds; battle-cruisers that float ponderously through the air to the slow beat of oar-like wing-banks; and the castle itself, stumping along on chicken legs, sections grinding against each other like the articulated Ohmu shells of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, the whole another visual correlative for Howl and Calcifer's basically inhospitable association. I could cheerfully move into the castle once Sophie cleaned it up -- prior to that it reminds me too vividly of all the student apartments I rejected when I was looking for off-campus housing back in grad school. :-) The scene in which Howl and Calcifer "move house" and various new rooms, architectural details, appliances and furniture squish and pop into existence within the confines of the castle's shell is marvelously realized and exquisitely funny. Miyazaki treats interiors with the same attention he gives to landscapes, and he does amazing work in low light. When Sophie and the Witch of the Waste confront each other in the hat shop, the dimness shows us enough detail to give the lie to the Witch's comment about everything's tackiness while maintaining the sense of abandonment that attends an empty sales floor. Or consider Howl's room, which at first glance looks like a spangled treasure-chamber but on closer inspection reveals itself to be a toybox trying to become a womb. Then there are the people. I quibble with the repetitiveness of one male character design: the prince looked like a cheap redress of Howl, who looked like an older and more mischievous version of Haku from Spirited Away -- and I would love to know if anyone else finds all Suliman's Stepford-Haku pages somewhat ... disconcerting. But that's just a quibble. The crowd scenes and minor characters demonstrate a goodly variety of face- and body-types, and the secondary characters as well as the principals are distinctive and well-realized, from Sophie's mother and sister, whose bubble-headed enthusiasm doesn't hide their capability for dignity and warmth; to the Witch of the Waste, desperately holding up her sagging chins (and other bits) against the onslaught of age until Madam Suliman strips her of artifice in a glare of zillion-watt incandescent bulbs; to the incredibly expressive blob who is Calcifer, whimpering in a cup, giving Sophie the razzberry from under a pan, blazing up like a gas jet in a roar of power. Sophie herself may be the film's crowning visual achievement, for all that the work on her is sometimes so subtle that it might be overlooked. Watch carefully: there aren't just two Sophies, maiden and crone, or even three, including the final synthesis of those boundary states. The film gives us a whole range of Sophies, signaled by differences in stance, in the shape of her limbs, in the lines and firmness of her face. Very seldom are the shifts from one state to another shown directly, which may irk viewers used to a more mechanistic treatment of magic, but which I find compelling. The downplaying of the changes commands attention: you have to keep your eye on Sophie or you might miss yet another moment of transition mirrored inthe mysterious transformations of her person.
The dub voicework is creditable, if not as good as that of Spirited Away or Porco Rosso -- more on a par with Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. Christian Bale is rather too old for Howl, but there were enough occasions when he hit the mood exactly right, as during the escape over the rooftops, that I forgave him his infelicities elsewhere. Despite a thick accent, Emily Mortimer handles all the emotions she needs to without missing a beat, and her voice blends well with that of Jean Simmons, whose old Sophie quavers without being querulous. Simmons is at her best when mischief is called for, as when she teases Markl, with whom Josh Hutcherson does a bang-up job. His fake dignity is a hoot and he sounds quite realistically vulnerable when he asks Sophie to stay. Lauren Bacall disappears into the Witch of the Waste, which some reviews I've read find disappointing but I think serves the film much better than a recognizably Famous Voice. Billy Crystal, his own voice unmistakably Famous, is less hammy than I'd been led to fear. Most of the porcine content is limited to his introductory scene as Calcifer; subsequently he delivers the part well. (I still would have liked to hear what David Ogden Stiers would have done with Calcifer, but you can't have everything.)
In sum, a very good film, enjoyable with little cavil up until the end. Its visuals easily stand up to those of this year's previous big-screen animated offerings; in depth and heart it roars past them like a bullet train. See this film and read the book. The world can't have too many aficionados of Hayao Miyazaki or Diana Wynne Jones, IMO.
Some disclaimers at the outset: I've beaten the drum for Miyazaki ever since I saw Princess Mononoke on DVD, and I dragged many confused people to the theater to see Spirited Away and had a hard time understanding why they weren't as taken with it as I was. I've also been reading the works of Diana Wynne Jones, the author of the book Howl's Moving Castle, for something over twenty years now, and will buy her books sight unread in hardback. I've been following this project with great anticipation since it was first announced that Studio Ghibli had acquired the rights to this novel, but I did not expect either to see a slavishly faithful adaptation of the text or to be disappointed by the liberties taken with it. I'm not a text purist when it comes to theatrical adaptations, though I do demand that, if a film departs from its source, it remain true to its own logic and not become incoherent. I'm also an English major, so I watch films differently than many people. You Have Been Warned.
That said, while the title card reads "Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones" (and Miyazaki offers her a shout-out during Sophie's first trolley ride), the film Howl's Moving Castle takes the central events of the novel and uses them to tell its own story. Character as well as plot is reinterpreted. The wizard Howl's heartlessness is both novel and film's problem-to-be-solved by heroine Sophie, but Jones's Howl is primarily a commitment-phobe, "a slitherer-outer" who "hates being pinned down to anything". Miyazaki, on the other hand, portrays Howl's childhood bargain with the fire-demon Calcifer as arresting his development. Howl's heart remains "the heart of a child" and he is unable to mature fully until he regains it. He's not as badly arrested as J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, who famously doesn't even understand what a kiss is. Howl knows he's attractive and trades on it, but his self-confident intrusions into Sophie's personal space are poised between intimacy and "Mommy, Mommy!" sleeve-pulling enthusiasm. By contrast, Sophie's growing willingness to confront Howl in his personal space marks her transition into full adulthood. While not as inclined to leap before looking as her counterpart in the novel, Sophie does begin in the same place emotionally in both versions, trapped in roles she has not chosen (responsible eldest, then cursed crone) and finding unexpected strength in the disguise age offers her. The curse is not as impenetrable a shield as she believes it to be, however, which Jones reveals through dialogue but Miyazaki chooses to represent visually. Depending on who is looking and how Sophie is feeling, her appearance shifts up and down the scale from teenager to grandmother. Her character arc requires her to leave behind the mousiness with which she is taxed in the beginning, but also to build on her "pluck." That pluck and Howl's daring both grow into courage as their love motivates them to protect each other. By the film's end, the synthesis of Sophie's girlish stubbornness and reserve with her granny's decisiveness and lack of self-consciousness finds its visual correlative in a youthful face crowned with white hair ("like starlight," as Howl besottedly puts it :-).
The secondary characters deviate more from the source material than do the co-protagonists, because while this is Miyazaki's closest approach to a straight romance (as Castle in the Sky is his closest approach to straight-up Good Guys vs. Bad Guys), it's a romance pursued in the context of building a family, an element specific to the film. Jones's lovelorn adolescent apprentice Michael, Sophie's would-be brother-in-law, becomes Miyazaki's Markl, a child who looks at Sophie first as a slightly embarrassing granny and then as a mother. The Witch of the Waste remains Howl's antagonist and double, but the doubling is more metaphorical in the film than in the book, where the Witch's enslavement to her demon foreshadows Howl's fate if he cannot break his contract with Calcifer. Her protestations of love for Howl in the film, on the other hand, are true (to the extent she is capable of loving) where their equivalent in the book is a deception. The Witch's disastrous intervention during the climactic chase scene is thus good character logic; her subsequent reversal, however, seems rushed despite previous efforts to build a less adversarial relationship between her and Sophie. That said, the Witch's arrival at the moving castle just as Sophie is beginning to youthen consistently is precisely timed; she can take on the "outspoken granny" role in this multi-generational household as Sophie vacates it. When all the castle's inhabitants sit down to breakfast -- including the delightfully supercilious, wheezy, long-haired wiener dog Heen -- they are, as Howl says, a collection of misfits behaving like a family. With the breaking of their various curses and the abandonment of their disguises (by the end, Markl is no longer masquerading as a short grown-up and even Heen is rolling around in the grass rather than spying for Madam Suliman), they are freed to become a family in truth.
The family romance is handled so well, in fact, that its uncertain integration into the "political plot" -- the war, the lost prince, Madam Suliman's machinations -- is all that prevents this film from equaling Miyazaki's best work. It's not so much that the war seems pointless and inexplicable; the pointless and inexplicable (or at least largely unexplicated) background conflicts in Princess Mononoke or Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind forward those movies' anti-war themes by showing the effects at ground level without the clarifying lens of strategic or ideological justification. To be caught up in war is to be caught up in destruction, regardless of the reason. Howl's daredevil sabotage missions likewise have nothing to do with altering the balance of power on the battlefield: he's always shown to be outnumbered and never does as much damage as the armies he confronts, despite the fact that to do as much as he does all but destroys him. His actions are all about his character's childishness: he hates the burning and destruction, but his response is to try to destroy the destroyers; he decries the monstrous wizards who have allowed the state to co-opt their skills, but runs the same risk of dehumanization in his mode of resistance. His motives may be praiseworthy, but his methods are futile and dangerous. Nor is the lost prince treated as a serious geopolitical problem -- in that regard, he seems more a distraction than anything else. His best use is as a foil to the Witch of the Waste, allowing Miyazaki to avoid a common romantic cliche. We're used to seeing villains who mistake desire for love have their desires crossed, but how often does the happily-ever-after of a handsome, loving person fail to involve finding his beloved ready to receive him? Amid the swelling violins of love triumphant, the conclusion of Howl's Moving Castle interpolates grace notes of reality (probably from the oboes): hearts can change, but even a fairy-tale prince's true love might not find its fulfillment. I do wish for a few moments of direct confrontation between the restored prince and Sophie to bring these points out in a more skillful and balanced way, however -- the closing minutes of this film, as many critics have remarked, are uncomfortably rushed.
But the main difficulty with the political plot is clearly Madam Suliman's responsibility for the war, which, while not stated explicitly, is implied by her authority to stop the hostilities. This resolution is abrupt to the point of denying what has preceded it and therefore unique in Miyazaki's work: the closest analogue I can think of is the way in which Porco Rosso's epilogue elides World War II, but at least the existence of war and turmoil are acknowledged. More characteristic are the scenes of reconstruction in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind's credits or the discussion of unfinished business to be dealt with in Princess Mononoke. Beyond the structural problem, Suliman's casual calling-off of the dogs because "the game" is over replaces the question mark over her ethics with an exclamation point. In the scene where Sophie comes to confront her on Howl's behalf, Suliman appears to advocate for justice untempered by mercy toward evil wizards; in typical Miyazaki fashion, an unyielding commitment to a particular idea, however virtuous, becomes terrible. Her assertion that her ex-student Howl must either be cleansed of his demonic association or forfeit his powers so that he cannot misuse them has not-inconsiderable weight in the face of the Witch of the Waste's penchant for curses, not to mention Howl's own slow degeneration. But Suliman's inflexibly adversarial methods compromise her motives just as Lady Eboshi's strip-mining compromises her community-building in Princess Mononoke. The film's close, however, moves well beyond compromise: if Suliman could call off the war so easily, why didn't she do so earlier? The lost prince's narrative insignificance militates against his restoration as the precipitating factor; the timing suggests strongly that Howl's recovery is far more important. We are left with the impression that Suliman was using the war to prosecute her pursuit of Howl, her putative successor, which, coupled with Howl's accusation that she is responsible for the transformation of the wizards under oath to her into monstrosities, would make her as reprehensible a villain as Miyazaki has ever created. Yet the film does not otherwise mark her out as villainous. I'm not sure if Miyazaki has here attempted a character subtlety that failed or wound up the narrative structure too swiftly, introducing a character inconsistency. I would have preferred Suliman's war-making authority to be first cued earlier in the film, or her concern restricted to saving or destroying her student, with the war as backdrop (possibly to be exploited in a conflict of stances between those who place their powers at the service of a state which may not act wisely and those whose loyalties are more circumscribed).
The ending as it stands is a significant and disappointing stumble, compromising an excellent film which, despite its limited release, I'd think would have the potential to do better business in the U.S. than Spirited Away. When that film was being marketed, I found the constant comparisons to Alice in Wonderland to be specious and misleading. Lacking Alice's dream-logic, indulgence in parody and cruel humor, Spirited Away in fact bears a greater resemblance to Celtic legends of humans "away with the fairies," trapped in otherworlds ruled by beings who help or hinder their guests according to their own codes without reference to human ethics. But these stories are not common cultural currency in the U.S., so it was unsurprising that many viewers seemed to find themselves adrift. Howl's Moving Castle, on the other hand, in addition to reimagining a moderately popular children's novel, recalls material very familiar to an American audience: Cinderella, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast (or Cupid and Psyche), even The Wizard of Oz. I'm not arguing that Miyazaki deliberately tries to evoke any of these narratives, but that similarities of ideas and imagery between the film and these well-known stories may give American audiences an "in" they didn't have with Spirited Away so they can enjoy Howl's Moving Castle as more than sheer spectacle.
But, oh, what a grand spectacle it is! The opening scenes in which first the moving castle lumbers through a mountain mist, three-quarters visible, past a flock of indifferent sheep and a shepherd who might be waving a greeting or cursing the intruders off, and then a steam-engine down in the valley belches a thicker, darker cloud of smoke to obscure the town outside Sophie's workroom window -- that's practically Miyazaki in a nutshell. Quirky machines and early twentieth-century quasi-European cityscapes, the sun sinking or rising through bands of cloud behind a Turneresque vista of hills and forests: nature contrasted with culture, the virtues and flaws of each portrayed with loving attention to detail. The war scenes are hellish, fire and darkness and the slow rain of fish-tailed bombs -- too intense for small children. The blobby servants of the Witch of the Waste and Madam Suliman, dressed in boaters and tails until they attack, are creepily comic. And then there's Miyazaki's fascination with machinery. Katsuhiro Otomo's narratively flawed but visually exciting Steamboy gave us a wonderfully realized extrapolation of the tools of the Industrial Revolution, but alongside its own Stanley Steamers and coal-fired engines Howl's Moving Castle likes to throw in the weirdly organic: personal airships like elongated hummingbirds; battle-cruisers that float ponderously through the air to the slow beat of oar-like wing-banks; and the castle itself, stumping along on chicken legs, sections grinding against each other like the articulated Ohmu shells of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, the whole another visual correlative for Howl and Calcifer's basically inhospitable association. I could cheerfully move into the castle once Sophie cleaned it up -- prior to that it reminds me too vividly of all the student apartments I rejected when I was looking for off-campus housing back in grad school. :-) The scene in which Howl and Calcifer "move house" and various new rooms, architectural details, appliances and furniture squish and pop into existence within the confines of the castle's shell is marvelously realized and exquisitely funny. Miyazaki treats interiors with the same attention he gives to landscapes, and he does amazing work in low light. When Sophie and the Witch of the Waste confront each other in the hat shop, the dimness shows us enough detail to give the lie to the Witch's comment about everything's tackiness while maintaining the sense of abandonment that attends an empty sales floor. Or consider Howl's room, which at first glance looks like a spangled treasure-chamber but on closer inspection reveals itself to be a toybox trying to become a womb. Then there are the people. I quibble with the repetitiveness of one male character design: the prince looked like a cheap redress of Howl, who looked like an older and more mischievous version of Haku from Spirited Away -- and I would love to know if anyone else finds all Suliman's Stepford-Haku pages somewhat ... disconcerting. But that's just a quibble. The crowd scenes and minor characters demonstrate a goodly variety of face- and body-types, and the secondary characters as well as the principals are distinctive and well-realized, from Sophie's mother and sister, whose bubble-headed enthusiasm doesn't hide their capability for dignity and warmth; to the Witch of the Waste, desperately holding up her sagging chins (and other bits) against the onslaught of age until Madam Suliman strips her of artifice in a glare of zillion-watt incandescent bulbs; to the incredibly expressive blob who is Calcifer, whimpering in a cup, giving Sophie the razzberry from under a pan, blazing up like a gas jet in a roar of power. Sophie herself may be the film's crowning visual achievement, for all that the work on her is sometimes so subtle that it might be overlooked. Watch carefully: there aren't just two Sophies, maiden and crone, or even three, including the final synthesis of those boundary states. The film gives us a whole range of Sophies, signaled by differences in stance, in the shape of her limbs, in the lines and firmness of her face. Very seldom are the shifts from one state to another shown directly, which may irk viewers used to a more mechanistic treatment of magic, but which I find compelling. The downplaying of the changes commands attention: you have to keep your eye on Sophie or you might miss yet another moment of transition mirrored inthe mysterious transformations of her person.
The dub voicework is creditable, if not as good as that of Spirited Away or Porco Rosso -- more on a par with Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. Christian Bale is rather too old for Howl, but there were enough occasions when he hit the mood exactly right, as during the escape over the rooftops, that I forgave him his infelicities elsewhere. Despite a thick accent, Emily Mortimer handles all the emotions she needs to without missing a beat, and her voice blends well with that of Jean Simmons, whose old Sophie quavers without being querulous. Simmons is at her best when mischief is called for, as when she teases Markl, with whom Josh Hutcherson does a bang-up job. His fake dignity is a hoot and he sounds quite realistically vulnerable when he asks Sophie to stay. Lauren Bacall disappears into the Witch of the Waste, which some reviews I've read find disappointing but I think serves the film much better than a recognizably Famous Voice. Billy Crystal, his own voice unmistakably Famous, is less hammy than I'd been led to fear. Most of the porcine content is limited to his introductory scene as Calcifer; subsequently he delivers the part well. (I still would have liked to hear what David Ogden Stiers would have done with Calcifer, but you can't have everything.)
In sum, a very good film, enjoyable with little cavil up until the end. Its visuals easily stand up to those of this year's previous big-screen animated offerings; in depth and heart it roars past them like a bullet train. See this film and read the book. The world can't have too many aficionados of Hayao Miyazaki or Diana Wynne Jones, IMO.