Flak Magazine: Review of Howl's Moving Castle, 06-22-05

Through hard work, consistency, and the endless work of an army of sympathetic American film critics, Hayao Miyazaki has become a brand to be reckoned with in the US animation market.

Like his video game equivalent, Shigeru Miyamoto, Miyazaki presides over a sprawling workshop of talented craftspeople, guiding complicated projects to harmonious conclusions. The result is hit after hit, always smart, always charming, always worth the consumer's time and money.

Howl's Moving Castle extends the franchise. Miyazaki has a command of scope and pacing that is more reminiscent of Laurence of Arabia than Disney's Tarzan. Nobody, with the possible exception of Peter Jackson, does an epic landscape with more oomph than Miyazaki. And nobody, with no exceptions whatsoever, is more adept at capturing the tiny gestures of tiny creatures in order to forge state-of-the-art cuteness.

Drama is in the details, and Miyazaki is as painstakingly conscious of the fine stitchwork as he is of the pennants and uniforms that create Howl's broad martial spectacle. As usual, he gets little things right: the click of a door, a wrinkling fold of flesh, the slow swelling and falling of a drop of blood.

Howl's Moving Castle is set in a quasi-Victorian fantasy world where streetcars, habadashers and 19th-centry European-style military uniforms mix with airborne dreadnaughts, wizards, and magical warfare. At the film's outset, hat-maker Sophie is at work in her deceased father's shop, toiling away relentlessly. She's not oppressed; she just doesn't have the desire to do anything more engaging or adventurous. Enter the wizard Howl. The creator of a massive, ramshackle, awe-inspiring walking fortress, Howl is being courted as a mercenary by both sides of an upcoming war. He's also the target of a powerful witch's vendetta.

Sophie gets caught in the crossfire, and ends up imprisoned in her own suddenly aged body; once lithe and lovely (dubbed "plain" by the film's blinkered denizens, of course), she is transformed into a hunched crone. Thus she finds herself converted by circumstances and emotions from a young lady with an old woman's soul, to old lady with a young woman's heart, in love with Howl and fiercely protective of him.

Howl is not a conventional love interest. With his two earrings, vast power, tricked-out personal mansion, room full of childish, colorful magic trinkets and his propensity for denying the demands of reality and turning from man to monstrous force of nature, Howl resembles a child-safe and magical Michael Jackson.

Still, you can kind of see how his combination of power and stunning good lucks might be appealing, and the relationship between the two protagonists is believable, if sometimes vexing. Halfway through the film, Sophie exclaims:

"I've never been beautiful, and all I'm good at is cleaning!"

Uh-oh. You hear it, and think, "Actually, you were quite cute, although you've got a point about the cleaning thing."

Sophie is a character who is far more passive than active: a person to be protected, to be escorted, rescued, sheltered and eventually treated to a fairy tale ending. Her action sequences are all catalyzed by and in support of Howl. In some ways this is a refreshing change from the grating, politically correct Disney heroines who rotely pound the self-sufficiency of women into our heads to the point of killing the story.

But other than her housekeeping skills, Sophie's central contribution to the story seems to be her unconditional love for Howl. "Even if you're some kind of crazy demon monster," she sort of says, "I will get my freak on with you. And then bake you a pizza. And do the dishes."

That said: offering unconditional love in Howl's Moving Castle is a fascinating challenge, ably depicted through many stunning visual metaphors. It means loving young Sophie, loving old Sophie, loving crazy-ass bird-demon Howl, loving whiny, pouty Howl Jackson, loving one another as bombs are falling, and loving one another at the cost of losing everything material that the film's oddball family has accumulated.

At times, the film recalls Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in terms of the imagination it exercises while depicting the often-tested bond between Sophie and Howl. In one particularly memorable vignette, Sophie travels back to Howl's childhood to tell him that she will be waiting for him in the future, to help him reunite with his own heart.

Elegantly depicted, the scene is just one of the film's many clever (and cleverly executed) conceits. Miyazaki is full of little tricks — magical minions made of a tar-like goo who shrink down to be stored in a brass teapot; a wheezy old fat dog whose antics are inevitably and genuinely heart-warming; and the nature of the moving castle itself.

More than just self-propelled real estate, the castle is an extension of Howl's pact with a curmudgeonly fire demon called Calcifer (charming in the subtitled version of the film; reputedly annoying when dubbed by the overexposed Billy Crystal). Mounted on massive chicken legs, and customizable based on Howl's whims, the castle's front door is a conduit to four very different physical locations, depending on how its destination disc is positioned.

Charmingly crafted as it is, the film isn't without significant stumbles. Like many (if not all) fantasies, Howl's suffers from a need to make its world a direct and heavy-handed commentary on our own through sometimes rigidly executed parallels. Instead of relying upon the magic of his own realm to carry his story through, Miyazaki tacks on a Seussian war story (two identical kingdoms engaged in a nonsensical and horrible conflict for no reason whatsoever).

An interview with NPR reveals that Miyazaki's own harrowing experiences during World War II inspired Howl's darker moments. But the war story feels grafted on, rather than an organic and engaging part of the film as a whole.

And while it's hard to demand rigid logic and honesty from a film that is unapologetically a fairy tale, the chintzy deus ex machina that wraps up the otherwise internally consistent plot of Howl's Moving Castle brought certain oversensitive viewers stumbling out of New York's City Sunshine Theater full of resentment and bitter oaths.

It's not that bad. Miyazaki deserves a light ruler-smack across the wrists for so lightly shrugging off the film's conclusion — by changing tone and attention to detail so quickly, it dents the film's fairy-tale spell. But he also deserves a warm round of applause for serving up yet another elegant animated epic.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)