Anime Review :: Howl’s Moving Castle [2004]

Director - Hayao Miyazaki
Written By - Diana Wynne Jones
Screenplay – Hayao Miyazaki
Language – English Dub
Starring – Christian Bale, Jean Simmons, Billy Crystal

Miyazaki has entirely too many films considered masterpieces for his own good, and while it’s usually not fair to rate a film against someone’s existing body of work, I’m gonna go ahead and do it anyway.

The Hayao checklist is all accounted for off the jump. Lead character with a curse? A war? Royalty being involved? Nature? Magic? Some form of frightening mindless Ooze-Men? (Seriously, this guy has it out for mindless ooze-men.) To lesser visionaries, this would be borderline self-parody, but luckily for Miyazaki, he’s always got enough visual punch to cover his ass.

The story follows Sophie, a modest young woman working at a hat shop who starts her adventure after an inadvertent run-in with a dashingly handsome and predictably mysterious wizard named Howl. Yes. The fella who has a moving castle.

Howl proving himself as the traditional romantic interest who’s more trouble than their worth, after her encounter, Sophie gets chased by blob-men and cursed by the equally blob-like Witch of the Waste. She’s now an old woman who, as we quickly learn is the detail of most curses in this world, isn’t able to talk about what happened to anyone beyond the witch herself.

Whimsy, art-direction, and yet another imaginative world run rampant over the first hour, as well as a delightful peppering of Wizard of Oz nods. One of the bigger problems with Howl’s, however, is that it blows too much of it’s magical wonderland upfront and leaves us playing catch-up as the film takes a turn for the average.

Eventually all the cast are making assumptions based on information the viewer hasn’t been let on and, like is all too common, you’re left to shrug and explain away the plot-holes with the handy caulk that is “the power of love.” Miyazaki is so accustomed to creating his unique little worlds that this time he’s really failed to make clear the rules over the course of the story.

Soon enough you're met with “your hair looks like starlight” and everybody hugs, which, you enjoy, because it’s a lighthearted story about the power of love, but while you’re jumping up and down for joy with the characters your mind does wonder to exactly why it is you’re hugging anyway.

Was this a wonderful story or did it just coast on a walking castle or the flamboyant charm and overwhelming cool of the male lead?

The answer is both.

Still, the end result is a wonderful film that’d be an out-of-the-park piece by any other director. Miyazaki unfortunately is forced to work within the handicap of… being Miyazaki.

[3.5/4]