Storytelling
Howl's Moving Castle
Hayao Miyazaki's animated movies are casually enchanted. They don't treat magic as a mere plot device; they frame it in dramatic or poetic terms, so that it reflects the characters' internal struggles and embodies the story's themes. Miyazaki's fusion of action and metaphor makes his films hypnotic even when they're gentle and quiet (which is most of the time). His latest, Howl's Moving Castle, is so richly imagined that it makes most American fantasies, animated or live-action, seem thin and stale. It's a storybook dream.
Miyazaki has only recently become famous in America, but in Japan, he's as influential as Walt Disney or Steven Spielberg. He and his friend and collaborator, Isao Takahato, co-founded Studio Ghibli, Japenese animation's commercial and artistic standard-bearer. (A sampling of Ghibli work is now showing at MOMA.) The studio had great success here with 1999's Princess Mononoke and 2002's Spirited Away, which were powerfully Japanese in subject and style. (Spirited Away even managed to win the 2003 Oscar for Best Picture, albeit against weak competition.) But viewers who have only seen those two films will be startled by Howl's Moving Castle, a combination odyssey, love story and antiwar parable about a cursed young man and woman thrown together inside a gigantic iron castle that clomps through verdant landscapes on taloned chicken feet.
Based on a 1986 children's novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the movie puts quasi-Anglo-looking characters into a European setting, and features a design scheme that owes less to Japanese fantasy than to L. Frank Baum's Oz books, the tales of Baba Yaga and the Brothers Grimm, and the pioneering sci-fi of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Set in a rural, war-torn Europe poised somewhere between the 19th and 20th centuries, it tells the strange tale of Sophie (Emily Mortimer), a smart, kindhearted but socially awkward 18-year-old who works in her mother's hat shop. Two grave threats plague the land: a war between Sophie's unnamed nation and an unnamed, unseen rival who attack each other with bombs and winged demons shat from the sphincter-like openings of warplanes, and the aforementioned moving castle, which is said to be controlled by Howl (Christian Bale), an evil wizard who captures beautiful young girls and eats their hearts.
Sophie first meets Howl while walking home from the hat shop. She doesn't know that he's Howl; he just looks like a dashing, slightly foppish young man with flowing blond hair. He saves her-or does she save him?-from an attack by oily, globbish humanoids disguised in human clothes. These beasts-who physically resemble Okutaresama, the sludgy river god from Spirited Away-work for the Witch of the Wastes (Lauren Bacall), an evil spellcaster who curses Sophie, turning her into a plump, stooped-over elderly woman (Jean Simmons).
Terrified of explaining the curse to her family, Sophie flees town, her arthritic old limbs creaking with every step-you can actually hear the cartilidge pop!-and eventually finds herself working as cleaning lady inside Howl's moving castle, which is a lot cozier and messier than she ever could have imagined. Besides Howl, the castle's denizens include a boy wizard-in-training named Marki (Josh Hutcherson), who disguises himself behind an immense dwarf-like bead, and a cranky, neurotic fire demon named Calcifer (Billy Crystal) who lives in the hearth and complains that the castle would collapse without his efforts. Sophie also has another enchanted friend familiar from Baum's work, a loyal scarecrow-only this one is mute, has a turnip for a head, and hops around on a pole, pogo-stick-style.
As always in Miyazaki's films, the characters reveal their complexity in stages without ever relinquishing their core of mystery. Calficer has a primal connection to Howl that I'd rather not spoil here. Sophie, who at first seems a typically sweet, chaste cartoon ingénue, is revealed as an old soul in every sense. She longs to see strange sights and experience adult, romantic love. And she adapts to old age with startling quickness, reacting to her physical and psychological changes with more curiosity than resentment. (Sitting alone in a stubby little chair on the bank of a lake, she muses, "When you're old, all you want to do is stare at the scenery.") In time, the witch of the waste's peevish malignance peels away, revealing a vengeful, jilted woman who, like Sophie, was disfigured by a curse. Howl is the deepest character of all-a magical man-boy, like the Little Prince or Peter Pan (both of which are pointedly referenced in dialogue and imagery) who disappears for days at a time, transforming himself into a winged creature who fights on behalf of his government.
Miyazaki links this movie to the rest of his filmography by presenting war itself as murderously infantile and senseless. Howl's warrior mentality is depicted as a kind of regression-a means of escaping from the adult man's obligation to become civilized, stable and loyal to something besides his own impulses.
A utopian feminist, Miyazaki believes women are a civilizing influence on men; that the closer men get to women, the more evolved and fulfilled they become. Viewed in this context, Howl is revealed as sort of a nightcrawling bachelor soldier with no fixed address. He lives in a moving castle, and the castle itself contains a dimensional portal that can deliver Howl and his fellow castlemates to one of four destinations in an instant. Howl also has at least two other identities. "All of this magic is just to keep everyone away," he says. Asked how many aliases he needs, Howl replies, "As many as I need to keep my freedom." It's funny and fitting that Sophie's bond to Howl is signified by a ring on her finger. In her dotty housekeeper guise, she's a maternal figure. She only reveals her true form-her teenaged form-when she's dreaming about Howl or thinking about how much she loves him.
I've only begun to describe this movie's richness. Like the best fantasies-animated or otherwise-it is designed to be watched closely, then explicated like a poem. It's far from a perfect movie-like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, it's long-winded, and its internal mythology sometimes goes fuzzy just when it ought to be sharp. But it's uniquely dazzling all the same-as visually intricate as a Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton movie, with a dense, imaginative soundscape that's as realistic (and therefore convincing) as the images are fantastic. Its most daring set-pieces induce a state of mind that few movies deliver: the tingly lightheadeness you feel when you briefly depart the waking world and get lost in your own imagination.
Though Howl's Moving Castle may strike American viewers as a departure from Studio Ghibli's norm, it's arguably more representative of Miyazaki's work than Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Like Akira Kurosawa-a profound influence on Ghibli-Miyazaki and Takahato have often looked to Western cultures for inspiration. By embracing the world, then applying his own sensibility, Miyazaki creates borderless pop art with a potentially limitless ability to move audiences. The best Ghibli movies remind you of what it felt like to be a child, hearing an adult read a fairy tale in patient, loving tones.