SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Offering an enthralling visual spectacle to disguise a dense, incomprehensible plot and lack of storytelling finesse, Howl’s Moving Castle makes for a mildly disappointing adventure for Studio Ghibli.
Part of me likes Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Its world is delightfully surreal and beautiful, its characters are memorable and it’s fully populated with Miyazaki’s signature director’s trademarks. On paper, it sounds like yet another opportunity to be swept away on an extraordinary adventure, and sitting down to watch this film, that’s exactly what I expected to happen. But for all its visual splendour and charm, Howl’s Moving Castle never manages to do that fully, nor does it live up to a spectacular first half that promises great things, but falters before it can deliver on them. It’s best summed up as pedestrian; while the film has a lot of qualities that make Studio Ghibli films great, the absence of a writer’s hand ready to deliver both nuance and poise makes them all seem disappointingly perfunctory.
A loose adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’ novel of the same name, Howl’s Moving Castle tells us the story of Sophie, a quiet young woman apparently destined to spend the rest of her life working in her father’s hat-making shop. Outside, her town and her country, loosely inspired by the kingdoms of 19th Century Europe, are at war. But none of this is really Sophie’s concern, until she’s rescued one day by the mysterious wizard Howl, drawing the attention of his enemy, the Witch of the Wastes. Placed under a curse that causes her to grow old well before her time, Sophie journeys to Howl’s walking castle to seek his assistance.
The movie’s setup is compelling, but it struggles to build on that foundation in a truly meaningful way. The backdrop of devastating conflict serves as a message about the evils of war, but the film seems content to go over themes covered in previous Ghibli films but without the nuance and without bringing anything new to the table. Both Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke make these themes central to their stories and make them relevant to their characters’ growth and development. In contrast, Howl’s Moving Castle almost seems bored with its own ideas. We spend an awful lot of time with main character Sophie, and it’s a credit to Miyazaki’s skill at writing female protagonists that you enjoy most of that time even though it’s suggested that most of the action is happening where Howl is; that is to say, off-screen. Trouble is, previous Ghibli films have fantasy worlds that operate within rules, which tie together story and worldbuilding elements that might otherwise be disparate. With Howl’s Moving Castle, the existence of witches, wizards and magic seems at odds with steel battleships and columns of brightly dressed soldiers marching off to fight a war we come to understand only in the vaguest possible terms.
It is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch to buy into this world, especially when the plot starts to meander in the second half. I don’t discount the possibility that some nuance gets lost in translation, but more than that, I genuinely do get the feeling it’s simply confusing, no matter the language. It’s best embodied by its eponymous castle: a ramshackle, rickety thing, haphazardly assembled and held together only by magic, journeying across the landscape. Its characters are a fun bunch to be around, and I have a particular fondness for Calcifer, the eggshell-gobbling fire demon that inhabits Howl’s gargantuan dwelling-on-legs. Like the castle though, it’s the visual magic that holds the whole thing together. Through its high-quality animation and sequences, simple acts like a thorough spring cleaning become heroic efforts, while you’ll be dazzled by an endless array of bright colours, painstaking detail, and other wildly imaginative creations as they cross the screen, one after the other. Contained within this visual spectacle is subtle humour, heart and flair as expected, and I can find no fault with Howl’s Moving Castle, at least in terms of the magnificent audiovisual experience it provides.
Perhaps it’s best suited to those who are more willing than I to just get lost in this film’s considerable splendour, without necessarily paying as much attention to whether the whole thing makes sense without some post-credits head scratching. I found it clunky and puzzlingly difficult to follow, and that difficulty dulled Miyazaki’s attempts to tell a story about war, compassion and courage. Much like Howl’s castle, the whole thing would fall apart without the magic that ultimately sustains it.
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