Howl's Moving Castle

I saw Miyazaki's adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle on Saturday. Capsule review: What the hell was that?

As usual, Miyazaki's animation is wonderful: Howl's Castle lurches and breathes like a living thing, and the mechanical battle transports manage, impossibly, to scuttle while they glide.

Right now, anyone who's read the book but not seen the movie is saying, "Battle transports?!"

Nineweaving, who knows a thing or two about dreamlike stories, sums it up perfectly (via coffee_and_ink):

It is splendid; but more of a fantasia on the book than a recreation. It's much darker and more dreamlike, less madly logical: as if Miyazaki had fallen asleep with his head on the book and dreamed it. There are scenes of war that might be from The Iron Dragon's Daughter, nightmares of industry. There are landscapes of a melancholy beauty: though I loved the green and misty hillsides better than his fields of flowers. And there is the Castle: which lurches about on chicken feet, huffing steam from every chink, and looks as if Baba Yaga's hut had stuffed itself on several half-timbered villages and a rusted-out Satanic mill. As if it had swallowed the Shire and belched. Unsettling but gorgeous.

Diana Wynne Jones' novel is about a young girl, Sophie, who is the eldest of three sisters. A curse turns her into an old lady, forcing her to run away from home. She winds up in the castle of the wizard Howl, trying to figure out the nature of the assorted curses that are keeping everyone from living happily ever after.

I didn't expect the movie to hew close to the book, but it caromed off into completely unfamiliar territory. I had no idea where the story was going, which is fine; but it mutilates and abandons Sophie's story, which is not.

My disorientation is partly due to the fact that the novel is very much in the tradition of, and commentary on, European fairy tales. All the classic props are there: The curse, the quest, the three daughters, the riddles, and the old woman who knows more than she's telling and is Not What She Seems. (It's just unfortunate for Sophie that she happens to be that old woman.) And Sophie knows how fairy tales ought to go; the eldest child never gets to seek her fortune. On top of this, Miyazaki's backdrops have European architecture and German signs and labels.

The movie is decidedly not a Western fairy tale, however. Perhaps it makes more sense in the conventions of Eastern storytelling, or maybe the original Japanese is more coherent than the English version. (There is a cogent comparison of the the subtitled version vs. the dub that I saw here.)

So: it's lovely, and it's absorbing, but it's confusing as hell.