released 01 apr 06 / last mod 01 apr 06 / greg goebel / public domain
* In HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (HMC), an animated movie by Hayao Miyazaki based on a novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones, we are taken to a fantasy world at something like a late 19th-century / early 20th-century level of technology, with steam trains, horseless carriages, dreadnought battleships, fantastical flying machines (they're all ornithopters, flying by flapping wings) -- and advanced sorcery. At the moment, two nations are becoming involved in a war.
Sophie, a plain and sensible girl working in a hat shop, gets into a bit of trouble in a back alley and is aided by a handsome magical stranger. The stranger, the wizard Howl, unintentionally gets Sophie in much worse trouble: the jealous Witch of the Waste turns Sophie into an old woman. Sophie, frightened to show her wizened face, runs off into the wasteland, to end up working as a cleaning woman in a dingy and dilapidated walking castle owned by Howl and kept running by a fire demon named Calcifer.
HMC is, as one would expect from Miyazaki, a beautiful production job with sparkling animation, ingenious machines, and vivid storyscapes. It is particularly imaginative, with the movie often taking twists and turns that take the watcher completely by surprise. More than once I had to back up and sometimes freeze-frame so I could figure out what happened. However, at the same time that imaginativeness also becomes a bit of a weakness, since in HMC it sometimes seems to get in the way of telling the story. There's so much going on that it reduces emotional impact, and there are also times where the plot twists seem to simply end up being loose ends that go off into nowhere.
That's maybe being a bit picky, since the general story is straightforward enough, but I do have to judge HMC as not quite in the same league with Miyazaki's more powerful works, like PRINCESS MONONOKE and SPIRITED AWAY. However, it is clearly a notch above Miyazaki's older works, like CASTLE IN THE SKY.
Highly recommended, though I should warn there are some violent scenes involving aerial bombardments. Another comment, just for pacing yourself, is that HMC is two hours long. There is a second disk of extras with this DVD volume, but I rarely have much interest in extras and I cannot comment on them one way or another.
