Movie! ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’

Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to have read Diana Wynne Jones’ ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ at a very young age. In fact, I suspect that I may be the only person in the world who has never read the book at all (please leave a comment if you haven’t read the book either and ease my feelings of loneliness!) However, thanks to the great present buying skills of my wife I can now move firmly into the camp of ‘people who have seen Hayao Miyazaki’s anime version’. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was great.
For those of you who don’t know the story, Sophie is a hat maker who is transformed into a 90 year old woman after getting involved in an ongoing dispute between the Wizard Howl and the wicked Witch of the Waste. Sophie is not the sort to take this lying down and sets out to have her youth restored to her; she finds refuge in Howl’s moving castle and her journey begins. A tale of warfare, love and redemption awaits the viewer…
The first thing you notice about ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ is the absolutely stunning artwork that goes into pretty much every frame of the film. There is so much to see I actually got lost in the amount of detail on the screen and every so often had to remind myself that these were only pictures on my TV screen. I don’t know much about animation but it’s really good to see that in the days of CGI animation there’s still someone somewhere who’s really gone for broke using more traditional methods. I loved the steampunk imagery in particular.
Having watched all the pretty pictures for a while I suddenly realised that there was also a story underpinning all this and that was really good as well. Any character of note (and one character that you wouldn’t have expected) appears to have had a curse placed on them and the story follows their efforts to achieve some measure of peace. Howl also has issues of cowardice to deal with and even the wicked Witch of the Waste elicited a measure of sympathy once I got to know her better. In short, I ended up really getting behind everyone and wanting things to end happily (especially when it became apparent that the rulers of the kingdom had ulterior motives that crossed purposes with our heroes). As well as this, some of the imagery from the ongoing war does tug on the heartstrings…
Like I said, I’ve never read the book but there were points in the film where things felt glossed over and not explained fully. The ending was a bit rushed as well and I’m pretty sure that the circumstances behind one ‘revelation’ were not mentioned earlier on. These are really tiny niggles though when set against a film that I fell in love with when I saw it. I’ll be watching ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ again and I don’t think I’ll ever get bored with it. I may even have to go out and buy the book…


Nine out of Ten