Howl's Moving Castle
Written and directed
by Hayao Miyazaki
Written by Hayao Miyazaki, based on the novel by Diane Wynne Jones
Featuring the voices of Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Christian Bale, Billy Crystal and Lauren Bacall
Classification: PG
***
Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of milestone Japanese animation films such as Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, is often referred to as the Walt Disney of anime. You might also say he's the Japanese answer to Ovid, or the Brothers Grimm or Tolkien. Miyazaki is an old-fashioned fabulist, a creator of worlds where spiritual and physical transformations take place; where nature, in league with magical beings, is in conflict with human greed and violence. Characters' fates unfold against stunningly detailed vistas of mountains, forests and vast destruction caused by war and industry.
Part of the pleasure in Miyazaki's work is the knowledge that he's the last of the breed. He and his team of artists use traditional hand-drawn animation, scanned into the computer. Paradoxically, the English-language adaptation of his film comes to us through his fans at Disney and Pixar, the American companies that have abandoned traditional animation for the computer-assisted variety. They include Pixar mastermind John Lasseter ( Toy Story, A Bug's Life) and Pete Docter ( Monsters, Inc.), but Miyazaki's world has little to do with their pop-culture-stuffed, wisecracking comedies. Miyazaki's films depend on a guileless perspective, an effect achieved through grandeur of design and strangeness of juxtapositions that border on surrealism.
Howl's Moving Castle was adapted from a 1986 children's novel by English writer Diana Wynne Jones. The movie starts in what appears to be a late-19th-century, Central European town of cuckoo-clock houses and cobbled alleys, where plain, shy 18-year-old Sophie (Emily Mortimer) works in the milliner's shop her family runs.
But this isn't quite Europe, either past or future. There are incongruous shark-like airplanes flying overhead, and evil spirits, wizards and a witch hiding on the edge of town. Outside town, there's also the moving castle of the title, a huge Monty Pythonish contraption that crosses the country on giant bird legs, billowing smoke as it goes. Inside lives a handsome playboy wizard called Howl (Christian Bale) who, according to local legend, likes to literally steal the hearts of young girls.
Howl's arch-enemy is the Witch of the Wasteland (Lauren Bacall), who looks like an overfed society matron and rides around in a sedan chair carried by giant leeches dressed as footmen. When the King goes to war against a neighbouring country, his chief sorceress (Blythe Danner) issues a recruitment call for all citizens with magic powers.
Strange things start to happen. One day, when Sophie is being harassed by a couple of soldiers, a handsome caped rescuer suddenly appears by her side -- the wizard Howl. Moments later, they are chased through alleyways by the witch's slimy henchmen, and in the next scene Sophie is cursed by the witch and transformed into a 90-year-old woman (now voiced by Jean Simmons). This slow-moving old woman, who discovers an outspokenness and determination she lacked as a girl, becomes the movie's heroine. She sets out, gingerly, to find the castle, in the hope that Howl can reverse her curse.
Along the way she meets a scarecrow (one of several parallels to The Wizard of Oz), who bounces along on his Pogo-stick-like pole and leads her to Howl's castle. There she meets Howl's wisecracking fire demon, Calcifer (Billy Crystal, perhaps the most obvious concession to North American taste), who makes the moving castle operate. Sophie, whose curse includes an inability to talk about the spell on her, takes on cleaning duties for the vastly dirty travelling castle.
After a rattling first hour, Howl's Moving Castle loses some steam in its long complicated denouement. Without the traction of familiar psychological realism, the narrative path becomes slippery: In a fictional world where anything goes, so does the attention span. Every character is under a curse, which forces them to live in an altered state. Sophie's age appears to change, depending on her mood and who is seeing her.
Howl, who occasionally turns into a giant bird of prey, looks like Disney's Prince Charming, but acts more like Michael Jackson, hiding from the world and obsessing about the loss of his own beauty. As the moving castle and the movie roll on, the initially intriguing ambiguities grow tiresome.
With its bold screen-filling imagery, this is definitely a movie to be relished on the big screen. But later, when you take the DVD down from your shelf, you can be forgiven for the moving finger that heads toward the fast-forward button.
Liam Lacey