Howl's Moving Castle

119 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 03/07/2006
Reviewed: 04/25/2006

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I spent a good portion of the Spirited Away write-up talking about our experiences with theater going and anime (the rest, if you'll remember, was about mono). I'm not gonna bore you with that again, I'll just say that Joel, Jerry, and I were unable to make it to Howl's Moving Castle at the Ritz theatres in Center City. Now that Joel's all "married" there's like a secret law that he can't hang out more than once a week under penalty of death. It's weird, I know, but who am I to argue with the sanctity of marriage?
So I just got around to seeing Howl's this past week. I wasn't in a particular rush because I've experienced what a Miyazaki movie has to offer already. There's a girl and a boy lead and one's magical and one's not and there's lots of flight involved and there's a message about the power of love overcoming hatred (and also war!) and I called this about six months ago. And I'm not gonna say I told you so... but I told you so. Or, I told "me" so, I guess. I didn't really tell you anything in the first place. It's got to be like rote memorization for the guy by this point, making these kind of movies is like muscle memory. They just pop out while he's whipping up a tuna sandwich for lunch. Celery, mayo, all of a sudden, oops! Howl's Moving Castle is born.

So I guess this one was based on a novel of Welsh origin, but even the novice observer would be able to tell it was a very loose translation at best. That, or someone out there in Europe makes the exact same type of books as Hayao Miyazaki makes movies and they somehow managed to connect over the vast expanse of this blue planet.

I don't even feel like talking about this movie requires a plot summary, but since it's the vogue thing to do... I'll be brief. There's a girl named Sophie who gets cursed and turns into an old hag and meets a magical boy named Howl and they have magical adventures together and then she learns that she was so much more than the ordinary girl she originally thought she was. Throughout this magical adventure she meets cutesy little sidekicks like the anthropomorphic fire and the animated scarecrow with a turnip for a head. He wears a top hat, so you know he's jaunty. Also, all the badguys really aren't that bad and just about everyone gets back together at the end. If I could use the vernacular,"'it's all good, man."

And, in theory, it is "all good", man. But at the same time... it's not. Because he's made this movie before. If I went through the records he's probably made about a dozen of them. Let's set aside the fact that I've liked just about every Miyazaki movie I've seen, I'd rather see him take a risk I might not like than sit through another one of his paint-by-numbers, square peg + square hole movies that's good enough, but never better than that these days.

Howl's Moving Castle is entirely what you would expect from a Miyazaki movie. There are no surprises, and the only revelation is that his movies seem to gradually be getting slower paced and less expository as time goes on. Nobody's saying you have to spend a ten minute time out talking about the Great Dagger of Galgamek and it's importance to the matter at hand during your movie, but I think saying ONE WORD about why Sophie's curse suddenly starts resolving itself halfway through the movie might've been nice. Having something important happen in your movie more than once every lunar year would've been good too. Scenes of fancy flight and outlandish character designs and big mustaches are really great, and all, but if you're just gonna do that then I don't see why I wouldn't just watch Nausicaa.

On paper it sounds like a perfectly reasonable example for a movie, and in execution it succeeds in a lot of ways. It's just... we've all seen Miyazaki make that movie before. As I told Joel in the podcast this week, I liken it to Christopher Guest and his host of "mockumentary" films. Sure I liked Best in Show, and I like Spinal Tap, but the guy's been making basically the same dang movie for 20 years now. I don't like the idea that being a big name director, in cartoons or not, means you can plug in all the pieces together in the same order and make a "brand new" movie out of them.
Hey, I don't know man. Maybe I'd be singing a different tune if there was some big name guy that got to make sweet movies about robots and punk chicks every other year. I wouldn't be crying in my soup about that, but I've seen enough whimsical romps from Miyazaki, and it's not like the guy doesn't have a thirty year backlog of stuff to keep me busy. Frankly, I'm pretty happy with just Panda! Go Panda! and Castle of Cagliostro, I don't need another Spirited Away. Put out something new Miyazaki, because otherwise you're just settling.