Howl's Moving Castle: Review

[rowyn]

Lut and I did see this movie on Wednesday, and I enjoyed it a lot. But I do have mixed feelings about recommending it.

As I said before we went, I am a huge fan of Ms. Jones's writing and of this book in particular. The movie diverges wildly from the plot of the novel. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. One of the strange aspects of film is that Hollywood keeps making movies out of 100,000 word books when a movie really can't cover more than 25,000 words or so of text. Inevitably, changes are made.

The film does have delightful and engaging characters; not quite the same as the ones from the book, but similar enough to make me squeal in delight when Howl first shows up on camera. They're a lot of fun to watch and to listen to, and this is the main pleasure of the film.

The animation quality wasn't as high as in "Spirited Away" -- not that it was badly-animated or poor quality, it just wasn't as visually impressive.

But the biggest problem with the film is one endemic to much of fantasy and anime. There is magic in the setting, and the viewer isn't given enough information about the way magic works up front for the events of the movie to appear logical. Even some non-magical events are never adequately explained by the movie. The plot hangs together much better in the book; there, at the end, the reader can look back and say, "yeah, in light of A, B and C that were established early on, events E and F make sense." In the film, you get events F and Z and you just have to accept that this is the way the world works. "It's magic!"

So that annoyed me, but not enough to ruin my enjoyment of the film. I expect I will see it again on DVD, possibly even buy it. I definitely gotta read the book again.

In fact, I gotta go buy the book. I've read it twice, but both times I checked it out from the library. I went to Barnes and Noble immediately after seeing the film to buy a copy, but -- in a testament to the lack of promotion and support for the film -- they didn't have it in stock, and the woman at the counter told me it wasn't in stock at any other area stores, either. (Of course, she also told me the paperback edition was out of print, while both Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com are selling it, so perhaps she's wrong about other stores not having it, too.)

Comments

[hotspurre.livejournal.com]

Well! Isn't that ironic. I went out just this evening and saw the movie as well, with a friend. ;)

I figured I'd log into LJ for the first time in a while, and see if you'd seen it yet. I wouldn't have thought we'd have seen it the very same day. :)

I liked the movie as well. Unlike you, I have never read the book, and didn't have anytyhing to compare it to, but all in all I thought it was a very good movie, with quite likable characters, but not as strong in the plot department as other films like "Spirited Away" or "Princess Mononoke." The plot didn't hang together quite as well as those other films, and parts of the movie you ended up wondering why a character did something, it just seemed rather pointless. C'est la vie.

The voice work was truly superb, though. I mean, when I buy the DVD (I could say "if," but I know myself better,) I wonder if I'll *ever* watch it with the Japanese voices, the English ones are just that good. Billy Crystal, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bayle, Jean Simmons, they all do a wonderful job. They also did a great job of working together the CGI and traditional animation, I thought. It was nearly completely seamless.

Explanations = Bad

[kirzen.livejournal.com]

That's a very Eastern tradition though May-chan, there is often a great deal of things in Anime that aren't well explained, and they make no appologies about the fact that they won't make you try to understand. Strange endings and happenings come to mind, the ending to Akira for instance, isn't explained at all, one just knows that Tetsuo has been freed of his human tethers and flesh by Akira... and that is all, they never explain where he ended up, or how...

(MILD SPOILER ALERT)

In some ways, like you, I would have loved if they explained whether or not the main character's curse ever 'was' broken, and if they explained the tie between Howl and Calcifer a good deal more, or went into more depth regarding his childhood bargain and their shared curse. There was a great deal of things left unexplained, but myself... I think I like it more this way, in many movies these days they try to find a 'reason' for something intangible or spiritual, and in 80% of the cases, their reason stinks, and it can really screw up a story when the 'why' gets in the way of everything else.

Myself, I'll be buying it. But I'm also a tremendous fan of Studio Ghibli's work, and have mixed feelings about Disney buying the rights to distribution *shakes fist at the morons for never releasing some true -gems- like Porco Rosso*.

If you can't manage to find a copy of the book, I'll put my feelers out here. Shouldn't be hard, we have some -awesome- book stores here, that I've found crush Amazon's selection of 'obscure' stuff.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hoo yeah, the plot kind of managed to be close to the book for half the way, then went *whoosh* into the wild wilderness.

I gathered from revar that the bomb-things and enemy fighter crafts were wizards who had transformed themselves, abandoning some of their humanity. Strange stuff.

I've noticed that there's a distinct Miyazaki formula - you have this girl from a normal society who falls into extraordinary circumstances and is saved by a dashing man who has a secret of his own. This would seem to fall well into that category. While Studio Ghibli does great animation, I'd like to see more like Nausicaa and Laputa...