June 10, 2005

HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE is the ninth film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. He’s only done three more in the twenty years since, so I guess it counts as late Miyazaki. When I saw it back then I went to a subtitled screening, so this time I tried it with English dialogue, and that worked well too.

It’s a story about Sophie (Emily Mortimer, THE 51st STATE), a young woman who makes hats in a shop founded by her late father. When her sister Lettie (Jena Malone, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME), a baker, encourages her to find something she loves rather than staying shackled to the family business she swears she’s content doing this.

Then one night after close this terribly rude rich lady (Lauren Bacall, THE BIG SLEEP) comes into the shop and starts saying the hats are tacky. To quote THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, “we’re a business with posted hours,” so get the fuck out. But this lady is actually the Witch of the Waste, who has come not to look for headwear, but to curse Sophie by turning her 90 years old. Then she’s out of there in a palanquin carried by her henchmen, oily black blob people with nice coats and masquerade masks.

I like the symbolism – Sophie let time get away working at her dad’s hat shop forever, now all the sudden she’s old, with the voice of Jean Simmons (GREAT EXPECTATIONS [1946]). But you know what, Sophie really takes it in stride. Though her bones and back ache she hitches a ride as far as she can out of town and then continues on foot into The Waste, looking for a witch or wizard to break her curse. She sees a stick that would make a good cane but when she pulls it out of the bushes it turns out to be the base for a legless scarecrow, silent but alive. She calls him Turnip Head (on account of his turnip head) and he starts hopping behind her on his one stick. Though she tries to get rid of him he brings her to Howl’s castle, which is one of the great animation creations, a sort of mutated mix between a steampunk giant robot and an over-elaborate stove; an enormously complicated stack of bulbous metal parts with a face and protruding eyestalks, wobbling around on chicken legs. It’s a building that’s a vehicle that’s not alive but has a personality and gives a performance. It’s animated with the aid of computers but it sort of looks like many cutouts of very detailed paintings animated to create sort of a 2-1/2-D look.

Okay one thing I skipped over is that when Sophie went to see Lettie she got hassled by some soldiers and rescued by Howl (Christian Bale after a run of REIGN OF FIRE, EQUILIBRIUM and THE MACHINIST), a dreamy wizard with a reputation for being a lady’s man. Sophie knows he’s supposed to be bad news and also thinks he’d never be interested in her, but definitely swoons a little when he literally sweeps her off her feet and flies her to her destination (while evading the witch’s blobs).

And now she’s at his house but she looks like an old hag. To her credit she doesn’t seem to get very self conscious about it. She doesn’t find Howl, but she does meet a fire demon (basically a talking flame in a fireplace, with a face) named Calcifer (Billy Crystal, CITY SLICKERS, actually doing a fine job). He’s cursed to follow Howl’s orders and power the castle so they make a deal that if Sophie finds a way to free him he’ll turn her back to her real age. Then Sophie falls asleep and wakes up somewhere else, a shop somewhere, where a kid named Markl (Josh Hutcherson, AMERICAN SPLENDOR) finds her and tries to get her to leave, insultingly calling her “Grandma.” This kid is really funny, he works for Howl and answers the door for him wearing a fake beard and lowering his voice pretending to be an adult and somehow everybody seems to buy it.

There are cool details to this world, many coming straight from the book by Diana Wynne Jones. I love how clearly the movie communicates the conceit that although this shop is on the ground it’s also in the castle – because the castle’s front door is a portal to several different places. There’s a dial above the door that points to colors representing the different locations, including this and another storefront where Howl works as a wizard under different aliases, Jenkins and Pendragon.

Anyway, “Grandma” tells Markl she’s Howl’s cleaning lady, and everybody just goes along with it, including Howl, so now she is. “Act as if,” as they say.

Eventually we’ll get to know Howl, a great character. Sometimes long black feathers grow out of his skin, he becomes a sort of birdman and flies around. The two kingdoms he operates out of are at war, and both are demanding he see their leader, because they force wizards and witches to turn into monsters like that and fight for them. That doesn’t jibe with his anti-war beliefs, and also Calcifer warns that if he turns to a demon too long it’ll become permanent. Looking into the abyss and all that, I guess.

Howl’s got some flaws for sure. The reason the witch has it so bad for him is he dated her when she was pretending to be hot. When he found out what she really looked like he moved on, like he always does, and she didn’t take that well, it seems.

He’s also very vain. When Sophie goes to clean his bathroom it’s splattered with different colors from all the potions he uses on himself (also it’s implied his toilet is either unflushed or nasty as fuck). Since she reorganizes his potions he accidentally makes his hair the wrong color and he thinks it looks terrible and throws such a fit his face starts melting into puddles of transparent jelly, then he lays in bed in his room full of magical treasures like he’s dying. Total drama queen.

Sophie makes a nice old lady, but very pro-active and fearless. Whenever Markl tells her some rule that she thinks is stupid she just ignores it – for example the kid is just gonna eat cheese and bread for breakfast because only Howl can control the fire and he’s not home. She thinks that’s ridiculous and cooks eggs and bacon on Calcifer whether he likes it or not.

When Howl wants her to pretend to be his mom and go talk to the king to get him out of military service she figures why not? An interesting adventure. When she gets to the palace the Witch of the Waste has also been summoned. She recognizes Sophie and taunts her about her curse. They have to walk up some stairs to get to the palace, which is intimidating for old Sophie, but it’s even worse for the witch because she’s enormous and the king’s sorceress Suliman (Blythe Danner, THE X-FILES) has blocked the use of magic. She sweats and struggles so much that I felt bad for her even though I laughed when she asked Sophie for help and Sophie said she would if she was younger. I also felt bad when they put the witch in some kind of magic circle and started doing a spell on her. Looks painful.

To me this is the most beautiful thing about the movie. Suliman takes away the witch’s power, causing her to turn to her actual age, her body shrinking and her skin shriveling and drooping. And then Sophie escapes and brings the witch with her! When Howl comes home to find the Witch of the Waste and Suliman’s dog Heen (long story) at his breakfast table he’s surprised but completely accepting of it. Then he sees Turnip Head peeking through a hole in the wall (also a long story) and he says, “Looks like we have yet another addition to the family. You’ve got quite a nasty spell on you too. It seems everyone in this family’s got problems.”

You see? Beautiful. The old found family, the radical acceptance of each other’s troubles, I love it.

From what I’ve read this is a big change from the book, where the witch is just a normal bad guy who stays evil and gets killed. Here, freed of her preoccupation with trying to look younger, she becomes a nice old lady with a positive attitude toward life and the world, always saying things like, “What a pretty fire!” and “What a handsome man!” Appreciating things. Huge improvement. She does have a moment of weakness when she realizes (spoiler) Calcifer has Howl’s heart, which she always yearned to possess. She snatches it but when Sophie asks her to “please give it back” she does the right thing, sweetly saying “Here, dear” as she hands it over. Sophie tells her “Thank you, you have a big heart” and kisses her on the cheek. Because the movie has a big heart.

By the way, I was a little uncomfortable with the use of obesity (the witch has like six chins) in that common way where it seems to be a physical manifestation of her excessive, gluttonous personality. It’s an effectively bizarre and intimidating design (especially when her face fills the entire window of her palanquin) but it’s kind of mean to actual fat people… except when she shrivels up she is still fat, and it no longer seems repulsive. You get used to her and she becomes adorable. So it works out.

We’re looking at the summer of REVENGE OF THE SITH, a movie that at the time I noted had strong parallels to our political situation in its story of tyrannical Palpatine. But it wasn’t exactly meant as a commentary on George W. Bush – it just happened to be a universal pattern repeated throughout history, because the broad strokes of the story were conceived in the ‘70s in response to Nixon.

As far as I remember I did not make much of a connection between HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE and the current events of 2005, but now I’m reading that in fact Miyazaki made it partly in response to the Iraq War. Like SITH its message is sadly timeless, but yeah, I see it now. In the early scenes as we’re being introduced to this picturesque fantasy village with its cobblestone roads and little cottages and things, we see the townspeople waving flags and celebrating rows of tanks. There are soldiers in the streets with handlebar mustaches and uniforms that would fit into the Land of Oz, but they are bastards who sexually harass and intimidate young, pretty Sophie as soon as they see her, before Howl rescues her. Much later when Howl sees an approaching airship he says with disgust that it’s “Still looking for more cities to burn.”

“Is it the enemy’s or one of ours?” Sophie asks.

“What difference does it make?” he asks (before flying up to sabotage it). Howl doesn’t pick sides in something he knows is wrong. He’s a good dude.

Not only did Miyazaki want to make an anti-war movie, he was so disgusted by our foreign policy he just didn’t want to appeal to Americans anymore! He said, “I can also say with considerable confidence that any films I make in the future will never be big hits in the United States. Around the time of the war with Iraq, I even made a slightly conscious effort to create a film that wouldn’t be very successful in the United States.”

Yeah, I don’t know, maybe he was right. It seemed like a huge movie in whatever circles I was in at the time, so I am surprised now to be reading that its widest release was in 202 theaters. Disney did a great job creating English dubs, but maybe by this one they realized they didn’t know how to make them catch on big in theaters. Here we have an incredible movie released on an IYKYK basis while MADAGASCAR is huge and even fucking SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL is making money. HOWL’S made less than $5 million in North America but it made $230 million everywhere else. Miyazaki’s plan worked!

Coming after his most internationally marketed movie PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997) and his Oscar winning classic SPIRITED AWAY (2001), HOWL’S had alot to live up to. I don’t know if this was the actual consensus, but I remember feeling at the time that most people I talked to didn’t like it as much as me, thought it was not as good as whichever one was their favorite. Twenty years later you know what? I was right. This is a fuckin masterpiece. Some of his most beautiful animation, and a story full of empathy and kindness that overshadows the atrocities Miyazaki was reeling against. Who wants to burn cities from an airship – who wants to kill younglings? – when you could be flying around in a castle with the people you love, making magic?