Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #230: Howl's Moving Castle

Watching a lesser film by Hayao Miyazaki is like listening to the worst song by The Beatles: it’s not as good but it’s still The Beatles. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) has many of the Japanese master filmmaker’s trademarks, from the gorgeous hand-drawn animation to the magical creatures, and a strong female protagonist. Yet the story is not as enticing and one particular character comes off as underwhelming. On the plus side the titular castle looks great and it does do a lot of moving.

My first experiences with Miyazaki’s films were watching some of his best work at a film club at the University of Sherbrooke. I got around to seeing this one while looking for my first job after graduating from Sheridan College in 2011. In between jobs, low on cash, and staying at home in Quebec City, I was not spending a lot of money of movies. Good news for me, my brother buys as many movies as I do and he likes Japanese animation. He was very enthusiastic about it, saying the animation of Howl’s castle reminded him of the game Metal Slugs. Agreed, but if you are going to have good animation you should use it to sustain a good story.

The plot actually starts off as pretty straightforward, with eighteen-year-old Sophie (Emily Mortimer) being cursed by the Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) for refusing to help her. The curse turns the young Sophie into a 90-year-old Sophie (Jean Simmons) who sets on a quest to find her old self again. Or is it her young self again? Either way, it’s a quest story and those are always filled with oddball characters. One of the first she meets is a cursed living scarecrow that hopes around the fields and takes her to the moving castle of Howl (Christian Bale) a powerful and mysterious wizard who may have the power to cure her.

Unfortunately this is where things get very muddled and complicated. Pretending to be a cleaning lady, Sophie begins to work in the castle and is offered a deal by Calcifer (Billy Crystal), the chirpy fire demon who provides the energy for the castle. If she helps him break his curse he will help him break her curse. Meanwhile, Howl the wizard is involved in a war with Sophie’s neighbouring country and often assumes different shapes or identities when he goes out on his missions. At one point Sophie thinks a dog might be Howl in disguise. Then the witch gets back in the picture with problems of her own.

Confused? I was too. It’s a shame because this a story with a lot of potential and intriguing characters, but I found it inconsistent throughout. The character of Howl is introduced as this mysterious and powerful figure, but he throws a hissy fit when Sophie gives him the wrong hair dye. As for the war part of the story, it feels like it is intruding on Sophie’s quest, like a subplot taking over the main plot.

The movie’s saving grace and what guarantees its memorable film status is what you see on screen. Only in Miyazaki’s world do you get talking fireballs, shape-shifting wizards, airplanes carpet bombing a city, and a moving castle made out of its own separate parts.

It’s a shame the animation does not support a stronger story, but even in this age of computer animation, Miyazaki’s world is in a league of its own.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

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