I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold stober.
Hayao Mizayaki's Howl's Moving Castle came out around the tail end of my being hugely into anime. With not many series I was interested in available, I was relegated to looking for movies, so of course I saw Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. SA did less for me than PM but I definitely appreciated the movies as being radically different than Disney or Dreamworks. (I was a huge Disney fan in middle school and high school, but haven't watched much they've put out in the past decade unless I've been forced.)
I've put off watching HMC because I really wanted to read the book first. I'm not even sure how I knew it was based on an English-language book. I suspect I'd kept imdb'ing it trying to work out the basic plot and saw the author's last name was Jones.
Finally putting my hands on this book proved far more difficult than it ever should have been. Whenever I'd look up "Howl's Moving Castle" in the library online catalog I'd get multiple results, including a volumed-edition as well as the book. I ordered the first volume (which took ages to get to me) and it turned out to be a comic book-type rendition written by the Japanese director who adapted the story. Definitely not what I wanted, so I returned it the next week and picked up the actual book which was sitting in the juvenile section the entire time. I think I was just confused.
After reading through a few of the summaries on imdb, and seeing the trivia that it's "loosely" based on Jones' book, I suspect the movie will be altered enough in the details to be entertaining beyond the book itself.
To sum up the print medium of Howl's Moving Castle in one word: bizarre. Simply... bizarre. What first struck me was the "typical" roles the characters expected to play, set out in the first chapter: Sophie, as the eldest, didn't have much going for her while Martha, the youngest, could be expected to successfully go off and find her fortune. Obviously the book introduced the expectations to dash them later, and I've seen similar handling in adapted fairy tales.
The second bout of strangeness was Sophie's ready acceptance of being turned into an old woman. She seemed to say, "Huh, I'm old now, might as well act like an old woman instead of moping around." She was literally described differently, attributing her cackling and hobbling to what it was like to be old rather than young. The character didn't spend any time adapting, she just sort of shrugged and moved on. She was also far more imperious than she ever was at her regular age-which I guess was the point of the book. Going back to her May Day encounter with Howl she was a real "little gray mouse" while she had no qualms being an total irritant to him as an unwanted housekeeper.
I rather raced through the last chapter when the Witch-fire demons-missing Prince situation was resolved. I didn't care so much about the story itself as I did about Howl and Sophie. Although it was rather obvious early on that they'd end up together, I was still kind of won over by their interactions. I didn't expect Howl had known from the near-beginning so that was a pleasant surprise.
I think some of the appeal for me lies in the utter randomness of most of the items, people, and their bizarre behavior. The little details that weren't strictly necessary-Lettie and Martha changing places, the actual counting of blue triangles as Sophie sewed the blue suit back together-added to the book's surreal atmosphere. Little things keep sticking out in my mind, like Michael "laughing uncomfortably" when Sophie recalled the rumors that Howl would steal girls' souls.
The whole time I was reading, I felt there was a very sharp awareness behind what we saw through Sophie's limited viewpoint. I remember a conversation I had with a professor in college about Jane Austen, how her characters appeared to see things one way but there was a very clear voice of narrator over them-and of the narrator's mind, then the real author behind the narrator. In all of her books you can kind of see another awareness peeking out to wave every once in a while. While Jones by no means reaches the pinnacle of Persuasion, I had a distinct sense of overarching irony far beyond the characters and their surface actions.
Now I'm finally ready to see the movie, which lost out on Best Animated Feature Oscar to Wallace and Gromit. To that end, I've resubscribed to Netflix.
I've put off watching HMC because I really wanted to read the book first. I'm not even sure how I knew it was based on an English-language book. I suspect I'd kept imdb'ing it trying to work out the basic plot and saw the author's last name was Jones.
Finally putting my hands on this book proved far more difficult than it ever should have been. Whenever I'd look up "Howl's Moving Castle" in the library online catalog I'd get multiple results, including a volumed-edition as well as the book. I ordered the first volume (which took ages to get to me) and it turned out to be a comic book-type rendition written by the Japanese director who adapted the story. Definitely not what I wanted, so I returned it the next week and picked up the actual book which was sitting in the juvenile section the entire time. I think I was just confused.
After reading through a few of the summaries on imdb, and seeing the trivia that it's "loosely" based on Jones' book, I suspect the movie will be altered enough in the details to be entertaining beyond the book itself.
To sum up the print medium of Howl's Moving Castle in one word: bizarre. Simply... bizarre. What first struck me was the "typical" roles the characters expected to play, set out in the first chapter: Sophie, as the eldest, didn't have much going for her while Martha, the youngest, could be expected to successfully go off and find her fortune. Obviously the book introduced the expectations to dash them later, and I've seen similar handling in adapted fairy tales.
The second bout of strangeness was Sophie's ready acceptance of being turned into an old woman. She seemed to say, "Huh, I'm old now, might as well act like an old woman instead of moping around." She was literally described differently, attributing her cackling and hobbling to what it was like to be old rather than young. The character didn't spend any time adapting, she just sort of shrugged and moved on. She was also far more imperious than she ever was at her regular age-which I guess was the point of the book. Going back to her May Day encounter with Howl she was a real "little gray mouse" while she had no qualms being an total irritant to him as an unwanted housekeeper.
I rather raced through the last chapter when the Witch-fire demons-missing Prince situation was resolved. I didn't care so much about the story itself as I did about Howl and Sophie. Although it was rather obvious early on that they'd end up together, I was still kind of won over by their interactions. I didn't expect Howl had known from the near-beginning so that was a pleasant surprise.
I think some of the appeal for me lies in the utter randomness of most of the items, people, and their bizarre behavior. The little details that weren't strictly necessary-Lettie and Martha changing places, the actual counting of blue triangles as Sophie sewed the blue suit back together-added to the book's surreal atmosphere. Little things keep sticking out in my mind, like Michael "laughing uncomfortably" when Sophie recalled the rumors that Howl would steal girls' souls.
The whole time I was reading, I felt there was a very sharp awareness behind what we saw through Sophie's limited viewpoint. I remember a conversation I had with a professor in college about Jane Austen, how her characters appeared to see things one way but there was a very clear voice of narrator over them-and of the narrator's mind, then the real author behind the narrator. In all of her books you can kind of see another awareness peeking out to wave every once in a while. While Jones by no means reaches the pinnacle of Persuasion, I had a distinct sense of overarching irony far beyond the characters and their surface actions.
Now I'm finally ready to see the movie, which lost out on Best Animated Feature Oscar to Wallace and Gromit. To that end, I've resubscribed to Netflix.