Strange Narrative Decisions, #1. David* recently procured me (cheapcheap!) an evil bootleg copy** of Howl's Moving Castle. It's a lovely movie, but actually not as all-embracingly wonderful as I'd hoped, given its genesis as the bastard offspring of my favourite anime director and one of my favourite fantasy authors. It's currently sitting a bit behind my other Miyazaki favourites, which are My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away with a side bet on Princess Mononoke. (Good heavens, they're all the folkloric ones, how utterly predictable and very not strange at all. And I should add, for the record, that in terms of these rankings there are whole swathes of Miyazaki I haven't seen, and won't see until July when my long-suffering mother hauls the latest Amazon pantechnicon of DVDs out from the UK on my behalf. Including Howl's Moving Castle, so I decline to feel guilty about the bootlegging).
Anyway. Lovely film, the usual visual splendours and whimsical detail, the classic Miyazaki gentleness and studied pace. Very attractive Howl (yum, in fact), very appealing Sophie, very cute Calcifer and (particularly) castle. And I love what he's done with the scarecrow. I suspect what's marring my enjoyment, though, is my extreme familiarity with the Diana Wynne Jones novel, and consequent response to this as an adaptation. There are some weird narrative choices here. The war theme that's a minor background to the novel moves right to the forefront, which works OK, and is very Miyazaki in the Nausicaa mode. I can also see why he's chosen to reinterpret the heartlessness of Howl as a very visual monstrosity, although I lament the loss of the sappy Howl girl-chasing. There are some strange character conflations and reversals, though: I can't work out why he's cut back the effectiveness of the Witch of the Waste and removed that epic (and extremely visually dramatic) conflict between her/her fire demon and Howl. I would have thought it would be very easy to infuse the nasty war scenario with the fire demon theme, they're very related, particularly given how strongly the war is conceptualised in terms of fiery destruction. And Sophie loses all her witch powers, which are central to the book. Annoying.
Cute dog, though. It huffles.
Strange Narrative Decisions, #2.
Ursula Vernon's blog currently features a very funny discussion of apocryphal Bible books as fanfic. This made me laugh a lot, although it's remotely possible that the mere concept of Jesus/Harry Potter crossover fanfic has scarred me for life.
Strange Narrative Decisions, #3. I have to dash off now and dig out the necessary weird assortment of props preparatory to running our enormous, complicated, plot-ridden, highly political Arabian Nights LARP this evening, for a bunch of relatively inexperienced CLAW players. There may well be frustrated artistic rantage on areas not entirely unconnected to this blog in the morning...
* the other bass, not the d@vid or Lara's one. We rejoice in an elegant sufficiency of Davids.
** In fact, I actually typed "an evil bootlet copy" there, conjuring fascinating mental images of petite footwear with lots of steampunky protrusions, and claw-like mechanical feet.