HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE
Howl's Moving Castle-one of the animes that i kept on watching and watching, especially the last part!
As always, Hayao Miyazaki delivers. i consider this movie to rank among his best, although it somewhat lacks the powerful emotional punch of "Spirited Away" or the fantastical grandeur of "Princess Mononoke".
Still the story (based on a book), backdropped on a European setting, is strangely moving and the visual imagery deeply satisfying. In fact, i'm running out of superlatives to differentiate each of Miyazaki's works.
The main characters are young (though with a twist on Sophie's part who intermittently reverts to her young/old self throughout the movie), and the plot is fairly easy to follow. There are secondary characters whose not-totally-bad/not-totally-good personas lend color and layers to an otherwise simple story. In the end, love and emotional resilience bring redeeming values to its protagonists.
Taken by itself, Howl's Moving Castle is an amazing movie. It's well-done, and very Miyazaki. The music is top-notch, and the animation is beautiful. For anybody who says Miyazaki can't create pretty characters, take one look at Howl. The one thing it is not, however, is a very faithful adaptation of the book. Up until the point where Sophie would go to visit Mrs. Penstemmon and the King, the adaptation is incredibly faithful. But then, Miyazaki decides to go off onto a parallel storyline that has rather little to do with Diana Wynne Jones' original story. Luckily for those of you who love the book, the ending is kept mostly intact, but it gets there in a very different way. If you watch in thinking of this as a completely different story, you'll love it.
I'm a sucker for animes, which means i watch a lot of them when i have the time...and i do consider Howl's Moving Castle as one of the best that i have seen so far. ^_^