Howl's Moving Castle
Went to see Howl's Moving Castle (the subtitled version) last night at the Phoenix, despite the hideous cold and the loooooong day. It was certainly worth going to see, if only because, having read the book, I was curious to see how it would translate into anime. But definitely odd.
Overall, the film had most of the episodes, characters and plot elements that the book does, but they had been put together in such a different way that the effect was rather like looking at a familiar scene through a warped stained-glass window. Or perhaps like one of those things in the Times where they take a familiar English idiom, and put it through Babelfish a couple of times, to get something like 'They cannot inform an old dog of new turns'.
This isn't surprising when you take a story written for British children by a quietly imaginative and wickedly humorous Welsh woman and turn it into an anime film, though. The changes do have their own kind of charm, and I found the visualisations of the kingdom of Ingary really delightful.
My big difficulty, though, was the character of Howl. In the book, he's endearing because, despite being rakishly good-looking and a powerful wizard, he's also very young and uncertain of himself. In fact, he's basically a troubled teenager (although supposed to be in his 20s). He's sulky, self-absorbed, thoughtless, directionless, undisciplined, cowardly, vain and lazy. Yet he's also spontaneously kind and generous and secretly unhappy about his own short-comings. And alongside all that, he's very human and vulnerable: he gets drunk, he has a cold, he argues with his family, he gets frustrated, upset or afraid. And all of this is both why Sophie (and a high proportion of DWJ's female readers) falls in love with him, and, more importantly, why she doesn't realise she has until almost the end of the book
In the film, this complex cocktail doesn't come across at all. Film!Howl just seemed like something out of a slightly unsettling fairy tale, and certainly not human in the least bit. He throws some of the same moods as book!Howl, but they're meaningless - they don't add any extra depths to his character, but are just things he does, which are forgotten the next minute. And Sophie is bowled over by him after their first meeting! She may be slightly scared of him at times in the film, but never annoyed or exasperated with him, and so again it seems vapid and meaningless when they fall in love, rather than the cumulation of a long drawn-out process of development for their two characters.
In the end, the most important thing the film did for me was to make me go home and start reading the book again. I'd always meant to anyway, because I've yet to encounter the DWJ book which didn't reward at least one re-reading. Not perhaps quite what Hayao Miyazaki may have intended. But no complaints here.
Overall, the film had most of the episodes, characters and plot elements that the book does, but they had been put together in such a different way that the effect was rather like looking at a familiar scene through a warped stained-glass window. Or perhaps like one of those things in the Times where they take a familiar English idiom, and put it through Babelfish a couple of times, to get something like 'They cannot inform an old dog of new turns'.
This isn't surprising when you take a story written for British children by a quietly imaginative and wickedly humorous Welsh woman and turn it into an anime film, though. The changes do have their own kind of charm, and I found the visualisations of the kingdom of Ingary really delightful.
My big difficulty, though, was the character of Howl. In the book, he's endearing because, despite being rakishly good-looking and a powerful wizard, he's also very young and uncertain of himself. In fact, he's basically a troubled teenager (although supposed to be in his 20s). He's sulky, self-absorbed, thoughtless, directionless, undisciplined, cowardly, vain and lazy. Yet he's also spontaneously kind and generous and secretly unhappy about his own short-comings. And alongside all that, he's very human and vulnerable: he gets drunk, he has a cold, he argues with his family, he gets frustrated, upset or afraid. And all of this is both why Sophie (and a high proportion of DWJ's female readers) falls in love with him, and, more importantly, why she doesn't realise she has until almost the end of the book
In the film, this complex cocktail doesn't come across at all. Film!Howl just seemed like something out of a slightly unsettling fairy tale, and certainly not human in the least bit. He throws some of the same moods as book!Howl, but they're meaningless - they don't add any extra depths to his character, but are just things he does, which are forgotten the next minute. And Sophie is bowled over by him after their first meeting! She may be slightly scared of him at times in the film, but never annoyed or exasperated with him, and so again it seems vapid and meaningless when they fall in love, rather than the cumulation of a long drawn-out process of development for their two characters.
In the end, the most important thing the film did for me was to make me go home and start reading the book again. I'd always meant to anyway, because I've yet to encounter the DWJ book which didn't reward at least one re-reading. Not perhaps quite what Hayao Miyazaki may have intended. But no complaints here.