Howl's Moving Castle

director

Miyazaki borrowed some ideas from his earlier works to put together another tale of where love conquers all, a girl protagonist, and magic. The musical score is very similar to Spirited Away, but not disenchanting. Here, he addresses shallowness, greed and eny. There has been something about his work -- something, but here in the post WWII, mixed with Hong Kong feel -- VonTrap sandwiched there too, is American Girl series, the dolls, coupled with other sales items like movies. I'll have to see if there is much on him. He seems to be writing for a daughter who never ages.

It has rewatchability and has no strong adult content. The war in the backdrop plays a role in character coloring and a theme of pointlessness of war. In the end [SPOILER -- the war is called off, for a boy's heart cannot be won by a jealous queen]

I think, if I had a little girl, she would very much like this movie. The English version I saw had some voices, which seemed to me like Billy Crystal. I can only hope that Wikipedia is correct here for the voices:

Character	Japanese version	English version
Howl	Takuya Kimura	Christian Bale
Grandma Sophie	Chieko Baisho	Jean Simmons
Calcifer	Tatsuya Gashuin	Billy Crystal
Young Sophie	Chieko Baisho	Emily Mortimer
Witch of the Waste	Akihiro Miwa	Lauren Bacall
Markl	Ryunosuke Kamiki	Josh Hutcherson
Madame Suliman	Haruko Kato	Blythe Danner
Prince Turnip	Yo Oizumi	Crispin Freeman
Lettie		Jena Malone
Suliman's Servant	Mitsunori Isaki
Heen (Dog)	Daijiro Harada	--same as JP--

Still, I would rate Spirited Away, for sheer re-watchability as my favorite of his work. Since ... Moving Castle is based on a book, I will have to get that some time.

I think another recurring element in his work is smoke and clouds. Perhaps difficult for some to master, but he seems to have a team that realistically renders these ambiguous gases and makes them live. The film incorportates, as do all his films, different styles of motion, stills, animation. Some of the humor is very subtle and some visual humor is, well worth watching and can't be written as funny.

After some further reading, he directed (English name: Lupin IIII) I have never seen all of this, but some of it was included in an '80s laser disc arcade game. Lupin has many sequels and some TV episodes. From what I saw of it, it was definately the forerunner for physical comedy and slapstick found later in Poke'mon and other cartoons.

I was already thinking about seeing Howl's Moving Castle, when MR mentioned that I should watch it then bitch about it.