Movie Night: Howl's Moving Castle

We recently caught the new Hayao Miyazaki anime feature film, Howl's Moving Castle. Miyazaki is the undisputed current master of Japanese animation. His previous film, Spirited Away, was theatrically released in the U.S. and won the director an Oscar.

We'd seen the Miyazaki film that preceded Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, which was the largest grossing film in Japan at the time it was released in the late 1990's.

So we went into Howl's Moving Castle with high expectations. Howl's is yet another stunning example of Hayao's preternaturally Japanese vision of spirituality and coming of age innocence. But the film falls surprisingly short.

We were disappointed, for one, because the movie breaks it's own internal logic in its storytelling. The film also seems to rely on some cheaper conventions of Japanese animation that appear thrown in for no good reason than an easy, gimmicky gag that might appeal to a child audience. This wasn't a problem with the more complex and more overtly fantastic worlds created in Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke.

Howl's Moving Castle revisits more of the territory explored in an earlier Miyazaki film called Porco Rosso, which was recently released on DVD in the U.S. Porco Rosso also left us disappointed, even it is indisputedly classic Miyazaki, especially when viewed with the hindsight of the director's total filmography. And even more so gicen his recent feature films, wherein the stories invariably revolve around a teenage girl wrestling with enormously powerful and mystical forces.

The verdict? See Howl's Moving Castle for the spectacle and the story and a taste of brilliant Japanese anime. But if you really want to see Miyazaki at his absolute most sublime and directorial best, then rent the DVD for Spirited Away instead and prepare to be blown away.

Posted by Supercore at July 5, 2005 10:44 PM