Yes, a heart’s a heavy burden.
In Howl’s Moving Castle, a young woman is snatched from her humdrum existence working at a hat shop when a mysterious curse transforms her into a ninety-year-old woman. She soon finds herself the pawn in a battle between the imposing Witch of the Waste and the dashing wizard Howl as she takes up residence in Howl’s fantastical dwelling and encounters a wild array of strange characters, from the wacky fire demon Calcifer to the magical scarecrow Turnip Head. Yes, it’s a Miyazaki movie, why do you ask?
This has a lot of the usual hallmarks of a Miyazaki film and, as usual, I really loved a lot of that stuff. Howl’s titular castle is a marvelous animated creation, adding a surprising and interesting CG element to the traditional animation Miyazaki style. There’s a typically gorgeous score by the always brilliant Joe Hisaishi. The movie boasts some really great character work, particularly, again, as usual, in the female characters. Sophie is a wonderful creation and the vocal performance by Chieko Baisho is pretty incredible; it’s hard to believe that it was only one actress voicing the character when she’s nineteen, when she’s ninety and in all of the many transitional stages in between, but indeed it was. I also really liked the Witch of the Waste character. She begins the movie as mysterious, frightening antagonist, but as the film unfolds, she develops in some really unexpected ways and by the end of the film, I think she’s the character I had the most complicated feelings about. The movie manages to hit a lot of the usual emotional beats of a Ghibli film and it’s at its best when it’s meandering about, letting us get to know the characters and watch them grow together. The film has many, many really beautiful emotional scenes and, again, at its best, it captures the kind of wonder I always hope for from a Ghibli film.
All that said, I confess that I’m not as enamored of this film as I am of the other Ghibli output I’ve seen. I’m not going to spend a lot of time attacking this movie over its flaws, because, flaws notwithstanding, it’s still a darn good movie. But in that last quarter or so of the movie, I really did start to kind of lose interest as the movie just got busier and busier and louder and louder. Now, look, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with explosions or action scenes or what have you; I love those in a lot of other movies. But something about the way this movie kind of devolves into action set pieces with gun fights and explosions just felt very non-Ghibli to me. During that final quarter, I started to feel like I was watching, you know, just some other animated movie by some other animated studio. It just got a little wearying and the characters just took a back seat. It isn’t exactly the epic scope I have a problem with, though Ghibli is always at its best when focused on the personal perspective, but it was just a little messier than I expected. I loved the first three-quarters or so of this movie and then it just slowly started getting louder and more chaotic and, ultimately, worse. Does it sink the movie? No, of course not; the movie is still delightful far, far more often than it isn’t, but it does make this one a lesser Miyazaki for sure, even though that still puts it pretty high up in the animated movie power rankings, I suppose. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – beautifully rendered world and compelling characters are Ghibli at its best, though the final quarter of the movie loses focus and becomes overly chaotic. 3 ½ stars.