I was not disappointed

Rating: 10/10 (30 June 2005)

I went to see Miyazaki's newest work "Howl's Moving Castle" with some minor trepidation. This was not a pet project for him from the start so I had reservations as to whether it would be able to match the visual mastery of his earlier works. I was delighted to find out that Miyazaki delivered a film that has become an instant favorite with me.
Being a Miayzaki enthusiast, I have seen all of the master's feature length directorial efforts. "Howl's Moving Castle" now only trails "My Neightbour Totoro" as my favorite Miyazaki work. What works for me the most in this film is that Miyzaki was able to join together the best of his early and later film-making traits into a brilliant baroque work of art. "Howl's Moving Castle" possesses the innocence and quiet beauty of his earlier films and the haunting, darker, more brooding excellence of "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away".
As with "Mononoke" and "Nausicaa", "Howl's Moving Castle" is a deviation of a previous Miyazaki film. It is, in many ways, reminiscent to Laputa: Castle In The Sky when one considers elements such as Howl's castle paralleled with the castle of Laputa, the central theme of war and the multidimensional villains (or are they? Consider how Miyazaki's characters are rarely purely evil, as there are layers of goodness in all of them).
There is a scene in this film that had me in awe and made me realize that I was witnessing a masterpiece within a masterpiece. It is delightfully underplayed. When Howl sends old Sophie to see madame Suliman she winds up climbing a dreadfully long set of stairs with the witch of the waste on the way to Suliman's castle. I was astounded with Miyazaki's craftsmanship here. First of all, the visuals are astounding and and humorously over-the-top. Miyazaki wickedly underscores the age of Sophie and the obesity of the witch of the west to bring out the humanity of both of these characters, their weaknesses in particular. Miyazaki is also very consistently patient here - one would expect in a Disney movie for the director to simply cut from the bottom of the stairs to the top of the stairs as the characters come to the entrance but he lets the viewer in on this amusing experience. There are nice subtle touches here like Suliman's dog who is carried by Sophie to make the experience even more strenuous for her. Miyazaki also goes to great lengths to show Sophie's kindness - this first becomes evident on the stairs when she is surprisingly sympathetic to the witch, developing into a central themes of the film - the theme of kindness, forgiveness and understanding.
These characters are multidimensional, they have human traits and allow the viewer to identify. Miyazaki's approach is the complete polar opposite to that of American animators who worked on cartoons like the roadrunner and the coyote or Bugs Bunny. These characters are mortal - they feel pain, they feel joy and sadness and we are in on this to experience these feelings as well. Miyazaki never cheats the audience with pop culture references or token characters - there is warmth and touching humanity even in the most cunning personages. This is missing today in works by studios such as Disney where we expect characters to be immortal, even in the most violent sequences. Miyazaki borrows more from Russian animation - works like "Hedgehog in the Fog" and "The Snow Queen" - to make these characters absorbing and devoid of clichés.
"Howl's Moving Castle" is a film for all ages, moreso than his previous two efforts which seemed to cater to adults, I would say. This film's humour, I felt, was much sharper than in "Spirited Away", bringing back Miyazaki's patented light-hearted silliness of "Porco Rosso" and "Kiki's Delivery Service". I felt that I had to have been missing something in the character of Howl (as I saw the dubbed version into English) - he is serious, tragic yet also surprisingly goofy, especially in his obsession over his looks, specifically his hair. I am looking forward to seeing this with subtitles so I can admire the Japanese voicework to see if Christian Bale's dubbing was appropriate.
I cannot recommend this masterpiece enough. If this is Miyazaki's swan song it could not be more appropriate.
4/4