The Immersive Dream World of Studio Ghibli

Rating: 8/10 (7 June 2019)

Hayao Miyazaki is one of the greatest animation directors. Famous for directing the prestigious acclaimed by the Academy: Spirited Away (2003). Through a career that has spanned five decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful story teller that usually focuses in strong young girls protagonists. He started his carer in 1963 as an animator and was involved in many early classics of Japanese animation. From the beginning, he command attention with his endless ideas for movies
In 2004, Hayao Miyazaki along with Studio Ghibli, released his new project - Howl's Moving Castle. The plot is about a young insecure girl named Sophie who work in her fathers hat shop, different from her sisters. One day she is cursed by a witch who shapes her body as a 90-year-old woman. In order to undo the spell, Sophie run away from home and end finding the castle of wizard Howl Jenkins Pendragon.
I watched this movie a long time ago when I was in my pre-adolescence and I decided to reveal it because every time it's a new experience. What I like about this movie is his simplicity, purity, and a feel of a real world - even if it's a totally fantastic world. It's like if the characters are from one emotion to another and we follow their development as people.
Hayao does very well that very simple structure of his narrative. He knows exactly the right time to apresent each element to us. The moments that needs to be calm, those that needs action and the exciting ones. Also, being based in a book by Diana Wynne Jones we found common elements of fantasy story books. At first, we have the main characters: a girl who will go through a magic adventure and the wizard Howl who, at first, appears as a selfish prince as the ones in a Beauty and the Beast (1991). Then the antagonist who is the evil witch, the secondary characters who have charisma and help the main characters
However, having a lot of subtexts some ideas or messages can be confusing to understood. Like, for example, Howl's relationship with the witch or how Sophie manage to undo her spell over the course of the movie. At the same time Howl is handsome and powerful, he is cowardly and selfish. He is complex and in the movie this may not have been well explained why.
But despite that it is a great animate film. So if you are looking for pictures scenes, dynamic characters and a very complicated character or story driven by plot, you will not necessarily find them here, but you will find this nice and pleasant. Miyazaki's passionate, sincere and surreal dream