Bittersweet movie about romance and old age

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2006)

I think many people are complaining about Miyazake because his movies are starting to look alike and their plots are beginning to get very similar. I don't have problems with that. The elderly Sofi here looks a little like Yubaba in Spirited Away and Dola in Castle in the Sky. However, you can generalize that all anime women look alike with their huge eyes and we can even go racist and say all black people look alike to Asians and Asians look alike to Americans and Mexicans, Spaniards and Argentinians look alike to Asians.
Miyazake is animating and he's doing what he knows best. His Nausicaa looks like they borrowed clothes from his TV series, Conan, Boy of the Future (and his son's upcoming film, Gedo Senki, looks like they borrowed production and costume designs from Nausicaa). I look at it this way, they are riffs of the same theme, similar yet different, and each riff is a gift for humanity and I have no cause for complaint. Miyazake has white hair and I would want him to work on forever but I'm going to break my heart over him one day so I'm grateful for every film he makes. He will never do less than his best anyway.
Despite this apology for his work (which does not need excuses anyway), Howl's Moving Castle has many virtues that makes it stand out from Miyazake's body of outstanding films. The movie has a tender eye for the elderly. It's a better version of the tale told in the Freaky Friday movies and 18 Again, because it's really told by an old man.
And again, Miyazake repeats his refusal to make true villains out of his characters. A villain at the start will appear again in a wilted, helpless form, then still later as a supplicant, then finally as a friend.
By the end of the film, Miyazake, that old master, has made me half in love with Sofi myself, whether she's the old lady with creaking bones, or the young girl with severe, conservative clothes, or the old lady with quick thinking and lightning reflexes or the young girl with hair like starlight, she's a complex creation, golden hearted yet not maudlin, plain in looks yet beautiful whether young or old.