Movie is pastiche of book, not adaptation.

Rating: 3/10 (29 December 2006)

Don't fool yourself--Despite sharing a name, the movie is more pastiche then adaptation. I deeply like both Miyazaki and Howl's Moving Castle. I found their combination to be jarring and distressing. If you've read the book, spare yourself and don't see the movie. I expected to see an animated adaption of the book and instead was treated to the disconcerting experience of seeing familiar characters, lines, and places juxtaposed with little or no reference for the original story. Minor points within the book become key to the plot of the movie, and major events/characters in the book fail to appear at all.
Howl's Moving Castle is not an especially deep book. It's a fairy-tale about a girl under a spell, and how she saves a wizard from an evil witch (and from himself). It's half a reversed 'Sleeping Beauty' crossed with a marriage comedy. But the movie plays the romantic theme very strongly, and brings in a theme about the how destructive and pointless war is, which was in no way present in the book. It is almost as if the director became disoriented and wrote the second half of the movie as a pastiche of another of Miyazaki's movies, 'Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind', which develops the same theme very strongly.
Watching this movie has really degraded my opinion of Miyazaki. I enjoyed both Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, as well as a variety of Studio Ghibli short films and had a general positive impression of Miyazaki. But as I see more films, I am reminded of H.P. Lovecraft's stories: While Lovecraft wrote well, he only ever wrote one story. Everything he wrote was a variant on that one story. It appears it may be the same for Miyazaki. Each film offers less, because you have, in essence, seen it before.