beautiful and irritating

Rating: 6/10 (12 May 2005)

My impressions of Howl's Moving Castle are both positive and negative. On the positive side, it is a gorgeous piece of animation, beautiful from start to finish, and the story is magical, unconventional, and unpredictable. It deserves credit for originality. On the negative side, much of the film makes no sense. The plot moves from one scene to another without demonstrating their relevance to the overarching storyline. The characters' emotions are mystifying and their motivations opaque, so it's difficult to understand why any of them do anything.
Eventually such lack of clarity becomes irritating. About three quarters of the way through the movie I gave up trying to figure out what the point of the story was and stopped caring about the fates of the characters. Thus, for me, the film failed Rule 10 of Mark Twain's Rules of Literary Art: "the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones." Sorry, Howl's Moving Castle. You're a pretty flick but I just didn't care about you in the end.