In some ways, Hayao Miyazaki’s new film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” is a typical love story. Girl meets boy, they fall in love, their relationship is beset by any number of complications, and in the end, true love conquers all.
In most ways, however, Miyazaki’s latest is not a conventional love story at all. The girl is a shy teen who has been transformed into a 90-year-old woman; the boy is a powerful but immature wizard who occasionally morphs into a giant-winged beast; the “complications” involve a grotesquely obese witch and some talking fire; and the scene in which true love conquers all takes place on a wooden platform propelled by metal chicken legs and is overseen by a spirited, grinning scarecrow with a turnip for a head.
Sound confusing? It is.
One has to imagine that any movie that could conclude with the scene described above must have a complicated plot, and here, “Howl’s Moving Castle” does not disappoint. In fact, even the most well-read Miyazaki fan would be hard-pressed to describe exactly how and why certain story elements transpire.
The narrative — or what there is of it — follows Sophie, a teenage girl working at her mother’s hat shop in a town that combines the aesthetics of Victorian-age Britain with the historical context of London during World War II. Many of the cities Sophie visits throughout the film are being bombed — a lá the Luftwaffe — as two warring kingdoms duke it out over a missing prince.
Sophie meets and falls in love with the tempestuous wizard Howl, arousing the jealousy of the (wicked) Witch of the Waste, a character so grotesquely obese she makes Kirstie Alley’s “Fat Actress” look like Olive Oyl. The Witch places a curse on Sophie, turning her into a 90-year-old woman. The rest of the film is dedicated to Sophie’s quest to remove the curse as she helps Howl vanquish a curse of his own.
Sophie spends the majority of the movie trapped in the frail, constantly cold body of an elderly woman, but as in most Miyazaki movies, the film is in large part about a teenage girl facing a number of challenges that enable her to grow as a person.
This was certainly the central motif in Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning “Spirited Away,” and it seems to be the case in his latest work. It could be said that Miyazaki, unique amongst all the middle-aged men of the world, has what could actually be considered a healthy obsession with teenage girls.
Most Miyazaki fans in the western hemisphere, though, would probably argue that, when going to see a Miyazaki movie, neither plot nor theme is the main draw. Instead, people go to see his films to appreciate the work of a modern auteur, an artist dedicated to capturing his own unique vision on the screen.
