Howl's Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro)

Release Year: 2004

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Review: This is a very different feeling Miyazaki film, perhaps due to it being based on a novel.  While there are many familiar aspects, the general atheistic imagination is tamed.  While the film is very much set in the fantasy genre, there is less of a dreamlike like quality to it unlike other Miyazaki films.  The main plot does fit perfectly into Miyazaki's filmography however.  A renegade womanizing magician who lives in a magical moving castle takes in a cursed girl amid a war reminiscent of World War I.  It has all the makings of the fantastic imagination of a Miyazaki landscape.

While I did appreciate the small details in the film, and actually quite enjoyed the film from moment to moment, there seemed to be a missing quality that so many Miyazaki films have.  The heart and sole of the film seemed diminished, and a bit wooden.  There were story lines that seemed to go no where, and the characters never seemed fully fleshed out.  I'm still not sure what the point of the missing prince was, or exactly how the true characteristics of Howl.  His womanizing is hinted out, but never shown.  It's as if Miyazaki is constantly battling keeping elements from the book and following his own path.

Where in other Miyazaki films every detail feels completely thought out and full, here there appears to be a lot of loose ends, and it left me feeling a bit empty.  This is not to say it is a bad film, as I did enjoy it.  There are some fantastic imaginative and beautiful sequences which really do deliver.  Taken on a whole it doesn't have the impact I have grown to expect from Miyazaki.  To be a lesser Miyazaki however isn't a slight against it at all, it's still a wonderful film.
Rating: 3.5/5