Inside each of us is a little boy, a shy, lovesick girl with a curse, a demon made of fire, and a shape-shifting wizard with no heart.- Dr.
Howls moving castle turnip head how to#
Instead, they have to learn how to accept love. All of the characters are in love with each other. In Howl’s Moving Castle, he resists his own resistance. In most Miyazaki movies, he resists turning the narrative into a love story. They understand each other in ways outsiders never could. They are all fearless and cowardly, timid and reckless. Before we meet any of them, we learn that they have committed themselves to something that they did not fully understand, which they would undo if they could, but which they are powerless to speak about or tackle on their own. Some of them by choice, others by curse the choices become curses, the curses choices. Howl, Sophie, Calcifer, Markl, the Witch of the Waste, and Turnip-Head are all, in one way or another, shapeshifters. It is as if each one stands in for different sides of all the others, like the brothers of The Brothers Karamazov. It is probably fair to say the residents of Howl’s castle are the unlikeliest.Īt the same time, despite their differences in appearance and circumstance, the characters are all so much like each other. None of this matters: Howl’s Moving Castle is my Miyazaki film you may choose your own.Ī number of Miyazaki’s films deal with fractured and unlikely families. Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind and My Neighbor Totoro will last forever in a way that Howl’s Moving Castle may not.
Spirited Away is a masterpiece of story, art, and character, every scene and frame indelible. The Wind Rises is more personal, more human and moving. Princess Mononoke is more epic, more careful in its throughlines and narrative choices. I would not say it is his best, his most beautiful, or his most perfectly realized. My favorite Miyazaki film is 2004’s Howl’s Moving Castle. We saw him much more dimly then, but I do not know if we see him better now. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this was the only Miyazaki we knew. I worry that this obscures the other Miyazaki, the environmentalist pacifist, a perfectionist who nevertheless sought and found miracles in everyday life.
At the end of his career, he’s rightfully acquired a reputation as a curmudgeon, a traditionalist with a dim view of human nature and our technological prostheses. Hayao Miyazaki is our Ovid, a fluent, majestic storyteller with a gift for deep connections and sudden transformations.