Hayao Miyazaki’s retelling of Howl’s Moving Castle is just as charming as the original tale.
Hayao Miyazaki’s retelling of Howl’s Moving Castle is just as charming as the original tale.
B eing a podcast producer leaves little time for personal music listening. It’s hard to edit The McCarthy Report when Glenn Miller’s orchestra and Rich Lowry’s voice are fighting for primacy in your ear, so my music listening is limited to during dinner prep and house cleaning. In some of those brief moments over the past two weeks, I’ve been delighting in Joe Hisaishi’s enchanting soundtrack for Howl’s Moving Castle. This 2004 Studio Ghibli film is based on Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 book of the same name, and in a wonderful turn of events, both are equally charming — though in fairly different ways.
Let’s begin with the book’s premise. Sophie Hatter, the eldest of three sisters, is resigned to her fate. In fairy tales, nothing good ever happens to eldest siblings, so she is squirreled away in her father’s milliner shop, creating popular hats for the town’s ladies. The town of Market Chipping, where she lives, is currently in an uproar over the arrival of a wizard named Howl, whose frightening-looking castle recently appeared on a nearby hillside. He is said to suck the souls out of girls and is to be avoided at all costs.
Sophie seems destined for a dull life full of ugly hats, but a chance encounter with an elegantly dressed young man (Howl, of course) throws her world into turmoil. The book’s villainess, aptly named “The Witch of the Waste,” decides that Sophie’s run-in with the wizard makes her a threat and transforms her into a 90-year-old woman. Our plucky heroine calmly packs her bags and sets off from town, unsure exactly what to do but not wanting to worry her family with this sudden change of countenance.
Out in the countryside, Sophie soon finds herself caught up in a world of moving castles, annoying wizards, talking fires, and moldy seven-league boots as she tries to break the curse so rudely thrust upon her. Jones’s writing style is engaging, and she managed to find the perfect balance between wit and snark, action and contemplation that eludes so many other fantasy writers. Like the great E. Nesbit, Jones knows that magic has rules and consequences, and she builds her world with them in mind. Her story plays on old fairy-tale tropes without becoming ridiculous and overly conscious of them. She also avoids a feminist bent while still making Sophie a strong, relatable character.
There are plenty of ancillary characters in the tale who give it color, but it’s the four main ones, Sophie, Howl, Michael, and Calcifer, who bring it all to life. Jones has crafted funny, consistent characters, and readers will enjoy following along and growing with all four, particularly Sophie and Howl. Nearly as entertaining as our two protagonists is Calcifer, the castle’s fire demon and the source of its movement. To understand his role in the tale, you must read the book, but in both the book and the movie, he is the best kind of grouch. This odd little group, living in the strange collection of parts that is the moving castle, became very dear to me by the story’s end.
Surprisingly, I actually disobeyed my own personal rule and saw the movie before reading the book. While the two plots have similarities, the movie’s creator, Hayao Miyazaki, took plenty of liberties with the story. I’d typically have issues with this, but the imagery and storytelling were so charming, and the soundtrack so captivating, I truly got swept away.
If you want to have a bit of context for the movie, it might help to read the book first. In Miyazaki’s version, war ravages Sophie’s country, Howl’s ties to Wales are completely ignored, Sophie’s curse disappears without a good explanation, and Michael is a little boy instead of a young man. Regardless, all the changes make for a whimsical retelling, and you certainly won’t hear me complain about the movie’s addition of a wheezing little dog, Heen.
And, as Jones herself readily admitted in an interview, the characters in the movie “are gentler and more noble” than those in her book. Sophie, kind though she can be, is also cranky and accident-prone in the book. Jones’s Howl can be infuriating at times, and he is terribly vain. The movie softens their edges, and you see them falling in love with each other much earlier on. In the book, Sophie and Howl are often frustrated with each other, and their lively banter is quite entertaining.
As a fun family movie night or a cozy read-aloud, this reverse “East ’O the Sun and West ’O the Moon” fairy tale invites you in, hoping you’ll be lost in the magic and music of Howl, Sophie, and their friends.