Being 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.
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