Saturday, we went to see Howl in subtitled form, and this will be the last time I see it before the DVD is released. Mad spoilers for the movie follow.<\/p>\n
The plot of the film is significantly changed from the book. The book, while its focus is undeniably on Howl and Sophie, does involve interaction with both of Sophie’s sisters and minor romantic subplots for both of them. As a result of the reduction of the roles her sisters play — one appears in one scene, and the other is merely mentioned in passing but remains off camera — the character of the dog is completely rewritten to accomodate a new subplot introduced by Miyazaki. Howl’s origins in the “real world” are removed, replaced by a simpler version that has him as a native of the same land where Sophie is from. Sophie’s magic, her ability to make things happen just by saying them, is severely downplayed. In fact, it’s never really addressed at all, though it does seem to appear in a few scenes.<\/p>\n
In the film, Sophie lives in a semi-industrialised country with the sort of strange airships and mechanisms that are so common to the Japanese animation industry (and I include the video game industry when I say that.) She works in a hatshop owned by her mother, who seems to be an absentee owner, off a lot of the time busy with her own interests. Sophie, after a strange encounter with (unbeknownst to her) the wizard Howl, finds herself the target of the dreaded Witch of the Waste and is turned into an old woman. Surprised and worried by her sudden age, she sneaks out of the hat shop in search of — what? It’s not totally clear in the film why she leaves. Presumably it’s to find a cure for her curse. (Comment: In the sub, her mother is portrayed as less selfish than in the dub. When she comes up to see Sophie after being told Sophie is still in bed, in the sub, Sophie says she’s going to stay in bed for the day, and mom departs, making what might be construed as a sympathetic grimace. In the dub, Sophie says she wouldn’t want mom to catch her cold, and mom recoils, looking like she’s going to wash her hands after touching Sophie’s diseased door. The animation is the same, but the feel of the scene is completely different.)<\/p>\n
Sophie makes her way into the Waste outside of town, encountering a strangely animate scarecrow along the way. As night draws near, she finds that it’s very cold, and she hasn’t really considered what she’s going to do for shelter. (Comment: her comments here are more amusing in the dub. Overall, the dub script was definitely more humorous. The subs may have lost something in the translation, but it didn’t strike me as being the case.) The scarecrow appears again, this time with the Moving Castle in tow. Sophie, though reluctant, gets herself inside and out of the cold. She quickly establishes herself as the cleaning lady, Howl permitting her to do this without any significant questioning.<\/p>\n
Calcifer immediately realizes she’s under a curse (and we’re later to understand that Howl does as well) and tries to strike a deal with her — help him get free of Howl and he’ll help her in return — which she accepts. An interlude follows where we establish that Sophie, Howl, Calcifer and Markl are falling into a cosy domestic routine. We see that the castle not only moves in the physical world, it is also magically connected to several locations at once, and via a mechanism attached to the door, one can exit into any of four places. We also learn that Howl has more than one identity (at least 3), and he is being summoned by the King (just the one king, presumably of Ingary, though that country is never mentioned.) to report for wizarding combat duty. A war is and has been going on, though no one seems to understand why or what its purpose is.<\/p>\n
During this time, Sophie visibly grows younger, her back straightening and many of her wrinkles smoothing out. This is the way Miyazaki has chosen to portray the idea that Sophie is the one keeping herself cursed, and if she’d only let herself feel freely\/live without fear, she’d break it. As it is, when she feels useful and isn’t denying her feelings, she edges back toward her normal self. Also when she’s asleep. <\/p>\n
Eventually her cleaning efforts lead to a conflict with Howl, who finds himself utterly depressed after his blond hair turns black. He languishes in bed, fretting over his looks and his summons from the king, until he has a brainwave: he’ll send Sophie in his place, pretending to be the mother of one of his personas. Sophie agrees, reluctantly, and sets off for the palace. (This is another place where the dub has some funny comments that the sub didn’t manage.)<\/p>\n
Sophie arrives to find the Witch of the Waste also heading for the same destination. The two old women are forced to walk up a very long flight of stairs. At the top, Sophie is led off by a dog while the Witch collapses into a chair. While the Witch is being punished for her stupidity in falling into the trap set for her, Sophie meets with Madam Suliman, the royal sorceress. Suliman provides some information that’s been hinted at by Calcifer — Howl has no heart, it’s been taken by a demon, and his selfish use of his magical powers is causing great concern to Suliman. At this point the now much reduced Witch is wheeled in, and Suliman notes to Sophie that if Howl doesn’t get his act together, this will soon be his fate as well.<\/p>\n
Howl arrives, and Suliman attempts to scare? Sophie by attacking him, causing him to turn into the bird (demon?) shape he’s often taken. The group manages to escape, Sophie bringing the Witch and Suliman’s dog back with her to the castle. Howl returns and the house is updated to accomodate these new developments, including the connection of the exit doors to two new locations — Sophie’s Hat Shop in Market Chipping, and a field of flowers.<\/p>\n
Sophie deduces from this (and from Howl’s comments) that he’s trying to set the group up with a source of income, anticipating their loss of his wizardly services. His own repeated transformations are becoming more difficult to undo, and as Suliman and Calcifer both observe, eventually it won’t be possible to change back into a normal human. Sophie doesn’t like this one bit, but can’t really do anything about it.<\/p>\n
The war escalates and Suliman continues to try and track down Howl so he can be dealt with. Howl takes off to try and prevent everyone from being bombed while everyone just sort of sits around and dithers and lets Suliman send Sophie’s mother to try to leave a magical spy in their house.<\/p>\n
Eventually Howl returns for a few moments, to assure everyone he’s not dead and to fix Calcifer. Then he leaves again, and Sophie decides she needs to disconnect the castle from all of the various locations so that Howl only needs to try and guard one spot rather than several. (Comment: The dub was very clear on what she was trying to do here. The sub was much less clear on the point, but I can’t say whether it was bad translation or bad script.) She does this, then they all return to the castle, and Calcifer starts it moving again with the aid of Sophie’s braid.<\/p>\n
At this point, the Witch realizes that the lump in Calcifer’s butt is actually Howl’s heart, and she grabs it. Sophie, who still hasn’t gotten the clue, simply notes that the Witch has caught on fire after picking up a fire demon, and tries to put them out with a bucket of water. And then she panics thinking she might have killed Howl. In any case, the castle breaks apart, as Calcifer, in his weakened state, is not able to keep it all together. Sophie and the dog are flung out.<\/p>\n
She finds herself amongst a lot of debris, and the magic ring given to her by Howl earlier tells her that the way to Calcifer is through a door leaning up against a rock. She passes through what ends up being a door to the past, and sees the moment where Howl made his bargain with Calcifer, and gave the demon his heart so that the demon could live and Howl could have phenomenal cosmic power.<\/p>\n
Finally enlightened, Sophie returns to the present, where she finds Giant Bird!Howl waiting for her. He flies her and the dog back to the creaking platform that’s all that remains of the castle. Howl collapses back into human form, and Sophie retrieves Calcifer from the Witch. She gives him back his heart, frees Calcifer (The point that only she could do this was made, but no one ever tried to explain -why-, as again, her own magic was mostly ignored.) and then clings for dear life as the remaining bit of castle promptly collapses.<\/p>\n
The scarecrow, who’s been hanging around throughout the film, hops in to save them. Sophie gives him a kiss as his reward, and, surprise! It’s the prince of the neighboring kingdom, saved from his scarecrow form by the kiss of True Love. Or not, since Sophie loves Howl and is busy glomping him instead of the prince. (Note: I know in the dub, the prince was mentioned as missing at the start of the film. I missed, but -assume- this mention was made in the sub also. Otherwise his appearance is just random.) The Prince takes himself off rather than linger so the wrinkly old Witch can hit on him. The war is called off (since no one knew why it was happening in the first place), Calcifer returns, the castle is reconstructed, and everyone lives happily ever after. Howl refuses to share his hair dye with Sophie.<\/p>\n
So, again, movie != book. And clearly here, the book has been adapted a lot to fit the vision of the filmmaker. I have to say that as an adaptation of the book, Howl makes a pretty poor showing. Up there with the recent episodes of Mystery! I’ve been watching, both Miss Marple (now with extra lesbians!) and Lynley (now with 50% fewer main characters!). As a Ghibli movie, I think it was pretty good. It joins Mimi o sumaseba and Sen to Chihiro as my favorites.<\/p>\n
One final comment about the Markl business. In the Japanese credits, his name was listed as \u00e3\u0192\u017e\u00e3\u0192\u00ab\u00e3\u201a\u00af\u00e3\u0192\u00ab (Marukuru). So clearly the dubbers got the Markl from the Japanese version, though their romanization choice is… questionable, at best. Now the question becomes: did Ghibli change his name on a whim, or did they get this bizarre version from the Japanese translation of Howl? I don’t have a copy of the latter to check. It seems possible, though personally, I question the translation skills of anyone who comes up with ‘Marukuru’ as the best equivalent to ‘Michael’.<\/p>\n
Saturday, we went to see Howl in subtitled form, and this will be the last time I see it before the DVD is released. Mad spoilers for the movie follow. The plot of the film is significantly changed from the book. The book, while its focus is undeniably on Howl and Sophie, does involve interaction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}