The meanie who casts Sophie’s spell is an immense harridan called the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall!) she makes a long journey that parallels Sophie’s trip to the kingdom where the prince’s parents, as king and queen, are preoccupied with an impending war. Wynne Jones’s tale-in contrast to the piquant simplicity of Miyazaki’s screenplays for previous great films such as Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service-is rather knotty.

Rarely have metaphors for sprouting adolescence and adulthood been more elegantly portrayed. And he has his own transformational problems: His body starts turning, part by part, into a bird. Alas, Sophie’s pursuit of love is impeded when she has a spell cast upon her that turns her into a hunched 90-year-old woman (voice supplied, in a wonderful return to the screen, by Jean Simmons), whom the young man-who proves to be the Prince Howl of the title-fails to recognize. As creepy, ink-black blobs chase Sophie and her new friend, he suddenly lifts her with him into the sky and tells her to do what he’s doing: to move her legs and walk on the air-it’s breathtaking. Another gorgeous quiet moment occurs early on. The Japanese director has adapted the popular British writer Diana Wynne Jones’s 2000 novel, about a teenage nineteenth-century hat-maker named Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer) who falls in love with a dashing and brave but vain young man (Christian Bale). You also may find yourself thankful that you’re not trapped in another noisy, frenetic joke-machine of a cartoon like Madagascar or Shrek 2, where the ceaseless rat-a-tat-tat of topical gags and body-odor yuks serve primarily to introduce kiddies to the very definition of “flop sweat.” Although those last two movies may make far more money than the serenely nuanced Howl’s Moving Castle, they are films that beg for an audience’s love, and you can be pretty sure that children recognize such unseemly flailing, even as they may snort and snicker enthusiastically.īy contrast, there is giggling, belly-laughing, and gasping to be done watching Howl’s Moving Castle. Watching the opening moments of his latest wonder-work, Howl’s Moving Castle-seeing the way the contraption of the title, a gigantic, bulbous wood-and-metal edifice that lumbers along a pastel countryside dotted with silent sheep-you’re struck by the exceedingly odd beauty of the scene. The great animation director Hayao Miyazaki frequently gives us a gift too often withheld from contemporary cartoons: blessed quiet.

Howls moving castle movie