i could be brave

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Howl’s Moving Castle

Categories: Art • Movies

I recently watched Howl’s Moving Castle at one of the local theaters.  This is the latest movie by Hayao Miyazaki who is probably the best known Japanese animator.  The movie has a great premise and fairly engaging story line.  However, the ending was incredibly abrupt and unsatisfying.  I felt as a cohesive whole that Spirited Away (Miyazaki’s previous movie) was much better.  The story line in Howl’s Moving Castle was certainly more exciting and action packed but the last five minutes nearly destroyed it for me.

There was also one character that I had a little trouble with at first.  The character of the fire demon looked like a orange amoeba.  Maybe that is the look Miyazaki was going for but I don’t think so.  This wouldn’t have been so glaring if the character hadn’t gotten so much screen time.  It was also the only part of the movie that showed the weakness of the hand drawn animation.  Flames can certainly be drawn convincingly in two dimensions (just watch one of the candles flicker in Disney’s Pinocchio) but it is much harder than with the computer techniques often employed today.  I’m not sure Miyazaki’s animators were up to the task in this case.  Thankfully, the charachter himself was really well developed and when suspension of disbelief kicked in things were fine for the rest of the movie. 

Despite the negative comments I’ve made I really did enjoy the movie a lot and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys animation.  It was certainly a hundred times better than anything Disney themselves has released in last 7 or so years.  Howl’s Moving Castle is being distributed by Disney however they had nothing to do with it’s creation other than the english voice actors for the US release.

Posted by Jamie at 10:54 PM