They also don’t quite fit into the fairytale world. The war machines and Howl’s titular castle truly are beautiful in their industrial ugliness. Maybe this was ringing in his head when he set out to make The Wind Rises, his final film.
While she decided to create fiction that had nothing to do with it, Miyazaki’s obvious fascination with the technology of war meant that, even in an ostensibly anti-war work, it was like trying to have his cake and eat it. The author said that she and Miyazaki both grew up with the Second World War as a background and developed a similar distaste for war. Jones herself wrote one of the most insightful pieces of criticism of the film in an interview published in the last edition of the novel before her death in 2011. The characters are all there in this adaptation and some plot points are kept, but everything is shuffled. Make no mistake: if you’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’s book of the same name and loved it (the only possible response to such a beautiful, elegant story) and are hoping to see it turned into glorious Ghibli animation, then you might be taken by surprise. But as the war progresses and we learn more about everyone’s respective curses, who the enemy is becomes harder to see clearly. When she curses Sofie, it’s easy to think that this will be a familiar story, the kind of quest where the young, beautiful man – and Howl is defined, in part, by his beauty – must defeat the ugly woman to save the heart of the pure girl. People are more scared of wizards like Howl and his old enemy, The Witch of the Wastes. Everyone is excited, and there is very little anxiety about this. “What difference does it make?” replies Howl, before a wave of his hand brings the whole thing crashing down.Īt the start of Hayao Miyazaki’s ninth film, the build up to the war looks worryingly familiar: infantrymen with dashing moustaches and crowds waving garish flags, as brown and grey tanks and warships (of both the flying and sailing kind) head off to glory.
“Is it the enemy’s or one of ours?” asks Sophie, a young girl with a curse that has turned her into an old woman. “It’s a battleship, looking for more cities to burn,” says the titular wizard in Howl’s Moving Castle, looking across a field of flowers towards the vast flying war machine. This article was originally published in 2014. With Studio Ghibli films now available on Netflix UK, we delve into our review archives to look back at what makes them so magical.