OVP: Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

Film: Howl's Moving Castle (2005)
Stars: Emily Mortimer, Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, Billy Crystal, Josh Hutcherson, Blythe Danner
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I will (on occasion) get someone who will be stunned when I haven't seen a movie.  This gets old faster than you think (despite putting near daily reviews on this blog, I will admit that I don't actually get to watch a movie every day, and even at that rate, I still would have gaps in my viewing history), but there are movies that pop up enough that I know that seeing them is actually going to help me a bit, going from a look of fake shock to an unamused expression of "oh, John has an opinion on another movie."  One of those titles is strangely Howl's Moving Castle, the only major Miyazaki film that I haven't caught since the director "went mainstream" in the US with his studio's Oscar win for Spirited Away.  The fact that I loved the 2002 movie and didn't see his immediate followup at the time is a little odd, but I was in college, and was getting paid to see specific movies each week for my school paper (and if I wasn't paid to see it, I had to pay for it from my consistently empty wallet).  So here we are, fifteen years later, finally catching it as we start to put a close on the 2005 Academy Awards.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, like so many by Miyazaki, has a lot of plot, so stick with me for a second.  Sophie (Mortimer) is a young woman who runs a hat shop.  She is one day whisked across town (literally, they fly) by a traveling wizard called Howl (Bale), who lives in a giant floating castle. At the shop, she encounters the rude and cruel Witch of the Waste (Bacall), who puts a curse on her, turning her into an old woman (Simmons).  She goes to find Howl, but is forbidden from speaking the reasons or the why's of her curse to Howl, since he might be able to break it.  However, once she gets there she finds that Howl is a lost soul, someone who tries to stay away from the world rather than be brave, and is involved in his own curse with Calcifer (Crystal), who is a wisecracking fire demon (a thing, apparently).  Together, they go after the Witch of the Waste, but in doing so realize the true creature they must battle is Madame Suliman (Danner), another witch who has actually stripped the Witch of the Waste of her powers, and has been doing so to a depleting number of witches and wizards.  They end up doing so by essentially breaking all of the curses, and saving the kingdom in the process.

That last sentence takes about forty minutes.  One of the bigger problems with this film is that there's, in fact, too much plot.  This isn't always an issue, and especially with animation it's kind of a refreshing issue to have (in recent years, one of the bigger crimes of mainstream animated films has been creating ridiculously one-note supporting players that feel phoned-in by the writers), but it's there.  The film's thick story works for long stretches, but then randomly Howl is flying around as a monster or he's unnecessarily vain or we have to see the piles-of-flesh Witch of the Waste degraded yet again as she extends a thin tangent.  It needs trimming, is what I'm saying.

But otherwise I have little to complain about, as while this lacks the automatic magic of Spirited Away, it's visually splendid and filled with genuinely interesting performances.  Leave it to only Hayao Miyazaki to have two of the big headliners of 1940's cinema (Lauren Bacall and Jean Simmons) unite for the only team some fifty years after they regularly headlined pictures.  The film looks gorgeous.  I'm never a fan of the way that Miyazaki makes hideous imagery onscreen with select characters, and there's some problematic aspects to the way he depicts overweight people here, but overall his moving castle is a vision.  And like I said, the film's story works in large spurts.  The back story is complete, the characters well-drawn, and the conclusion pretty satisfying.  In the US, this would have surely required several movies to get through, but thankfully this is our one story with these characters.  As such, it's also the type of movie that we used to obsess over and recreate, in a world before prequels & sequels did that for us.