#HOWLS MOVING CASTLE MOVIE VISUALS FULL#

The adventures disclose unexpected reversals, turning enemies into friends. How can the spell be reversed? She determines to find Howl - with whom she is more than a little in love anyway - and beg for his help. (A dubbed version, with the voices of Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall and Billy Crystal, is also on release.) The witch casts a spell on Sophie, turning her into an ancient old crone, the hex cruelly intensified by making it impossible for Sophie to say what has happened to her. Her association with this dashing, dangerous outsider excites the fury of Howl's enemy, one of Miyazaki's obese characters with jowls flowing outward like molten lava - the Wicked Witch of the Waste, and I didn't catch how or if the pun works in Japanese, despite having watched the subtitled print.

Sophie's life is turned upside down when she is rescued from two boorish soldiers by Howl: a notorious wizard rumoured to eat the hearts of young maidens, who lives in his own moving castle: a wheezing, steaming mobile edifice clanking around the landscape on four spindly legs, like something by Hieronymus Bosch.

It is in this Ruritanian place that teenage Sophie works in a hat-shop, humbly believing herself to be plain, while her more glamorous sister, Lettie, is surrounded by male admirers as she serves behind the bar at a fashionable cafe. But it is a town at war the bewildered populace witnesses incursions from retro-futurist ships and planes, disgorging missiles and bombs. There are trams and quaint automobiles, and town squares lined with buildings sporting picturesque oak beams. It is set in a fictional middle European town on an unnamed coast - sort of Bath crossed with Bruges, with a hint of Vulgaria, the city-state in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The film is a touching parable about the transforming power of love and the scary burden of youth. Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle has the wizardry and spells that JK Rowling has made fashionable again perhaps Miyazaki's happy conversion of her book into Japanimation will bring it to a new audience through an unexpected route. Like his other movies, it is influenced by western authors ranging from Homer to Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum and Frances Hodgson Burnett, but this is explicitly based on the work of a British writer. Howl's Moving Castle has worked its charm on me as well: a floatingly delightful fairytale with its heart set on repealing the law of gravity. I came relatively late to his rich, kaleidoscopic fantasies, having been baffled but intrigued by his Princess Mononoke, and then utterly bowled over by his great movie Spirited Away. He is a real artist of cinema who works with hand-drawn images in the old style while everyone about him is fully immersed in computer techniques.

#HOWLS MOVING CASTLE MOVIE VISUALS FULL#

H ayao Miyazaki is the 64-year-old Japanese animation genius whose mastery of the form has, through a piquant turn of fate, come to its full flowering just as his craft is on the verge of becoming forever obsolete.

Howls moving castle movie visuals