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Howl’s Moving Castle: Mapless in Dreamland
By admin | July 9, 2011
Two weeks after seeing Howl’s Moving Castle, I’m still not sure what to make of this strange, magical, ultimately maddening film. I would never say, like the Washington Post guy (and unlike nearly every other rapt critic) that I disliked the movie; it was fiercely gorgeous, as intricate as an opium dream, and there was something deeply pleasurable about being carried along by its febrile, imperious momentum. But what in hell was it about? This question began to occur to me about halfway through the movie’s two-hour running time, as I roused myself from the drugged stupor the images had put me in and started to chastise myself for not even trying to follow the plot. How was I going to write about this later, I asked myself, if I couldn’t even summarize the story? Surely the rest of the audience, all the cool anime-liking denizens of the Sunshine Theater, were grooving on every filigreed plot twist, every sudden shift from one alternate reality to the next.
Or did the other audience members just not care what it all meant? Was I being my dorky museum self, unable to look at the art on the walls until I’d read every word of the curator’s text? Why couldn’t I just be?
It may be true that my Zenlike ability to be swept along spontaneously by the clouds of unknowing needs a little work. But now, two weeks after seeing the film, I’m more inclined to give some credence to my confusion. It’s not as if Howl’s Moving Castle is the cinematic equivalent of an abstract painting, a purely experiential work of avant-garde art. I won’t insult the film’s intelligence by letting it off the narrative hook that easily. Hiyao Miyazaki’s movie is cluttered with the trappings of traditional storytelling: plot, character, setting, conflict, suspense. It’s awash in signifiers from the world of fairytale, allegory and myth: there are princes in castles, beautiful young girls under spells, demons and transformations, and even what appears to be a conventional happy ending a la Disney (a tremendously disappointing one at that — but more on that later.) Like the castle of its title, the film is an enormous and ragtag assemblage of wildly dissimilar moving parts — and like the castle, that shambling disorganization is key to its charm. I don’t expect a tour of the narrative-castle’s every turret and crenellation. All I want to know is where the thing is going, and why we were invited along for the ride.
It’s too hot outside for plot summaries, so I’ll send you here for a good recap (and a warm appreciation) of the murky goings-on in Howl’s Moving Castle. Essentially, we have a naive young hatmaker named Sophie (voiced by Chieko Baisho in the original and Emily Mortimer in the English dub), who lives in a pseudo-Tyrolean village in a kingdom perpetually at war. Early on, Sophie falls under the evil spell of the flabby-chinned Witch of the Waste (Akihiro Miwa/Lauren Bacall), who turns her into an old woman (Chieko Baisho/Jean Simmons) before her time. Next thing you know, Sophie is hiking into the wilderness to hitch a ride on the Terry Gilliam-like ambulatory castle pictured above, which is home to a remote but soulful young wizard named Howl (Takuya Kimura/Christian Bale)and his oddball cohort, including a crabby fire spirit named Calcifer (Tatsuya Gashuin/Billy Crystal) and a cloying little-boy sidekick (Ryunosuke Kamiki/Josh Hutcherson).
Then a whole bunch of stuff happens, involving cosmic battles, enchanted scarecrows, spells and counterspells and trips back in time. The general idea seems to be that Howl leads a double life: poutily handsome Japanimation hero by day, huge feathered bird-warrior by night. When he returns from his nightly trips to the battlefront, the whole household flutters around him like a rock star’s retinue. What the war is actually about, or what the stakes of it are at any given moment, we have no idea, but every so often there are bleakly gorgeous scenes of great flaming dirigibles against an apocalyptic sky. As for Sophie, she slowly grows more and more comfortable in her new old-hag self, and begins to focus less on breaking the witch’s spell than on running Howl’s unconventional household (which soon comes to include a taciturn dog and a very old lady who is none other than the Witch of the Waste herself.) By the end of the film, Sophie seems to slip freely between youth and age, ending the film at some indeterminate stage between the two. Like the little girl at the center of Spirited Away, Sophie is a formidable heroine, alternately tough and tender, and resourceful in a way that sets her apart from the world of passive Disney heroines.
(SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read beyond this if you still want to see the movie. Which, if you haven’t, you should.)
But whatever credit Miyazaki gets for de-Disnefying his protagonists may have to be revoked upon witnessing the saccharine, conventional ending. What the hell? Was anyone else but me horribly disappointed by the transformation of the bouncing, benevolent scarecrow into a fey and chatty prince with a blond Prince Valiant pageboy? And the castle itself … didn’t its slow destruction over the course of the movie have any allegorical weight at all? How and why did it just sort of magically puff up again into its former self? I can’t even count all the concessions to traditional movie happiness that marred the ending of this film: the cloying pop song, the return of the lovably grouchy Calcifer as a boring shooting star, the final image of the restored castle as a floating headquarters for married suburban bliss. Is Miyazaki kidding? Is this an ironic happy ending? That would seem strange, since the rest of the film takes place in a world that seems blessedly oblivious to the existence of irony.
A final coda: This inability to get fully with the Miyazaki program reminds me of seeing Mulholland Drive back when it came out in 2001. Nearly all of my friends swooned for that movie (and the more brilliant and impeccable-taste-having the friend, the more complete the swoon) and I wanted so much to love it too. For huge swaths of the film, I did love it. That central section, in which the two women (Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring) have sex, then take a cab to that mysterious lip-synching stage show in the middle of the night, was almost impossibly haunting and powerful; to this day, it feels in my memory as if it was part of my own past.
But by the end of that movie, with the multiple inexplicable subplots and the guy living behind the dumpster and the miniature old couple with grating voices coming out of the lunch bag, I was just plain mad at Mulholland Drive; mad, more specifically, at David Lynch. As I grumbled afterward to my dinner companion, it was as if Lynch had used his God-given gift (and it is a great gift) for recreating his own inner landscapes on celluloid, simply to plonk us down in the middle of his own unconscious and have us say, “Oh, cool.” (I could talk forever about Mulholland Drive, which is the best thing that movie has given me; it only took two hours to see the movie, but in the years since, I must have spent dozens of hours having fascinating conversations about it.) In a long-ago High Sign about Matthew Barney’s Cremaster II, I named this style of filmmaking the bad-boyfriend school; Lynch and Barney, I said, seemed like bratty but brilliant lovers who invited you into their seductive dreamworlds, only to strand you there. Is it possible that the Miyazaki of Howl’s Moving Castle is moving toward bad boyfriendhood? Discuss.