Summer 2014 #1: Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) - Hayao Miyazaki

I can’t believe that I’ve managed to get my almost 250 film Watchlist down to just 196 films in a little over a year. But I think I can do better! That means it’s time for another Moviecation. This time, I won’t be doing 15 films in 15 days like I did over winter break. I’m doing 15 films over the course of the summer. So

and let’s go!

My fifth Miyazaki film! In just sixth months. I can’t believe it was only January when I saw Spirited Away, and since then I have seen My Neighbor Totoro, The Wind Rises, and Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki has totally altered the way I think about animation, since, as I’ve said before, the only animation companies I respect are Disney and Pixar. 

I think Miyazaki has transcended the American idea that animated films have to be geared towards kids. And even though the fantastical worlds created in Studio Ghibli’s films are definitely, on the surface, childlike and wonderful, these films are always much deeper. Miyazaki’s hard childhood experiences with WWII bleed into all of his films, and you can feel the animator struggling to understand those troubling times in mid-twentieth century Japan.

Howl’s Moving Castle follows a strong female protagonist like many of his other films. This one’s name is Sophie, and within two minutes of meeting her as the bland hat shop girl who works herself too hard, a witch comes and transforms her into an old woman.

The film doesn’t care to take the time to characterize Sophie in her normal world, but we do hear a little about the strange wizard named Howl, who eats women’s hearts and must be watched out for. That is, until Sophie encounters him and he protects her from some evil spirits that are following her.

Old lady Sophie is a hilarious lens for the story, because she is strong-willed and curious and learns quickly that with old age comes a bizarre amount of courage. Her witty self-banter is probably the strongest comedic source in the film, and she quickly asserts herself into Howl’s magical world in hopes of having her curse lifted.

Howl’s connection to the crown makes him a target for the king’s system of drafting military men, since he trained with a witch that seems to have all the power in Japan. A violent and unjust war permeates the entire film, and Howl’s plight to stop it leaves him less and less human with each battle. It’s very interesting to see the negative characteristics in Howl, namely his cowardice, because it humanized someone who at the beginning of the film seems so inaccessible. 

Like the other Miyazaki films I’ve seen, feminist and anti-war themes ground the film, while the imaginative world it inhabits lifts it off of the screen and into a sort of escapist adventure. Between the witches and wizards, the spells, and Howl’s literal moving castle, the film has enough heart to rival even the best Pixar films. Not to mention a great love story.

And as always, Studio Ghibli’s ties with Disney made for some amazing English voice actors. Howl is voiced by Christian Bale, Josh Hutcherson plays his young assistant, and the amazing Lauren Bacall (The Big Sleep) gets to be the antagonist turned comedic side character, the Witch of the Waste. 

There she is in her “normal” state. Here she is the next scene.

Also the fire she is referring to is a tiny fire voiced by Billy Crystal.

I loved the film overall. It has drama, heart, and comedy. Roger Ebert, one of the only critics to not love it, called it one of Miyazaki’s weakest films. I think I’d be hard-pressed to pick a “weak” Miyazaki film, but out of the five I’ve seen, I can see where this one seems to be missing in that last bit of extra spark that his films usually emit. Maybe it’s the nonchalance with which Sophie falls in love with the deluded, cowardly Howl, I’m not sure. Not that the film isn’t great, because it is. It’s beautiful in so many ways, and definitely worth viewing.

Howl’s Moving Castle lost the Best Animated Film at the 2005 Oscars to “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” But it ranks as #152 on the IMDb Top 250, only behind #36 Spirited Away and #130 My Neighbor Totoro. 

The Big Sleep (1946) - Howard Hawks

I got to watch this film adaption of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel for my film class. It’s #169 on the IMDb Top 250, and I am still unsure about how I feel about it. 

The film comes just 4 years after the Humphrey Bogart masterpiece, Casablanca, and 5 years after my personal favorite of his work, The Maltese Falcon. When the credits began rolling, I saw that the screenplay was written by the famous American writer William Faulkner. 

So it started off on a good note. Plus I had just finished the book. So I had high expectations. 

The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, as Bogart’s character (Philip Marlowe) unravels a mystery about Bacall’s (Vivian Rutledge) family. Vivian is part of the Sternwood family, a wealthy family headed by the patriarch of General Sternwood. He originally hires Marlowe because a man named Geiger is blackmailing the younger of the two daughters, Carmen Sternwood. Oh right, she’s crazy.

She’s young, sexy, and wild. She basically sleeps around and gets into a lot of trouble. So General Sternwood hires Marlowe, without having a clue what any of this is about. Turns out, Geiger is just the beginning of a huge mess of blackmail, pornography, and gambling problems that Carmen comes into contact with on a daily basis. In an early scene, she gets drugged and poses for pornographic pictures for a business that Geiger runs. She’s really messed up.

But aside from Carmen’s mess, Marlowe actually begins uncovering an even bigger mystery about the disappearance of Vivian’s husband, Rusty Rutledge. For some reason he’s Rusty Regan in the book, but yeah. So the book is actually a combination of two of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories, which is why Wikipedia refers to the plot as “unusually complex.” And it really is. Vivian is an avid gambler, Carmen is a slut, and Marlowe spends all of his time trying to uncover a world of lies and murders that the girls have set up. I can’t say I loved the movie, but I definitely respect it for being hard for the viewer to figure out. Although I couldn’t imagine seeing it without reading the book.

One thing I didn’t appreciate was that the movie has a different ending than the book. The book is a classic detective story, but the movie strays a little closer to the “film noir” style, keeping common tropes that the style is known for (such as a femme fatale for the main character to fall in love with in the end). I can’t say much else against the movie, but for what the book gave it, the film took a complicated plot and made it enjoyable.