Come anticipate Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" with me

You are dead to me.

I have the book and should get around to reading it before the film comes out.

No Face was cute, I'll grant you that.

Still, some people seem enchanted by it, so who knows.

I'm in Tokyo

Isn't The Cat Returns directed by some sparkly young protege rather than Mr Miyazaki?

i went last month- i was somewhat disappointed by the small scale of the museum and how half of it was devoted to Pixar.. but what displays there were, were AMAZING and you get to browse through the original sketches for totoro, kiki etc (there were hundreds of them) and look through miyazaki's own sketchbooks which were full of clippings and pictures. and i got to pose like a robot next to the robot from Laputa/castle in the sky. and i ate at the Kiki Cafe. and rode in a catbus (shuttle service from the station to the museum).

i think kiki is magical- a girl finding her own way. learning how to use her powers. living above a bakery. making friends. being crushed on by a bespectacled preppie boy. only the ending marrs it.

What a dapper-looking gent Mr. Miyazaki is.

Steamboy looks fun as well. It's by the Akira dude!

Laputa? i hadn't realised this was an adaptation. doesn't Dawson Leary voice one of the characters? this must be a new version because i doubt Dawson was alive the first time it was out (yes, 1985 originally, re-released 2003. JVDB was born in 77. close.)

Kiki is great, one of my favourites, but i realise i'm not in it's target demographic. plus, the flying.

Koogs, I don't suppose you burn me some vcds, for, erm, evaluative purposes?

xp

i do not know of what The Nipper is talking above. kthxbye.

8)

(jtn, yep)

For what it's worth, those were precisely the things that struck me about the movie, too, and I haven't seen anyone mention them on this thread, so I'm glad someone did. I haven't seen any of Miyazaki's other movies, so maybe I wasn't as prepared as some of the others on this thread were for the shifting of good/evil characters.

I was confused about Howl's role in the war. Is that where the black door led to? Where did he go, all those times, when he came back as a bird, wasted and tired?

I haven't seen any of Miyazaki's other movies, so maybe I wasn't as prepared as some of the others on this thread were for the shifting of good/evil characters.

Well, to be fair, Miyazaki does have characters that are clearly evil or good depending, so it's not a constant hallmark, but certainly there's a fair amount of ambiguity. That said, I can definitely see how this being someone's first Miyazaki film would make it a wide-ranging introduction to a variety of his key themes and motifs.

I should also say that without having read the original book I can't say how much of what we see in the movie comes from the book, how much was in the book that Miyazaki felt an affinity to and how much is solely Miyazaki. Has anyone read the book *and* seen the movie?

Momus and Tracer: I'm not really arguing, I'm just suggesting that many people who have never seen (many) other Miyazaki movies are approaching 'Howl' without much background or exposure to his earlier works; a reasonable analogy would be to say, after seeing Disney's 'Lion King' "well, that sure did mine some archetypal fables and make you really connect with the anthropomorphic critters". Sure it did; EVERY Disney movie does that. Pretty much every Miyazaki helmed Ghibli film features: women cleaning as representative of their power (don't ask), ambiguous villains, selfless heroes, disjointed plotlines that tend to be resolved in somewhat hokey and ambiguous deus ex mystical fashion (Spirited Away and Mononoke being the biggest culprits of this prior to Howl, which ended so abruptly and absurdly that I have to assume that something went wrong with the translation) and glorious glorious handdrawn animation. These are constants in Miyazaki's universe and used to the point of cliche now. What I (and a few other die-harders) didn't like so much about 'Howl' was that film's reliance on the traditional Ghibli cliches and its general lack of emotional resonance and depth (which can be found in MUCH greater degrees in, say, Porco Rosso, Kiki, Totoro or Nausicaa.

I know I'm a massive geek, but it was a bit disappointing. Still a nice film, but not one I would recommend to a first-time watcher.

And Momus, I didn't mean to come across quite so snotty; I gotta watch my use of Caps Lock. All impressions are legit and so on.

colonel muska in "castle in the sky" is pretty unambiguously evil, though i agree with the point you were making.

Calcifer doesn't get the privilege of being good or evil, since he's the same type of "servant" character you see in Shakespeare, good for laughs, not really aware of the larger issues. It's interesting to me that this servant character is essentially Howl's heart, Howl's heart makes the whole castle run, Howl's heart argues with him sometimes, doesn't like to do what it's told, is reCalcitrant.

The only character who really veers is the Witch of the Waste, who is unalloyed evil and then turns into this pitiable thing, and eventually becomes everyone's doddering mother!

Am I right to think that when Howl created Calcifer by, er, removing his own heart and turning it into a glowing ember, he essentially decided not to grow up? His bedroom, surrounded by childrens' toys... the tunnels lined with gingerbread men, all very odd.

And the reason why I don't think the black door is just "Howl's off to the war" is that Howl makes it clear that he's always running away, that he's selfish. Maybe the war is his way of running away from... what?

Nice! That was my fate for Spirited Away many moons ago.

In the movie we actually have, this moment doesn't exist. She becomes young again by degrees. Even the mechanism by which she becomes young again remains obscure. It's barely even an issue.

(By the way, I decided I liked her much more as the old woman!)

and yep, adverts in papers on saturday confirm the 23rd

Anyone else seen it?

I must say I was mildly disappointed with HMC the first time I watched it, particularly with the ending which seemed unnecessarily abrupt. But on further viewings (I've watched int around 5 times now) different bits reveal themselves and in fact everything makes sense. That said I still don't know how they got away with "Hi, I'm this one guy who got mentioned offhand right at the beginning of the film. Thank you for saving me, I'm off to stop this silly war, g'bye dudes!".

I got The Cat Returns from HMV - what do people make of this? Is it a recent film? I really enjoyed it - obv not as big and epic as Spirited or Howl's but certainly better than Mononoke (which I thought was a bit of a snooze) but there was something very charming about the whole thing. I was expecting it to be twee beyond nausea but no, it was very good. I especially liked the messenger cat with the silly rosy cheeks. The ending was left open and completely ambiguous which was odd for a Miyazaki movie.

(i know this is a film specific thread, but couldn't find a thread dedicated solely to studio ghibli so i'll put this here)

just finished watching only yesterday (omohide poro poro), a ghibli film from 1992, and it was sublime. really really gorgeous animation, and a great subtle use of expressionism in an otherwise wholly realist anime. it dealt with feelings of nostalgia for one's youth better than any ghibli film i've seen, and had a beautiful soundtrack (the credits seemed to hint that ymo were involved somehow, there is little english information on line to confirm this).

wiki sez it is the only ghibli anime yet to receive a western release, anyone else seen this beautiful film?

http://www.ecranlarge.com/upload/movies/images/movie12213/small_320882.jpg

Yeah, you.

I absolutely loved Only Yesterday, for most of the reasons above and also because the period detail (for both eras) was so perfect. I also really dug the way that the credits had already started to roll by the time the romantic subplot was resolved, a cute touch. The little scenes (like the pineapple eating and gathering the safflowers) have emotional heft to them too, with some real magic in depicting the mundane. I doubt it ever got a cinematic release here, but it's available on Region 2 dvd in the UK and elsewhere as part of the Studio Ghibli Collection from Optimum Releasing.

On a non-Ghibli note, Makoto Shinkai's "5 Centimeters Per Second" is well worth a look in an Only Yesterday/Whisper of The Heart/Cat Returns vein. Shinkai started out as pretty much a one-man anime maker and whilst 5CPS hasn't got the depth of Miyazaki/Ghibli it's incredibly beautiful to look at.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/ponyo/

I know Disney blah blah blah but I'll still see it because it looks beautiful and Ponyo is so cute I already <3 him.

this is playing at the LAFF, but only to a select audience. it's a shame, there's not much else of note at the festival this year.

Finally saw this. It's....good? I was charmed all the way through, lots of little things to smile at and be carried away by...but boy does this movie not make any sense. Kind of fairy-tale logic I guess - stuff just happens, it's never set up beforehand or explained after the fact. Dream logic, maybe. That's where a lot of the charm comes in but it's hard to really feel a connection to the characters or the action, even, since you don't know why anybody's doing anything.

Of the seven of his films that I've seen it seems the weakest - but the weakest Miyazaki film is still a pretty good thing to be...

I had thought this movie was a little bit of a disappointment when I saw it in the theater. But I watched it again last night and it just totally did it for me. It reminded me of all my favorite fantastic books – Neverending Story, Castle of Otranto, the Oz Books – very inconsistent in tone and with manic pacing but those flaws are made up by dizzying, rapid-fire blossomings of imagination and sublimity!

I liked that they never slowed down to explain anything – you just had to go along with the fantasy dream logic. And god, it LOOKS so good. Beautiful, richly detailed background paintings. Amazing (and sometimes garish) character design. I don't think this movie got enough credit for how it looks! Like I'm riding on good feelings from last night but I'd say it's Miyazaki's best-looking film. And so unafraid to be baroque and bizarre! That wartorn hellscape being bombed to death by those airships, Howl as a bird-man fighting (by flying around being handsome?), and the henchmen are these frog-bird-goons in derbies straight out of Yellow Submarine! That's the animated film it most resembles, I think.

The themes really resonated with me, too. IDK why this movie worked for me so much better seven years later but it did.

The whole ending is so 'wait...what?' in the best possible way!
I time traveled back to your childhood and saw you eat a demon and now I know how to save you with love!
Ok, 30 seconds later! The turnip/scarecrow is now a (hilariously blonde dandy) prince from the neighboring kingdom! Go tell your father the stupidity of war!
<3 <3 THE END

Yeah I think it's a movie that gets stronger and comes into its own more with time.

Am I just going through a thing in life or were there TONS OF SHOTS OF HOWL'S ASS?

Is this movie...is this Miyazaki's HUGO THE HIPPO?

Huge advocate for this film, Deus Ex Machina notwithstanding. I think it just about edges over Spirited Away, and it certainly improves every time I've seen it.

The scene where the castle pitches up beside a gorgeous alpine lake and they just busy themselves with cleaning, hanging out washing and then having a nice sit down is one of my favourite things in the whole of Ghibli's output.

It's often these little understated scenes that make Ghibli what they are. The poignant sequence where Chojiro takes a train journey to Granny's house in Spirited Away is among my favourites. Love the way there are other passengers on the train but they're just ghostly outlines of people in rain coats getting on and off. It emphasises the loneliness and otherness of the journey I guess. Need to watch that movie again soon - it's been at least two years.

Love this movie except for the last couple of minutes.

rewatched this film for the umpteenth time last night and enjoyed it loads but still have the same questions