In Which I Ramblingly Confuse Myself About Howl's Moving Castle(s)

Even before I've started typing this, there's no way I can delude myself into thinking this will turn out as something I can honestly call a "review."

So. Spoilers, no doubt, will abound.

Skipping back to the top from the end of this (several miles off, as the crow flies), I'll offer a tl;dr before the jump: I read the book, I watched the movie, I really liked the book better but the movie is too different for an actual comparison. 

Alright. Press on, gentle reader, if you dare.

If you haven't guessed, people who work in Circulation tend to take home a lot of library books, from a wide variety of genres, age ranges, publication dates and popularity levels. If someone has checked a book (or audiobook or DVD) out, requested a book and forgotten about it, or just picked one up and left it lying on the shelf at a weird angle, one of us is going to pick that book up and look at it in the course of our job.

(On a tangent, we also tend to see all the over-sized books, as these are often returned to us in person at the desk and need special attention during shelving to make them fit -- this is somewhat unfortunate, as big books tend to be pretty and tempting and ... long story short, I have a slowly-shrinking pile of library books that I keep renewing because they're so big and/or heavy I don't want to drag them all back to the library at once.)

Anyhow. A few days back I stumbled on Howl's Moving Castle. Our copy, at least, is one of those thick fluffy-looking YA paperbacks, properly big pages to hold your place a bit if you leave it lying open, but with lots of encouraging white space throughout. In short, a fun quick read I could finish on the bus, especially since the cover just screams fantasy-adventure/fairytale (though this particular cover is a bit off -- more on that later).

I'd heard plenty about the movie, but never got around to watching it. Since I prefer taking the books on first, this suited me fine.

My very first impression, honestly?

"Well, *this* is British."

I mean, sometimes you have trouble telling, or nothing really stands out at all, but not so here. Of course it's also, as I said, a fairy-tale, or at least set in the land thereof; and as such it has a lot of that matter-of-fact, old-books-for-young-children style that my childhood reading experiences cause me to instantly associate with an English setting (books by E. Nesbit and P.L. Travers come to mind).

Anyhow, next impression (closely related to the first, actually) was that "Market Chipping" is a lovely town-name to say, even if I can't personally work out why one would put those two words together as if it's a descriptive phrase.

Third impression (because I'm more slapdash and distracted than Howl) was, "Oh hey, she titles the chapters the way I title my blog. This will be an excellent book."

And ... it really sort of was, in its way.

The premise is great fun. The setting is immediately established as one of the magical lands, "where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist." Sophie, eldest of three, works in a hat shop and despairs of ever going out to seek her fortune ... because of course, the eldest of three is never the one that returns triumphant. A couple other amusing examples of her hopeless lot are listed, and I can't help thinking of Neil Gaiman's Instructions. Both books take their humor and charm from the reliably formulaic nature of fairy-tale plots (a frame of reference easily taken for granted until you try to explain to someone who doesn't care for folktales and fables --  Instructions was pretty much meaningless to my mom, whom I used as a guinea pig, and the first two paragraphs of this book were "a muddle" to her).

Anyway, there's also a wizard in town, in a great floating castle (here's where the cover comes in -- the 2008 cover art, depicting a pudgy castle with great spidery stone legs, was perhaps influenced by the movie, as the book's description of Howl's castle mentions that Sophie can't initially work out how the castle is able to move about). The wizard Howl is rumored, rather alarmingly, to steal away young girls and then do something vague with them afterward -- eat their hearts or steal their souls, depending who you ask.

...I know, right?

Anyhow, Sophie runs afoul not of Howl, but of a wicked witch, who zaps her from eldest to elderly without so much as an explanation, aside from the assurance she won't be able to tell anyone about the ageing spell.
Inconvenient.
However, Old Sophie turns out to be a good deal less mousy and more stubborn than the original, so she sets off to seek her fortune after all ... and ends up assigning herself as Howl's cleaning lady in order to score a free ride in the castle and possibly get her spell removed by Calcifer, the demon living in the hearth.

Being newly old and crotchety, Sophie feels she has nothing to fear from Howl, who from this new perspective is just a young man prone to the most diva-like behavior (complete with frequent temper-tantrums) a wizard ever did have. He hogs the bathroom, is more obsessed with beauty products, clothes and perfume than the average teenage girl, struts around town carrying a guitar he can't play, and gets his reputation from the fact that he periodically falls madly in love with some random young girl and can't forget about her until she falls in love with him.

At which point he forgets about them.

And also he's a bit afraid of aunts.

Basically, he's the most entertaining kind of terrible, where he seems redeemable-ish, and you feel a bit bad for him ... but not bad enough that you can't thoroughly enjoy it when he is occasionally abused and often exasperated at the hands of the "lesser" characters.

Eh wait, wrong jerk.

And it's not quite like that ^, because of course, for all his power Howl's also been given this sort of vain, insecure, periodically-bleach-blonde drama-queen personality that keeps him from actually seeming any more intimidating than his rather more spunky companions; especially when he's got a scary little thing like Sophie yelling at him --

Oh, heavens. Okay, I'll at least try to stop afflicting you, poor reader, with every unrelated mental image that pops up as I write this, but they do make for a bothersome disruption of thought either way ....

Anyhow, those are just the characters, and just a few of them. But I love the characters. They are the best part, because they all really do have character, and those characters are often a good bit unexpected even as the tried-and-true patterns are respected.

The plot ... the plot required a little more concentration. Okay, a lot. For me at least. So much happens, and there are so many names (I am bad with names). There are at least two Letties at any given time, the dog alone takes on about six different identities, Howl has about four, Sophie at least three, and half the cast periodically pops up in modern-day Wales (see, the castle door leads to four different exits, and they move the castle's location once, which makes for eight total, or rather seven since one of  ... oh, bother).

To be fair, it's supposed to be madness, to a degree, and if you're reading you can just skip back if you get lost. In fact, since it's a finding-things-out sort of story, you really ought to skip back even if you're not confused, just for the sake of having a different perspective on behaviors and events that were, after all, put there for a reason whether you caught it at first or not. I really loved the book, in the end, but I knew it was unlikely this was making it into a wee little animated movie without some serious chopping.

What I didn't expect was the movie itself.

In hindsight, I probably should have taken them as two separate entities. The major character names are (mostly) the same, some events and even much of the dialogue is retained, and Calcifer is good old Calcifer (though much cuter than I imagined), but ... the interactions don't go quite the same. The author herself remarked, in a way, on how much nicer Howl and Sophie right off the bat, and it does stand out, but I suppose there's less time or need to work in the subtleties of that sort of thing. If you want to do a love story-plus-other-plots in under two hours, people have to get lovable a bit more quickly and more obviously.

Also, while I assumed they'd sensibly snip Wales out of a Japanese movie, I was in no way prepared for the whole thing to take place in War-torn Steampunk Village And Its Surrounding Areas. I think Miyazaki took the whole smoke-belching towers thing from the castle itself and just ran with it.

That did make for a much more impressive Moving Castle -- instead of a big blocky hovering coal-chimney, it becomes an elaborate, half-living, monster-like junk-heap (retaining proper fairy-tale status by clomping along on mechanical Baba Yaga-style chicken feet). I don't know why the back cover of the DVD refers to it as a "flying castle," unless they only caught the end of the movie.

It also necessitated (or perhaps allowed for) quite a bit of a story change, though. There's more immediate action, less moping about, fewer plot threads to catch up, and of course a nice dose of War is Bad. The parts that threw me I probably could have taken in stride if I weren't trying to reconcile them with the book. I don't know whether any of it draws on Diana Wynne Jones' later work, as I've yet to read her related books.

Sophie's varying appearance, which for the first couple seconds looked like some strange incongruous laziness on the artist's part, seems to have turned out to be a bit of a map of her progress (and of course a narrator/dialog-free way for us to glimpse Howl's perspective on the matter).

The music's not as alluring to me as some (dangit, I SO want the Arrietty soundtrack), but that waltzy theme segueing into brassy carousel tune at the beginning does really suit the whole colorful, mechanical, fantastical, surviving-in-wartime thing the movie has going.

While my difficulties with the book lay in its somewhat convoluted storyline, it's all about characters when it comes to my complaining about the movie.

Now, I know it's so common in stories and perhaps even in life as to be a time-saving shorthand, and we're all about fairytale stereotypes here, but does the mousy-girl-who-thinks-she's-ugly always have to show up as a dark-eyed brunette, with rather heavy eyebrows, and with her long hair back in a braid?

This has nothing to do with the fact that she has "red-gold" hair in the book, and while it perhaps has a tiny bit  to do with the fact that it is the perfect description of me for about 14 years (and would still be if I weren't too lazy to braid my own hair and prefer to be a scary frizzmonster), it's mostly just feeling tiresome.

Also, why no magic, Sophie? Did I miss it? The story works well enough without her being a proper witchy woman, and requires less explanation, but Sophie herself teeters a bit closer to damsel-in-distress territory without her own cool powers. She gets away with it by being a Tough Anime Girl, but it feels a bit sad to lose that fun little surprise from the main character.

Speaking of Anime Characters ... oh, Howl. I can't really call it a complaint, since his appearance actually sounds true enough to his description, but as the story progresses I just find more and more instances where I'm mistaking Howl for somebody's Anime Mom. The puffy shirt makes the upper regions ambiguous enough, the hair is a vague low-maintenance medium-long, he's got this delicate little big-eyed face, and of course he's wearing earrings and a necklace.

I just switched on the English version as I started on this blog (it's a DVD, why just watch one?), and I have to say I'm a bit surprised to hear him cast as Christian Bale, of all people ... though of course, thinking on all the cape-wearing, building-hopping, night-flying, identity-switching mysteriousness, I don't suppose it could have been anyone else.

So, to sum up ... both had their merits, in very different ways, and while the movie was nice, it fell a little flat for me. It was pretty, but not what I was in the mood for, I suppose. The book was a lot of fun, partly because it lasted longer than the movie, and the familiar writing style drew me in immediately. The next book, Castle in the Air, is currently misplaced somewhere in the library, so I'm patiently waiting on the request queue. If it takes long I may just assume it's worthwhile and buy it, crazy wacko spendthrift that I am when it comes to such matters. I'm sorry you had to even look at a post this long, and again you deserve at least two cookies if you actually read it.

Goodness, I have to go to work.

Adieu.