Film Review: Howl's Moving Castle
Wednesday, 30 August 2006 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI'm not quite sleepy yet, so another film review.
Howl's Moving Castle is... probably better cinematically than Castle in the Sky and not quite as good as Spirited Away. In my opinion, at least. Miyazaki is a visual genius. The war scenes in particular... were clearly by someone who had lived through air raids. And the flowingly organic machinery were just beautiful.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. HMC is a romance fantasy, along the vague lines of Beauty and the Beast except most of the characters are cursed at one point or another with different needs to be met in order to be freed. At the same time it's the story of an adopted family running from a warring Wizard Queen. Running in a castle on spindly stick legs. Lots of fun, that castle.
In addition to really fun visuals, it has very well done voices by Jean Simmons (Grandma Sophie), Christian Bale (Howl), Lauren Bacall (Witch of the Waste), and Billy Crystal (as Calcifer, the incredibly cute but powerful fire-demon). I don't usually note who does voies for an animated film, but these actors seemed particularly well-suited.
So, why didn't I like this as much as Spirited Away? The plot, in the last third, seemed to unravel, and the last 5 minutes felt like a letdown. It was particularly a frustrating to me because the story seems to fall apart relatively shortly after a breathtaking scene involving tiny shooting stars falling and skittering across the waves... Dunno, maybe if I see it again, it will be less frustrating.
Yes, worth seeing if you like anime.
Howl's Moving Castle is... probably better cinematically than Castle in the Sky and not quite as good as Spirited Away. In my opinion, at least. Miyazaki is a visual genius. The war scenes in particular... were clearly by someone who had lived through air raids. And the flowingly organic machinery were just beautiful.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. HMC is a romance fantasy, along the vague lines of Beauty and the Beast except most of the characters are cursed at one point or another with different needs to be met in order to be freed. At the same time it's the story of an adopted family running from a warring Wizard Queen. Running in a castle on spindly stick legs. Lots of fun, that castle.
In addition to really fun visuals, it has very well done voices by Jean Simmons (Grandma Sophie), Christian Bale (Howl), Lauren Bacall (Witch of the Waste), and Billy Crystal (as Calcifer, the incredibly cute but powerful fire-demon). I don't usually note who does voies for an animated film, but these actors seemed particularly well-suited.
So, why didn't I like this as much as Spirited Away? The plot, in the last third, seemed to unravel, and the last 5 minutes felt like a letdown. It was particularly a frustrating to me because the story seems to fall apart relatively shortly after a breathtaking scene involving tiny shooting stars falling and skittering across the waves... Dunno, maybe if I see it again, it will be less frustrating.
Yes, worth seeing if you like anime.
