Howl’s Moving Castle has been a staple in animation since it came out. At an impressive 2 hours and 10 minutes, the movie, by Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, takes the viewer into the fantasy world that Sophie, the female protagonist, experiences. From wizards to living scarecrows, the story has a lot to offer. Despite the well-developed scenery and narrative, the movie has many differences when compared to the book. While the animated movie and novel are works of art in their own right, they are almost separate stories. Writer Diana Wynne Jones wrote the book for young adults and fantasy seekers alike. Studio Ghibli did the same but in a different way.
The plot is about a young woman named Sophie Hatter, who is cursed by the Witch of the Waste, a woman who is jealous of her for reasons that remain unclear until later. The once young woman is now cursed to be in her nineties. She leaves her home and goes out on an adventure to avoid others seeing her in her older state. A moving castle picks her up and she makes a deal with a fire demon to break both their curses. The Wizard Howl Jenkins is the male protagonist of the story, with his melodramatic and slithery behavior, as Sophie puts it in the novel. He is the owner of the castle alongside his apprentice, Michael. The group becomes a ragtag trio alongside the fire demon Calcifer as the story develops and they all work towards their own goals.
Movies based on books are by no means a new idea. Filmmakers, past and present, take inspiration from the novels they read and take them to the big screen. With the film adaptations of books, a lot of detail is left out for the sake of time. Howl’s Moving Castle is certainly a victim of this. Details that are important to the novel are dropped in favor of setting up the plot clearly for the audience. Time is precious in a movie and main characters need to be liked by the viewers quickly or else they may lose interest.
It isn’t clear until the end of the novel that it is a romance. The movie makes it clear almost from the beginning. Howl has a clear interest in Sophie throughout the story, even if she can’t see that. In the novel, it takes till the last chapter for her to even realize she is interested in the wizard and he is in return. The narrative allows Sophie more time to learn to love and appreciate her abilities, no matter what appearance or age she may be stuck in. The movie version of Sophie almost feels like another person at certain points, especially when she visibly changes age from old to young. It is a good visual metaphor to explore how she feels about herself throughout the story, but it does take away from the original meaning of her as a character. She is the eldest sister who thinks that her life is meant to go nowhere as a result. Throughout the book, she learns that that doesn’t need to be true. She sets out on her own path and discovers her own magical abilities along the way. The movie gives Sophie a similar path but it isn’t exactly clear what she is meant to learn about herself. She accepts love in the end but it seems like her self-love comes from the love Howl feels for her.
As a viewer and a reader, it will be most beneficial to watch the movie first. That is rarely said about anything. Most argue that reading the original story is more important than watching the movie first. In this case, the opposite is true. The film should be treated like a different story from the book. In my case, I watched the movie numerous times before I had read the book. The movie felt like it could be its own beautiful story without the complaints of changes throughout the whole thing. This review is probably hypocritical, considering how I was just critiquing the movie for the changes it made, but I love both works of art equally. It did take some time for me to realize that treating the two as the same story did not make for an enjoyable read. When I separated the two as their own, unique stories, I could appreciate them far more.
Sometimes movies need to be given a certain amount of grace with changes from their novel predecessors. Not everything will be an identical story and nothing will ever be perfect. Readers often have an idea of what they want and it is all so different from someone else who read the same story. The filmmaker may have had ideas and views that you never did, and that’s okay.
Unless of course, they butcher the story completely, which is always a tragedy and definitely should be complained about.
