Berthier - Howl's Moving Castle

Hayao Miyazaki has created yet another awe-inspiring anime with the film Howl’s Moving Castle. The film is about a girl in her late teens who works at her dead father’s hat shop. The immediate connection I made was to Alice in Wonderland because of the mad hatter and the fantasy aspects in Howl’s Moving Castle. The fact that they were both animations and the direct differences between both American and Japanese animation is simply astounding. Another strange occurrence that I thought about was how in the beginning it seemed very similar to the film The Wizard of Oz. The main reason I saw this parallel was because when she meets Howl, the wizard, he takes her on this wild magical journey that she never would’ve expected to go on without his help. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy also goes on an amazing journey in which she meets an envious witch who is the witch of waste and casts a horrible spell on her because the wizard Howl has set out to court Sophie. The are a lot of differences but one of the main differences is that Howl’s Moving Castle is a lot more intense and way crazier than the Wizard of OZ which is expected because of the Japanese nature and ruling to genuine anime surrounding the film. I couldn’t help but notice that the film was extremely well thought out and how things rolled on top of each other for poor Sophie was extremely enticing while still making somewhat complete sense. Also what was interesting throughout the film was that at the end it was very unconventional in terms of anime because most anime’s do not end very happily and this one was pretty stable especially considering the anime we have watched before in this class. I enjoyed the utter fantasy throughout the film because it was something we hadn’t seen in all of the other anime’s. The other anime that we have watched was a statement on post apocalyptic warfare and very serious subjects that also come into play in this movie, but not so much as the other films.