Ghibli Fest: Howl's Moving Castle in Theaters November 26, 27, 29

Studio Ghibli Fest 2017 concludes with Hayao Miyazaki's 2004 sprawling epic Howl's Moving Castle in theaters on November 26, 27, and 29. This will include both "dub" and "sub" screenings, so everyone will be able to enjoy this great movie.

Of all the Studio Ghibli films, I feel that Howl benefits the most from the big screen. Miyazaki paints with a wide canvas, he fills the edges and corners with little details and grand, sweeping gestures. Its episodic structure reminds me greatly of the Nausicaa books, which made radical shifts in tone and style as its story progressed. This is Miyazaki at his most lavish and self-indulgent. Many people at the time were thrown off as a result, especially fans of Diana Wynne Jones. I don't think they were expecting an adaption of Howl's Moving Castle that chucks half the plot, kidnaps the characters, and then just runs on a wild tangent. But that's what Miyazaki does, and it's something you will either love or hate.

My frame of reference is Horus, Prince of the Sun and Heidi, Girl of the Alps. I'm from Miyazaki's corner of the world, so I can recognize his archetypes and themes. These may not match perfectly with the movie's source material, but the same could be said of Alexander Key's The Incredible Tide, a sci-fi novel that served as the foundation for Future Boy Conan (a Miyazaki and anime classic that neither Miyazaki nor anime fans want anything to do with).

I love the romanticism of this movie, the earnestness of its characters, the lush colors and details of its settings, the bold and varied color palettes. Sophie is the ideal heroine for this picture, a person who is transformed from a young girl to an old woman and back again. By the end of the movie, she is her younger self, but retains her 90-year-old shock of white hair. She is the embodiment of her experiences, paradoxes and contradictions. She's just like that enormous, lumbering castle in that sense.

This is a great movie. You should watch it. I know it will take you away from your phones and your digital sugar pellets, but trust me, you will survive and be better for the experience.

Please visit the Ghibli Fest website to find the nearest screening in your city and to reserve tickets.

Studio Ghibli Halloween Costumes For 2017

Halloween is only one week away, which means it's time for everybody to hurry up and finish their costumes. Ghibli Freaks of all ages will be eager to show off their love of their favorite animated movies and help spread the word to their families and neighbors.

These costumes were first shown at DramaFever, and if you follow the link, you will find a dozen more, all equally impressive. It's very clear that everybody invested an enormous amount of work for their costumes. "Cosplay" is a popular staple of anime and sci-fi conventions, and it seems as if that community has exploded in recent years, thanks to the soaring success of ComicCon and similar events. I remember kids dressing up in costumes at Star Trek conventions back in the late 1980s, but today's fans have taken the game to a whole new level.

Each of these makes for a terrific Halloween costume idea for parents and children alike. I especially like the My Neighbor Totoro photo at top, with the two girls pulling a Cat Bus wagon. The pet Ohmu is also pretty inspired...I wonder if it moves? That would be cool.

Photos: Howl's Moving Castle

I'm a great fan of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, enough to see the movie four times when it played at the local theater in 2005. It felt like a distillation of his entire body of work, from Toei Doga to Studio Ghibli, from animation to comics. Was the movie a big, sprawling mess? Absolutely, which is precisely the thing I enjoyed most about it.

Fans of Diana Wynne Jones' fantasy novels were, understandably, less charitable with Miyazaki's very loose "adaptation," which only seemed to skim the names of the main characters and basic setting before chucking the rest and running wild. If you were expecting something akin to the books, or a faithful translation ala Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, you were bound to be disappointed.

I never read the novels, and have never been a fan of the fantasy genre. Science-fiction was always my style. Because of this, I never saw Howl as anything more than a Miyazaki story, one that seemed to plumb the depths of his personal quirks and obsessions. He seemed less interested in telling Jones' tale, and more interested in sharing his insights on the war, work ethic and marriage. The romantic leads are clearly meant to be the Miyazaki Clan, as we have seen in Animal Treasure Island, Future Boy Conan, Sherlock Hound, Ponyo and The Wind Rises.

I enjoy the joyous surrealism of this movie, the Fellini-esque carnival atmosphere and obsessions with his personal emotions. I enjoy Sophie's transformations, from young to old, back to young again,  and then a happy medium of youth and acquired wisdom. I enjoy the mashup of sidekicks and oddball characters who feel like refugees from Oz (one almost expects to find a yellow brick road somewhere. I especially enjoy the hulking castle, pieces together from impossible pieces that shouldn't fit together, yet somehow still works. It has real personality.

And, yes, I even enjoy the ending that attempts to shoehorn one too many plot points into a too-neat-by-half ending. One character is even reduced to tossing out wisecracks to the audience like Tom Servo and Crow, and we find ourselves agreeing with her. Great movies are rarely perfect movies, as Pauline Kael loved to say. You have to appreciate the cheesy moments now and then, or you're never going to enjoy going to the movies.

UPDATE: Blogger seems to have eaten this post, for some unknown reason. I'll just leave everything here and we'll discuss Howl's Moving Castle in depth at a later time. Yay, screenshots!