Miyazaki's latest is
Howl
-ingly bad.
At its core, Hayao Miyazaki's
Howl's Moving Castle
is an animated feature about the all-powerful transformative power of love. To find that core, however, one must wade through a tremendous amount of junk. It's not a trip worth taking.
The acclaimed director of
Spirited Away
tells the story of a young girl named Sophie (Emily Mortimer) who is turned into a hunched old woman (Jean Simmons) after a run-in with the wicked Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall). Ashamed of her change in appearance,
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Sophie goes into exile, eventually taking up residence in the home of Howl (Christian Bale), a notorious wizard. There she meets Howl's apprentice Markl (Josh Hutcherson), Calcifer the fire demon (Billy Crystal) and the wizard himself. Sophie installs herself as the castle's cleaning lady but soon finds herself falling in love with the mysterious wizard.
Sophie and her new friends are in danger, however, as the country falls deeper and deeper into a war waged by the king's sorceress, Madam Suliman (Blythe Danner). From there, it's one long tumble into a jumbled plot about breaking spells and finding true love.
Miyazaki fills the film with theme after theme, blazing through the wonders of love and magic, the dangers of vanity and fear and the idiocy of war with all the detail of Cliff's Notes. From start to finish the film unfolds like a beginner's correspondence course in morality and ethics, barely delving into a topic before moving on to the next. Though fluffy, the survey-style moralizing is burdensome in its laziness.
Bale, currently on-screen everywhere embodying the fearsome fiction of
Batman Begins
, is grossly mismatched to the Liberace-as-wizard character of Howl. The sense of mystery and darkness he puts into the character is betrayed by the animated pink cape and emerald earrings. Though the rest of the actors are appropriately cast-even the obnoxious Crystal-in this redubbing of the Japanese original with Hollywood heavyhitters, the translation of the dialogue gives the film a disconnected quality, as if the wrong voice track was dubbed onto the
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animation.
Forget the celebrity voices-the art work is the real star of the show. Miyazaki brings the characters to life beautifully in strict visual terms, even if one wishes they were dead. The Witch of the Waste is an oozing, Jabba the Hutt-like obese woman covered with warts and wrinkles and sweat; Madam Suliman's henchman are frightening blobs of flowing black goop that wobble across the screen like living ink blots. The most impressive feat however, is the titular castle. Not a castle in the traditional sense, Howl's home is a gurgling, dilapidated hunk of wood and metal with a clunky yet somehow fluid movement. Each look at the castle reveals a new detail of its patchwork design but, sadly, it's too small a treat to save the film.
Howl's Moving Castle
has a fairy tale quality buried somewhere beneath its muddled plot and exhausting running time, but no amount of love or magic is likely to help this trite, rambling film end happily ever after.
