Howl's Moving Castle and the Sepia Tint of Nostalgia
How to desecrate your temple of cherished memories
It’s been a month and a half since I’ve come back from Long Island, but it’s felt like a year. I feel like time passes in sneezes; the days go by slowly, then all at once. I wake up on a Monday at noon, make myself some noodles for lunch, maybe work out, spend a lot of time on Twitter, eat dinner, spend more time on Twitter, eat second dinner, and then wake up on a Thursday. In about one month, I will move out to the Bay Area, probably on a weekend when I will stand on the curb at SFO, wave my hand at Ben’s car, and force him to listen to this weeb song I found before I move into an temporary apartment gifted to me for two months, during which I have to find my own place, where I will live and work from home at least until July, when the offices will finally reopen. That moving day is one I await and I dread, an escape from a house that feels more stifling by the day but also a leap into the corporate rabbit hole, where after a sneeze or two I emerge, 40 years old with a couple of gray hairs and a newspaper, grumbling about the NASDAQ. This point in my life should feel like a crossroads, but it feels more like moving from one treadmill to another.
Last night, I plopped onto my bed and watched Howl’s Moving Castle for the first time in years. Whenever people asked me what my favorite Miyazaki movie was, I instinctively chose this one, although honestly I didn’t remember much about the film; I remember stunning visuals, feeling warm, and the theme song being an utter banger. I thought about taking an edible beforehand, but I decided against it; I couldn’t do Hayao Miyazaki like that, dull my reaction to hahaha big moving house go brrrrrrr. Really, I didn’t need to. Look at this shit.
Someone drew that by hand! What madman came up with this?! It’s so whimsical, a patchwork collection of things that look like they move and things that look like houses, all sitting atop some a base of spindly legs. Just like in every Miyazaki movie, the visuals and the music of the film are crazy. I saw a tweet the other day that said I want to be reborn as a blade of grass in a ghibli film.
I came out of the movie with two distinct conclusions. Howl’s Moving Castle is way more thematically interesting than I remember. Howl’s Moving Castle is a much worse movie than I remember. I’m not saying that it’s a bad movie, but given that Miyazaki chose it as his favorite out of all his films and that I placed it atop the pantheon for so long, upon rewatch it really was disappointing. It was a film that had so much more potential, and just didn’t act on it.
For a movie borne out of Miyazaki’s distaste for the Iraq War, the causes and ramifications of the war are underwhelming. That part of the plot always felt secondary and resolved too quickly at the end; even if it was to show the whimsicality and pointlessness of the war, I feel the way to go about communicating that pacifist message is to show how silly the cause of the war was and how few stakeholders the war had (the disappearance of a prince of a neighboring kingdom) in juxtaposition with widespread destruction and the citizenry that bear the brunt of the consequences of war. My problem that the war wasn’t very nuanced (that’s fine! Many wars aren’t), but that if one of the central messages of the film is about pacifism and how war is dumb, the movie did a poor job of conveying it, especially when you think about the other films about war Studio Ghibli made before, like Princess Mononoke or Grave of the Fireflies. The plot also drags at times; again like a sneeze, we see the menial work Sophie does for long stretches, and then suddenly Howl and the group relocate and the movie reaches the climax and then ends. It was all kind of confusing and left me wanting more. The film was adapted from a fairy tale, and perhaps that’s the limitation of adapting a story that might be flawed, but the best adaptations exceed their source material; in this sense, Howl’s felt more like high-quality fanfiction than anything else.
For all of its structural failings, I still think Howl’s is thematically rich. There are well-tread commentaries on inner beauty and outer beauty (a part where Howl laments that if he can’t be beautiful he’d rather die, and Sophie cries afterwards, having never thought herself beautiful), on greed (that whole part with the Witch of the Waste), and on love (Sophie was simply not a dick and as a result got not one, but two, bona fide hunks to fall head over heels for her in like two weeks). The speed and almost flippancy with which Madame Suliman ends the war is striking, reiterating how pointless it all was. We see Howl literally begin to lose his humanity as the war drags on, and how the location of Howl’s home mattered far less than the people in it. Miyazaki’s love of flight again shines through, but this time with dual interpretations, with the sky being used to express liberation in the opening scene, but the destruction of nature by the warships later during the war.
Much is made of the fact that Miyazaki had an old woman as his main character awhich is seldom seen in mainstream movies. Through Sophie, he shows the freedom and joy that can come with old age, but I found the converse message equally compelling. In the beginning, Sophie felt constricted, constantly being told that she could do anything but out of dutifulness she really only had a narrow set of outcomes until she met Howl. It made me think a lot about the problems with hustle culture and tech grift, and a quote I once heard that went choice is an illusion given by those with power to those who don’t. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, as I’ve seen pretty much everyone I know from school, including myself, go into a grand total of like four kinds of jobs.
More than anything, Howl’s Moving Castle is such a sweet film. Watching the film in quarantine brought me so much warmth; it was joyous throughout without ever feeling saccharine. Miyazaki said the central message of Howl’s Moving Castle is that life is worth living, which is a real picker-upper compared to the firehosing of awful news I inflict upon myself day after day. The visuals, as in all Ghibli films, are gorgeous. There are the trademark landscapes, the dynamism in all the flight scenes, the love for the medium seen in the meticulous detail of the animation. Good things happen to good people, and compassion is shown even to wicked characters. The little things that we do for the people we love, like sharing an umbrella and doing housework, are portrayed as heroic. The two core relationships of the film, between Howl and Sophie and Howl and Calcifer, have transactional beginnings but evolve into so much more. The theme song? Still an absolute banger. Its swaying motif evokes the image of Howl’s castle bobbling through the countryside, and while ever-present it never gets boring. The song is titled The Merry-Go-Round of Life, and I think it fits perfectly: the film is so bright and optimistic, trying to convince us that even with the whimsical machinations of the powers that be going on around us, even when we feel we have no control, through compassion and collectivism we persist.
Maybe I just always held Howl’s in high regard because I watched it when I was younger, and upon rewatch that lens of nostalgia faded away. I remember in this animal behavior seminar I took freshman year, the professor said there is no greater tragedy than the way human memory works. Every time we remember something, we lose more and more detail of that memory; the best way to remember all the details of something? Recall it once, and then never again. I think that’s what happened to me with Howl’s Moving Castle. In nostalgia, the messy details melt away, and eventually all I remembered was the unrepentant joy I felt the first time I saw it. I don’t regret rewatching the movie; even though I returned to it overcritical and a little burnt out, it’s such a beautiful and hopeful piece of art, especially during the pandemic.
Plus, the theme song still slaps.
