Howl's Moving Castle

Yesterday, I watched Hayao Miyazaki's newest anime film, Howl's Moving Castle, and I am fast becoming obsessed with it: I've been thinking about it over and over since yesterday, and it's distracting me from reading my academic stuff. Hence the blogging, in hopes of getting it out of my system temporarily. It's based on the novel of the same title by the British (children's) novelist Diana Wynne Jones, and it's a wonderful love story set in an interesting world at war that reminds me of late Victorian England--but with magic. Egads, how amazing was the film! I have yet to read the novel but it's on its way from Half.com, and I am thoroughly looking forward to it based on the strength of the film, though, strangely, I don't think it'll be better than the film, maybe the same; they'll have different strengths simply because of the difference in medium, although the characterizations are likely due to Wynne Jones's considerable talent. But the visual rendering of the hero, Howl, was just brilliant--the hottest and most interestingly flawed anime hero I've ever encountered, although admittedly I haven't encountered very many. The heroine, Sophie, was especially lovable to me because she has something of the underdog about her; she's a spunky but repressed young woman on her way to spinsterhood who plans to spend the rest of her life as a milliner (hatter) but finds love with a rake of sorts. (Spinsterhood in British literature is one of my side, er, academic interests.) Having watched only two other Miyazaki films, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, I was a little surprised by the sexual content of Howl (though not too overt, and it made for some of the funniest parts). How weird that it's more like a romance novel than I would have thought. The music with its circus-y, merry-go-round lilt and the strange mix of secondary characters also really drew me in. This is one of those movies that I'm simply going to have to get on DVD, whenever it comes out. One final note, I was able to watch it in Japanese with English subtitles, and that was a far superior experience to watching Spirited Away dubbed in English (the little girl's voice in SA was sooo annoying!).